St Mary MacKillop, Fr Julian Tenison Woods, Fr Donald MacKillop SJ, Fr Duncan McNab and their ministries to Aboriginal Australians by Fr Carl Mackander
Presented to the Diocesan Pastoral Council’s ‘Participation of Indigenous Catholics’ Working Group, May 2017
Fr Carl Mackander, Parish Priest of St Patrick’s Parish, Wellington is well known for his love of and devotion to St Mary of the Cross MacKillop, founder of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. His interest in Australia’s first saint has led to a deep and thorough knowledge of Mary MacKillop’s life work, her family and the impact she had on the lives of those less fortunate. Fr Carl is a member of the Diocesan Pastoral Council’s ‘Participation of Indigenous Catholics’ working group. In this capacity, Fr Carl presented a paper he authored entitled ‘St Mary of the Cross MacKillop, Fr Julian Tenison Woods, Fr Donald MacKillop SJ, Fr Duncan McNab and their ministries to Aboriginal Australians’. The essay gives a detailed insight to the atrocities Indigenous Australians experienced in the 1800s and the constant challenges Mary MacKillop and her colleagues faced to fight for the human rights of our Nation’s first people.
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St Mary of the Cross MacKillop, Fr Julian Tenison Woods, Fr Donald MacKillop SJ, Fr Duncan McNab and their ministries to Aboriginal Australians. The interest which Mary MacKillop (18421909) took in the conditions and circumstances of Indigenous people was determined by the social and religious setting of the period of history in which she lived. It was a time of rugged individual enterprise in the rural parts of Australia and New Zealand. European settlers were claiming land legally, according to the colonial laws, or illegally by squatting. It is a period in our history when the rights of Aboriginal inhabitants to their traditional land were ignored or over-ridden by the legal fiction of ‘terra nullius’ - vacant land. Gold rushes all over Australia caused dispossession after the first discovery of payable gold in 1851. Violence, abuse and massacres of Aboriginal women, children and men by white settlers were still occurring during Mary MacKillop’s lifetime. The largest massacre of white settlers was at Cullinlaring Station, near Springsure in Queensland (QLD) on 17th October 1861. 19 people from a party of 25 were killed. Police, native troopers and civilians pursued the suspected murderers and killed up to 70 Aborigines in revenge. The numbers of Aboriginal people killed did not matter in the calculations of most European Australians; it was never referred to as a “massacre” by the ‘whites’ in their reporting of these events. In 1868, 60 Aboriginal men, women and children were shot in one day near Dampier, Western Australia (WA), after a policeman, his assistant and two pearlers were killed. The reprisal killings show the lack of respect and 3
acknowledgement for Aboriginal men, women and children as being equally human. This was a year after Sr Mary MacKillop made her religious vows in Adelaide. Her brother, Fr Donald MacKillop SJ (1853-1924) and her cousin, Fr Duncan McNab (1820-1896), would have made her aware of the grim reality of life for Aboriginal people, particularly in northern Australia, where first contact was still being made. Both of these Catholic priests were strong advocates for the rights of Aboriginal people, by actions and in letters, to newspapers during the 1870s, 80s and 90s. They would not have failed to communicate these sentiments to St Mary of the Cross. Through observing the social conditions around her in the Victoria (VIC) and South Australia (SA) colonies she would have witnessed the marginalised plight of survivors of European settlement in southern Australia. Diseases, such as measles and influenza, and the gun, had depopulated many areas and the settlers had established towns, villages and farms on the land which was now ‘vacant’ due to colonisers actions and imported diseases. After Mary met Fr Julian Edmund Tenison Woods (1832-1889) in his Penola, SA parish territory during 1860, while acting as a governess for her cousins the Cameron family of Penola Station, he would have shared his thoughts about the terrible inhuman situations of the local Indigenous people. He also put pen to paper to speak out about the neglect and injustice which troubled him. At the same time, he was called to minister to Europeans who were suffering attacks because they had ignorantly occupied Aboriginal tribal land. Fr Woods was parish priest in the vast area of South-East SA, which included Penola, Robe and Mount Gambier. In the mid to late 1850s, the plight of the Aborigines of the region was the subject of public controversy in The Border Watch newspaper. It is evident from Father Wood’s indignant letters that he had been caring for many of them, at least materially, even if they had not asked for his spiritual care.
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“The Aborigines of the South-East had already, by the 1850s, grouped themselves in camps and settlements near the townships; those who were not able to find work and housing on the stations nearby were caught in the bewildering transition from their tribal life to an uneasy kind of fringe existence. Although Julian Wood’s sympathy and help were genuinely kind, as one would expect from his family history where his mother was especially kind to the poor, there is nothing to suggest that he saw the Aborigines in any other capacity than ‘poor and unfortunate’. He showed no inclination, for instance, to bring Aboriginal children to the little school, which he later established in Penola. He had some fleeting ambition to become a missionary to the blacks whom he met on his bush journeys, but the ambition never became a reality”. (Press p. 55,56) In 1866, Mary MacKillop began teaching in the Penola Catholic School. Fr Woods confided to another priest that “the suffering and neglect of the local Aborigines were prompting him to provide some kind of infirmary for them”. At the same time, he wrote a series of letters to The Border Watch on the subject, full of indignation that the Aborigines of the South-East should be so degraded and forced into squalor by the indifferent attitude of district officials. He appealed for justice for men and women who suffered the effects of racial prejudice, offering as examples of this the plight of Aboriginal women with halfcaste children being turned out of their employment at stations owned by the fathers of those children; men imprisoned for life for a crime for which a publican, ‘equally responsible’, was fined 10 pounds; Aborigines who were often too afraid to collect their rations because the distributors were the local police. “His appeal for justice and charity were based on the human dignity of all men (sic), for whom Christ had died. It was only at times that he betrayed the ingrained colonial attitude of men of his age: ‘Now I am well aware that the blacks (sic) will be degraded no matter what we do, because they are savage’”. (The Border Watch, 9/6/1866). “Yet he was distressed by sad events like the death of an old man who had come to him for food and shelter, and who was buried in the pastor’s cloak, because the official supply of blankets was in another town, and there was no one willing to arrange the burial”. (Press p 65)
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We can assume that Mary MacKillop, the zealous and compassionate young Sister of St Joseph would have been influenced by these concerns of Fr Woods and that he would have spoken to her about the possibility of the new Institute of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, which she led, being amongst those who would educate and care for the needs of Aboriginal people in SA and other colonies of Australia. ‘Aboriginal populations, decimated through introduced disease and deliberate massacres and poisonings, were also a preoccupation of some bishops. But there was little they could do, since lack of church personnel and restrictive government policies frustrated early attempts to engage with the issue. There was open enmity and fear among white settlers as Aboriginal peoples tried to defend their land, as recorded in the Memoirs of Fr Woods, “At the close of the first day’s journey, they passed by a newly built hut where there was a woman with three children who implored them to stay, as she was alone and was afraid of the blacks. They had just speared six of the horses and the husband had gone away to seek assistance... The woman was a Catholic and he (Fr Woods) was anxious to say Mass for her the next day and give her the sacraments. Night came on and the settler did not return, so a watch had to be kept. Father had only one charge in an old double barrel shotgun...”. (Cresp p 108) Mary MacKillop’s father, Alexander, was born in Scotland in 1812 migrated to Australia in 1838. His parents and all his siblings, except one brother, also migrated and settled in VIC. One brother, Duncan MacKillop, stayed in NSW and eventually owned large properties in the Dubbo and Trangie districts. Alexander’s cousin, Duncan McNab (1820 -1896), was ordained a priest in Scotland in 1845 and then ministered in parish work for the next 20 years in his homeland. He dreamed of becoming a missionary priest to the Australian Aborigines, perhaps inspired by letters home from his MacKillop cousins in Australia.
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Fr Duncan McNab finally arrived in July 1867 and worked for the next eight years in the Geelong, Portland and Bendigo districts of VIC. Mary MacKillop, his cousin’s daughter, was teaching in several schools in Portland, VIC from 1862 to 1865, and at Penola in 1866, when she began her religious dedication on the 19th March, St Joseph’s Feast Day. A month before Fr McNab landed in Melbourne, Mary moved to Adelaide Fr Duncan McNab at Fr Woods’ direction; he was now the Director of Catholic Schools in the Adelaide Diocese. She made her vows as the first Sister of St Joseph on the 15th August 1867 in Adelaide.
These eight years in the southern colonies would undoubtedly have brought Fr McNab face-to-face with the reality of the Aboriginal situation in Australian society and destroyed any romantic notions which may have inspired his initial desire to come as a missionary. As described later in this paper, the grim and inhuman experiences which he encountered in QLD in the 1870s, would really test his commitment and passion for the cause of Indigenous people. Fr McNab attended to the 56 year old Alexander MacKillop on his death bed at a hotel in Hamilton, VIC on the 19th December 1868 “When Mary MacKillop went to Europe from March 1873 - December 1874 to seek the Pope’s approval of the Rule of Life for the Sisters of St Joseph, written by Fr Woods in May 1867, she took the opportunity to study the schools and education systems in the British Isles. This included a visit to Scotland in October and November 1873. A visit to the Isle of Mull to see Father McNab’s sister”. (Gardiner - p. 139) suggests that Mary felt a closeness to Fr McNab and her cousins in this branch of her family and was maintaining the relationships. In September 1875, Fr McNab was given permission to start a Mission to the Aboriginal people in QLD. At Mackay, he began to see that the one hope for Aboriginals was to treat them not as ‘a problem’. He therefore sought for them the right to own land and to be treated as responsible adults by law and as
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individuals. His dour common sense did not appeal to either the Government or his clerical superiors, especially Bishop James Quinn, who was Bishop of all of QLD. McNab was gazetted a commissioner for Aboriginals but became unpopular with other commissioners by advocating individual homesteads rather than reserves. He quarrelled with Bishop James Quinn because of their different points of view on how to minister to the Aborigines. His cousin, Sr Mary MacKillop, also had great troubles and challenges in her dealings with the Bishop of Queensland after she arrived in Brisbane on the 31st December 1869 with the first group of Sisters of St Joseph; she stayed until March 1871. Several years later, she had continuing troubles and opposition to the central government in the Rule of the Sisters of St Joseph by a Mother General, independent of local bishops and under the protection of a designated Cardinal in Rome. This necessitated her making four visits to the Sisters during the mid and late 1870s to try to sort out strife with bishops who wanted total control and to give encouragement to her Sisters in very trying situations. The letter of Fr McNab, printed at the end of this paper, was written at “Terrabella” NSW, the property of his cousin Duncan McKillop, on the Macquarie River in the Geurie district, between Dubbo and Wellington. It was written three months after Mary MacKillop had visited Orange in January 1876, 120 kilometres from “Terrabella” which she didn’t visit on any of her three visits to the Diocese of Bathurst in 1875-76. Fr McNab’s letter describes in full his sentiments as an ardent fighter for the rights and protection of the Aboriginal people of the northern colony, separated from NSW in 1859. He learnt Cahi language and translated the Lord’s Prayer, Creed and Commandments. Sr Mary MacKillop was aware of her priest cousin and his apostolate to Aboriginals during her four visits to the Sisters in QLD in the 1870's. In a letter of May 1878 to Dr Grant, a Scottish priest working in Rome, “Sister Mary gives herself the pleasure of adding a note about her cousin and unchanging friend Fr McNab, who, like her brother Donald, had devoted himself entirely to the difficult mission of the Australian Aborigines; ‘he has (she says) become quite a patriarch in appearance; his mission is painful and dangerous; please pray for him!” (G. O’Neill p 261) 8
In the book called, “The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs - the untold story,” by Dr Rosalind Kidd, Fr McNab is referred to as a prominent advocate trying to uphold law in the face of human degradation and annihilation of QLD Indigenous people. She points out that Aboriginal people experienced injustice in the courts of law because they could not swear on the Bible before giving evidence because, most often, they were not Christians. “In 1876, a Bill was passed in the QLD parliament, which allowed evidence to be taken on affirmation of truth, rather than a Christian oath. Despite this, as Aboriginal advocate, Fr McNab noted bitterly, many judges failed to utilise the provision”. (Kidd p. 26.) Other injustices were perpetrated when white men where let off crimes which should have been capital offences. “In one case, two men charged with shooting an Aborigine were discharged by the magistrate after he refused to delay to allow interpreters to attend, stating ‘none of the Aboriginal witnesses understand the nature of the oath’”. (Kidd p, 26) At other times the ‘white’ juries found the accused not guilty even though the evidence and the admission of guilt should have brought a guilty verdict. In 1876, the QLD Aboriginal Commission was reactivated and included Fr McNab as a member. Directed to consider ‘the best measures of reclaiming and benefiting the Aborigines’, the commission was emasculated by political disinterest. Police Inspector Wheeler, arrested for flogging an Aborigine to death, was granted bail and promptly absconded. “The papers just now teem with statements of cruelty to blacks by the Police”, wrote Commissioner W. Drew, “and altogether the condition of affairs gets worse and worse”. It would be into this rugged frontier environment that Mother Mary MacKillop would be bringing her Sisters. In 1877, QLD elected a new liberal Colonial Government and gave the Aboriginal Commission formal gazetted reserves for Aboriginal use at Bribie Island, Durundur near Caboolture, Ipswich, Bowen and Townsville. The Durundur Reserve of 2,130 acres was the outcome of assurance given to Fr McNab by local elders that they would settle in the area as long as the Government gave them official endorsement. In the early years, 200 people 9
worked with Fr McNab, agisting and selling stock and renting out a paddock for the police horses. Agitation by local whites against the community brought about the closure of the reserve in 1885, six years after Fr McNab had left QLD. The ease with which Aboriginal people could be displaced from reserves prompted Fr McNab to lobby for the right to purchase land, but this approach was even opposed by his fellow commissioners. “Many natives who will not live on a reserve would occupy homesteads”, he argued. (See his letter at the end of
this paper).
Two years later, a conservative government was elected and reserves were cancelled which meant that old and ill Aborigines were turned off the land and from places where they had security to live. Arthur Palmer was appointed colonial secretary and his appointment brought the end of the Aboriginal Commission and the cancellation of reserves. As a pastoralist from central QLD, he was looking after the interests of his fellow cattle and sheep men. The crisis in Aboriginal affairs, provoked by the massacre of 24 Aboriginal men, women and children near Cooktown by sub-inspector O’Connor and six troopers, reached to the highest levels when the government immediately accepted the police testimony. Fr McNab resigned in disgust and described the commission as “a facade to mask the government inaction”. When Commissioner W. Drew followed, it was the end of the commission and the reserved lands were thrown open to white settlement. Now that Duncan McNab was free from the restraints of government commission he challenged a government official who admitted that seven out of every ten raids by Aborigines on white stations were the direct response to white provocation. He wrote that the government was directly accountable for continuing atrocities because it maintained a “standing army of native troopers under European officers for the protection of the colonists, and of their flocks, by the destruction of the Aborigines”. The position of Aboriginal women and children in occupied areas was particularly perilous. They were taken from their families ‘at will and 10
unchecked’ wrote a correspondent to the Queenslander. “It is an everyday occurrence in the north to meet travellers and teams accompanied by a black woman ... in a man’s clothes and passing herself off as a boy”. Contemporary singer and song writer, Ted Egan, sings a song based on this practice called, ‘The Drover’s Boy’. Fr McNab also berated the practice: “... frequently the whites seize the Black gins and after keeping and abusing them for a few days, let them go”. Children were caught and traded like chattels. One man told McNab “he had seen a carrier run down a black boy, tie him in chains on his dray and after two days sold him to another carrier for two pounds ten shillings”. (Kidd p. 29) “The school textbook version of Australian history positioned Aboriginal people as the dark historical backdrop to the grand adventure of ‘explorers’. This account of QLD history denies Aboriginal people as human beings with a knowable and known past”. In the foreword to Kidd’s book, these words are written by Marcia Langton, Director of the Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resources Management N.T. University, March 1997. After Bishop James Quinn did not renew Fr McNab’s faculties to work as a priest in QLD, he “appealed to Rome in June 1878. On receiving no reply he decided to go in person and sailed in August 1879 and induced Pope Leo XIII to authorise a Jesuit Mission to the Aborigines. In December 1879, Fr McNab wrote in one of his many sympathetic letters to Sister Mary, “My dear Cousin… It is a pleasure to me to write to you, but I do not think it can bring you any great comfort, as I have but little of encouraging news to impart. I have found but little or disinterested zeal in my search (in Rome) among seculars (diocesan priests) or regulars (religious orders) for missionaries for the Australian Aborigines… My labours for the blacks (sic) seem fruitless and hopeless; yet I believe some good may result from them, though there is little or no appearance of it at present.” (G. O’Neill p 275-276) He also put his case at the Colonial Office in London and then travelled through the United States before returning to VIC. After persuading the South Australian Jesuits, including his cousin Fr Donald MacKillop, to select the 11
Northern Territory (NT) rather than QLD for their Mission to the Aborigines, he turned his attention to WA. He arrived at Perth in March 1883 and after a period as chaplain to Aboriginal prisoners on Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth, he responded to the request of Fr Matthew Gibney, VG Perth, to found a protectorate/mission in the north of the State. Aged 65 years, he arrived in Derby on 1st April 1884 and in June, sailed west across King Sound to begin his ministry amongst the Bardi, Nimanboor and Nyul Nyul peoples on the east coast of Dampier Peninsula, north of Broome. With the aid of an Aboriginal interpreter called ‘Knife’ and a priest companion, Fr Treacy who arrived in April 1886, he moved about the peninsula meeting people and telling them about Jesus Christ. His ministry was that simple, sowing the seeds of faith. This was at Goodenough Bay and further north a La Djardarr Bay – (Disaster Bay) (From –
Saunders p. 13; Nailon p. 29; Worth p. 11)
He also gave pastoral care to the miners at Hall’s Creek but when he returned to the east coast of the Dampier Peninsula he found the bushfires had destroyed the mission buildings and the vegetable gardens were overgrown. Also, Fr Treacy had contracted malaria and gone to Perth. (From the Australian
Dictionary of Biography - Online Edition)
The now tired and old Fr McNab, according to an Aboriginal tradition, rode from Derby to Albany accompanied by his faithful Aboriginal translator, ‘Knife’. This would have taken some weeks! Other sources suggested he travelled by boat down the west coast to Perth and Albany. He took a ship to Melbourne where he lived in a Jesuit house at Richmond and worked quietly in the parish until he died on 11th September 1896, aged 76 years. (Australian Dictionary of Biography - Online Edition). Maybe his curious mixture of Celtic mysticism and Scottish common sense antagonised many in Church and government circles, but his proposals for Aboriginal welfare would have saved much agony and death. In his manner and ideas, he seems to echo the ideas and actions for faith, compassion and justice shown in the religious lives of his cousins, the son and the daughter of Alexander, Father Donald SJ and Mother Mary of the Cross. 12
“As a result of Fr McNab’s visit to Rome, the Holy See called the attention of the Jesuit General to the needs of the Australian native peoples, and he in turn directed his men to take up missionary work in the NT. In 1882 they began at Rapid Creek (near modern Darwin), but after four years the station was transferred to the Daly River, further inland, and the Jesuit missionary enterprise in the NT has come to be known by that name. The approach was similar to the one that had succeeded in Paraguay, South America, in the 17th and 18th centuries, but Australian conditions were very difficult. Owing to the nature of the country and the nomadic habits of the people, progress was slow and reverse followed reverse. Eventually the obstacles proved too great and the whole enterprise was closed down in 1899 ". (Gardiner p 428) Fr Donald MacKillop had been the superior for most of the 17 years of missionary activity and presence. Most of the 19 Jesuit priests and brothers at Daly River were Austrians who had come to SA in the years after the revolutions in Europe in 1848; Jesuits were expelled by new revolutionary liberal governments who considered that they were the link ‘between Altar and throne’. At Daly River, the Jesuits carried out a painstaking study of the local language and used music and singing as a means of communication. They were open to many aspects of the Aboriginal culture and allowed some ceremonies to continue. Over four years and 26 editions, they ‘correctly’ translated the Lord’s Prayer into local language. Fr Donald gave vision to the enterprise because his knowledge was based on profound respect for the people and he wrote strongly worded letters to city newspapers, including the Sydney Morning Herald, about the Government, miners and cattlemen’s treatment of the Aboriginal people. Fr Frank Brennan SJ writing in, “Land Rights - the Religious Factor”, says that 1892 was “perhaps the darkest year in the Mission’s 17 years, because influenza and the pending Great Depression in Australia were taking their toll on the people and the mission. On one of his begging tours south in 1892, Fr Donald MacKillop wrote: “Australia, as such, does not recognise the right of the blackman to live. She marches onward, truly, but not perhaps the fair maiden we paint her. The blackfellow (sic) sees blood on the noble forehead, callous 13
cruelty in her heart; her heel is of iron and her helpless country men beneath her feet. But we are strong and the blacks are weak; we have rifles, they but spears; we love British fair play, and having got hold of this continent we must have every square foot. Little Tasmania is our model, and, I fear, will be, until the great papers of Australia will chronicle, “with regret”, the death of the last blackfellow (sic). There is a feeling abroad, too, which might be worded thus - It is in God’s providence that the native races here, as elsewhere, must disappear before the British people. This, of course, I do not admit. The laws of nature, not God’s providence, Mother Mary of the Cross MacKillop require that in given circumstances an inferior with her sister, Annie and brother, Fr Donald MacKillop SJ race will disappear before a superior, but so do they require that death will follow starvation, or be the consequence of poisoning.” (Brennan p. 143) Fr Donald arrived in Darwin on the 25th January 1887 and left in 1898. His leading the missionary group of 11 brothers and 8 priests during these years enabled him to write to the Jesuit Superior in Adelaide and ask the Sisters of St Joseph in 1889 to provide Sisters for the Mission. The Sisters in the Chapter meeting of that year supported the request and Mother Mary MacKillop looked forward to taking the first Sisters to the NT, but year followed year under Mother Bernard Walsh’s leadership in the 1890s and nothing came of the directive from the Chapter. This was a great frustration to Mother Mary who was second in charge of the Order. By 1898, when Mary was again elected Superior General after the sudden death of Mother Bernard, it was too late; the Jesuits had decided to withdraw from the NT. “In Penola, Mary helped an ailing part-Aboriginal girl whose filthiness had repelled other, less charitable Europeans. Many years later, she longed to join her Jesuit brother, Donald in his missionary work among the native tribes of the 14
Daly River district, NT, especially after hearing how their way of life and welfare was being threatened by white hunters (and miners). Circumstances prevented her going to the NT, but it was her privilege to offer hospitality to the Aboriginal boys her brother sent to Sydney for further education. In the following century, the Josephite Sisters would realise, in a variety of ways, Mary’s desire to serve the Indigenous people of this continent.” (Hull p. 27) In August 1892, in a letter from Sydney, Mary wrote to Sr Annette Henschke, an old friend in Adelaide, and refers to the two boys from NT; “This must be a hurried note for I am indeed kept very busy... then had to go to St Mary’s to see the black boys on Saturday - returned yesterday, and have been on the move since... Tell Fr MacKillop (holidaying in Adelaide), please, that the boys are wonderfully well and growing big and strong. But they are troubled about him and tempted to think he has gone back to the Territory without them. I had to go up on Saturday to reassure them. They are really good boys. A lady gave Charlie (the big one) sixpence on Sunday, and the dear boy, hearing that I was short of money, brought his sixpence to Agnes and told her to give it to ‘Mother’, that he did not want it. Tell Fr Donald this - he will be pleased...”. (McCreanor - “M M in
Challenging Times” p. 296)
Fr Paul Gardiner refers to these boys in his book and makes the point that “Mary MacKillop’s love for people was not abstract; it was personal and practical and detailed. When two Aboriginal boys came south from the NT with her brother Donald, she told Sister Annette, “We are keeping the black boys at St Mary’s near Penrith, but he is paying 10 shillings a week for them... They want care and warmth in the winter”. Her concern for others was never simply, ‘God bless you!’, but also, ‘I will personally make sure you keep warm’. In a letter to her cousin, John McDonald, from Lithgow on 9th November 1892, she speaks of these black boys being with her there, “I feared they would never live the winter out unless very carefully housed during that time. They are dear boys, and so good and intelligent”. (Gardiner - p. 386) Mary wrote on the 15th April 1898 from Arrowtown, South Island New Zealand, to her close confidant in SA, Sr Annette Henschke. “I am sorry, sorrier far than I 15
can say, that there should be such apathy about the NT Mission - but it does not exist everywhere. Mother General (Bernard Walsh), naturally, or rather from the first, shrank from that work, but all are not of her opinion, and I am sure a community could be made up. Let me know when Father Superior (of the Jesuits) would wish a community (of Sisters) to be ready. They cannot, of course, for this year’s May, but would the Fathers be ready for them by next May? If so, I think I can pick out a community and DV (God willing) be able to go up and spend a few months with them myself. This has always been my hope, and Mother General promised I could go now that Father Donald (Mary’s brother) is not there. I would be more anxious than ever to accompany the Sisters, as he would not be there to receive them and they would need encouragement at first, being so far away. Please tell Father Superior this for me...” (McCreanor - “M M
on Mission To Her Last Breath” p. 245, 246)
It seems that Mother Bernard had her own reasons for not wanting Mary to work in the same Mission in the north as her Jesuit brother. There was some resentment amongst some of the Sisters of St Joseph over the MacKillop siblings’ closeness. Mother Bernard Walsh had been appointed Mother General of the Sisters of St Joseph by Archbishop Moran of Sydney in November 1885 after Roman authorities ruled that Mother Mary’s re-election at the 1881 Chapter of Sisters was invalid because she had already been the leader since appointed informally by Fr Tenison Woods in 1867. At the First Chapter of Sisters in 1875, after Sr Mary brought the revised official Rule back from Rome, she was elected unanimously as the Mother General. For his own purposes, supposedly to satisfy his fellow Irish bishops who couldn’t cope with Mother Mary’s strong yet fair Scottish/Australian approach to independent leadership of the Sisters, Archbishop and later Cardinal Moran, kept her out of leadership as Mother General. She remained first Assistant to Mother Bernard Walsh, who was reappointed a second time in 1897 before her sudden death at Lithgow on the 3rd August 1898. During Mother Bernard’s time as leader of the Sisters of St Joseph, Mother Mary being the assistant, was therefore unable to put into effect her strong desire to send Sisters to the Mission for Aboriginal people in northern 16
Australia. After Mother Bernard’s unexpected death, Mary was acting within the month to organise for Sisters to go to the NT the following year. She wrote at this time, “Poor M. Bernard’s death was indeed sudden... I don’t think there will be any fear for the black mission now as far as we are concerned”. (Gardiner p.
429)
Arriving back in Sydney from New Zealand on 19th August 1898 to lead the Sisters after Mother Bernard’s death, in a letter to her brother, Fr Donald, dated the 30th August 1898, Mary writes in part; “Another thing I ... am most anxious about is that I want to know for certain if the Sisters will be required for the Daly Mission next year. Whatever other places may have to wait for Sisters, the Mission must be supplied if the Fathers (Jesuits) are ready, and I want to be in a position to bring this strongly forward at our G (General) Chapter. I am writing so hurriedly, but you will understand me, I hope, and explain all to your Very Rev Superior”. (McCreanor “MM in C. Times” p. 357) This was not to happen as the Jesuits withdrew from Daly River NT after a record high flood in March 1899 which destroyed the buildings and crops associated with their missionary activities at Daly River. The question must forever remain unanswered: might the closure have been avoided if the Sisters had come? “We shall never succeed without Sisters,” Donald wrote in 1888, “they are the want. I would ask for Sisters tomorrow if I had the means to support them and to prepare a nice home for them - something better far than we put up with”. But his dream was never to be fulfilled, nor was Mary’s, and it was many decades before the Josephites were to be seen in Australia’s north and north-west.
(Gardiner p. 429)
After Fr Donald MacKillop left the NT in 1898, he went to New Zealand to recover his health, which was affected by many years in tropical northern Australia. Mary wrote to him on the 18th January 1899 from the convent at North Sydney. She addressed it to Rotorua, New Zealand, where he had gone to take the hot-spring baths. She asked him to call on some friends and relatives in 17
the North Island as he travelled south to Wellington and mentions “an old friend, Mrs Hamilton (whom you knew here as Mrs Hickey and whose child gave you the first donation for the Blacks). Sarah was her name”. (McCreanor “MM in Challenging Times” p. 380). This letter illustrates how Mary didn’t forget the kindnesses and generosity of people towards her or her brother for their works of charity in the name of the Gospel. ‘In the oral tradition of both Josephite Sisters and Aboriginal groups, there are numerous stories of positive interaction between the Sisters and local Aboriginal people in country towns. Aboriginal people living in such places as Hillston, Walgett, Mt Isa, Cloncurry, Moora and the twin goldfield towns of Kalgoorlie-Boulder hold such memories in their family history.’ (Sisters of St
Joseph Justice Space)
CORRESPONDENCE RELATING TO THE RESERVATION OF LAND FOR THE USE OF THE ABORIGINES -------*------No.1 FROM THE Rev. Duncan McNab to COLONIAL SECRETARY Sir, Permit me to direct your attention to a subject, to which, I hope, your Ministry is not indifferent; and in which I am deeply interested. I mean the conversion to Christianity, and the civilization of the Aborigines of QLD. Moved by the desire of helping to ameliorate their condition, from VIC I went to QLD, in September last (1875), and was occupied in acquiring a knowledge of their dispositions, habits and language, until I was compelled by sickness to leave Port Mackay. I am now convalescent, and expect to return soon; but perhaps not before the assembling of the Parliament of Queensland. Therefore, I now briefly submit my views to your consideration in writing, which otherwise I should have been glad orally to express more fully. It seems to me an error in political economy, almost incredible, that a government which countenances the importation of temporary laborers from the South Sea Islands, and annually expends considerable sums of money in procuring immigration, should be 18
indifferent to the extinction of the Aboriginal population. They may be civilized and saved, and their energies being properly directed may help to develop the resources of the colony. I have interrogated several belonging to the Logan, the Bribie Island, and the Durundur tribes, and found them all anxious to be civilized, and inclined to settle down and maintain themselves by industry, if the Government would assist them. I may say the same of those at Mackay. Were your Ministry to carry out the suggestions contained in the report of the Aboriginal Protection Commissioners, published in 1874, it would benefit not only the blacks, but the colony. The only measure of their recommendation, which to me seems inexpedient, is the opening of reserves for the Aborigines - 1. Because hostile tribes cannot be congregated on a reserve, and even those who are friendly, will not live together in very considerable numbers - 2. Because considering the marriage laws, or rather the polygamy and polyandria of the aborigines, the system of reserves is favourable to their continuance, and also to that of the communism naturally resulting from them - 3. Because I think this mode of providing for the blacks too slow in inspiring them with energy and self-reliance, and also because fit managers for reserves cannot always be procured - 4. Because the work and expense of their settlement and civilization in distinct families has to be begun or recommenced after perhaps years of residence on a reserve. Reserves are temporary expedients, whereas the object desired is the permanent settlement of the blacks upon the land. This can be attained only by their being domiciled like the whites; and not merely preserved like cattle on a run. For these reasons it seems to me that the proper mode of dealing with the aborigines is to place them at once in distinct family homesteads, in the districts they belong to, under European superintendence. Thus, all might be instructed in the principles of Christianity and trained to civilized habits or mode of life and to their respective avocations, and the children be sent to school. At first they would need to be, to some extent, provided for as on a reserve, and those along the coast should be furnished with boats, and the materials for making nets, and taught cooperage, and the curing of fish; while the chiefs of those in the interior should have 19
sufficient runs, and be supplied with some sheep and cattle, and the others should be settled on homesteads, and trained to shepherding and station-work. Thus, they should soon be able to dispense with further assistance from Government, and be in condition mot only to maintain themselves, but also to pay their guardians, or do without them, and to become producers of wealth and contribute their share to the revenue of the colony. To expect men, who have lived by the chase, voluntarily to submit to slavery, or to a life of constant toil and hard labour is folly. For neither savages nor civilized people will change their mode of life unless they see, or fancy they see a way, by so doing, of bettering their condition. I hope, therefore, that the Parliament of Queensland will speedily make ample provision for the aborigines, and frame such regulations as may be found expedient for their welfare. Then it will fulfil the expectations of the country, whereof the commissioner report, - “It also appears to be pretty generally held that justice and humanity alike demand that no effort or expense should be spared for the welfare of the aborigines.” In a few weeks I intend to return to QLD to co-operate with those who strive to satisfy these claims of humanity and justice. I am, &c., ‘Terrabella’, (1) 9th May, 1876 DUNCAN McNAB, C.C. ------Commission A. M., 23-5-76 –B.C, W.L.G.D, for information of the Aboriginal Commission.- H. H. M., 20-5-76. (Footnote - ‘Terrabella” (beautiful land) was the rural property in the Geurie district which was owned by Fr Duncan McNab’s cousin, Duncan MacKillop, uncle of Mother Mary MacKillop). -------------------------------No.2.
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FROM THE Rev. D. McNab to THE MINISTER FOR LANDS, ENCLOSING APPLICATION WITH MEMO ON SAME. Brisbane, 24th July, 1876. Sir, By instructions received from the Aborigines, James Diper, William Watiman Nilepi, and Charles Diper Ghepara, I presented to the Land Agent here the enclosed applications for the selection of homesteads for them, which were refused for the reasons assigned. If the Form of Application is inappropriate, I hope that the Lands Department can provide one suitable. I am, -------------------------------SOURCES: Brennan Frank SJ – ‘Land Rights – The Religious Factor’- Cambridge University Press. Cresp Mary RSJ –‘In The Spirit of Joseph’– Sisters of St Joseph, North Sydney– 2005 Gillingham Printers Crowley Dr Marie – ‘Women of The Vale’ Perthville Josephites 1872-1972 Spectrum 2002 Gardiner Paul SJ - ‘Mary MacKillop An Extraordinary Australian’– authorized biography EJ Dwyer 1994. Hull Geoffery–‘Building The Kingdom: Mary MacKillop and Social Justice’ ACSJC Paper No 22 Dove 1994 Kidd Rosalind Dr - ‘The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs–the untold story’ Qld Uni 1997 Lyne Daniel CP – ‘Mary MacKillop–Spirituality and Charisms’– St Josephs Generalate, Sydney. 1983 Nailon Sr Brigida – Brigidine, Echuca Vic. – ‘Encounter, The Past and Future of Remote Kimberley’ 2009 See also, ‘Champion of the Aborigines: Duncan McNab 1820-1896’, FOOTPRINTS, Feb. 1982; May 2; August 1982; Nov. 1982.’
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McCreanor Shiela RSJ – ‘Mary MacKillop in Challenging Times 1883-1899 – a collection of letters’ - Sisters of St Joseph, Sydney 2006 McCreanor Shiela RSJ – ‘Mary MacKillop On Mission to her last breath – letters 1881-1909’ Sisters of St Joseph, Sydney 2009 McNab Duncan Fr. letter from website: www.queenslandfirst.org/01_cms/image_pop.asp?ID=317 O’Neill Fr George SJ ‘Mother Mary of the Cross (MacKillop)’ - 1931 Press Margaret M. RSJ – ‘Julian Tenison Woods’ – Studies in the Christian Movement No 5 Catholic Theological Faculty, Sydney – Southwood Press Pty Saunders - Bishop Christopher of Broome Diocese – National Council of Priests quarterly magazine -‘The Swag’, Summer 2015 pp 12, 13, 14) Worth Bill - ‘Father Duncan McNab’ - ‘Church of the Kimberley’ - ‘Heroes in Faith’ from Kimberley Community Profile, Broome Catholic Diocese, May 2013
Information compiled and commentary by Fr Carl Mackander, Diocese of Bathurst NSW, March 2010 with additional information added in 2017 & 2018.
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