Ministries to Indigenous Australians in the time of St Mary MacKillop
F
r 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, co-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.
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, WA, after a policeman, his assistant and two pearlers were killed. The reprisal killings showed the lack of respect and acknowledgement for Aboriginal men, women and children as being equally human. This was a year after Mary MacKillop made her religious vows in Adelaide. Her brother, Fr Donald MacKillop SJ (1853-1924) and her cousin, Fr Duncan McNab (18201896), 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.
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 paper 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. The following is the introduction of the paper, with the full version available on the Diocesan website. The interest which Mary MacKillop (1842-1909) 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 lands were ignored or
The ministry of the Sisters of St Joseph continues today. Sr Robyn McNamara rsj recently spent time at St Joseph’s School, Kununurra, WA. She is pictured with Geraldine Melpi and Chandalene Newry 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 on 17th October 1861. 19 people out of a party of 25 were killed. Police, native troopers and civilians pursued the suspected murderers and killed up to 70 Aborigines in revenge.
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 Victorian and South Australian 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. Fr Carl Mackander’s full essay can be read at goo.gl/Ky6eLV
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C a t h o l i c O B S E RV E R , T h e D i o c e s e o f B a t h u r s t • September 2017 • Page 33