Rear from left, Sisters Margaret Mary Crowley, Loyola Moloney, Lawrence Teahy, Aloysius Evans, Columba Bailie, Fabian O’Keefe and Di Pazzi Hensker. Front from left, Joan Gallagher, Teresa McMahon and Gerard Walter
Many of us who grew up in the Latrobe Valley and East Gippsland would have fond memories of the Presentation Sisters for their work in the parish and at Nagle College in both Bairnsdale and Moe/Newborough.
My early years were spent in Bairnsdale and I remember the day that Mother Catherine PBVM came to St Mary’s Primary School and was introduced to the various classes. The Presentation Sisters were taking over the administration and staffing of the school from the Josephites. I reckon I must have been in grade 4… and I was mildly alarmed by the ‘horns’ of her starched wimple.
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It is almost precisely 150 years since the Presentation Nuns arrived in Australia. On December 21st 1873 the first small group of Sisters from their Limerick convent disembarked at Port Melbourne to staff the little Catholic school in East Saint Kilda… what was to become Presentation College, Winsor.
They were intrepid women. There were six professed nuns and two young postulants, one of whom was only 19 years old. The superior of the little group turned 31 on the voyage to Melbourne.
The tearful relatives who clustered around the 11 o’clock train to Dublin never expected to ever see them again and they, the nuns, like all other Irish migrants of the time, both religious and lay, never expected to return to see their relatives or their homeland. Most of them never did.
On this day in 1873, so protracted was their parting that the train was half an hour late leaving Limerick.
I have included a poem written to mark the first 100 years of the Presentation nuns on the mainland (there was an earlier foundation in Tasmania). It perfectly captures the ‘shock of the new’ and the audacity of these women as they ‘rose up’ to follow their vision of the possible.
We too stand on the threshold, listening to hear ‘Life’s insistent cry’ every day we embrace the dawn.
Article by: Mike Hansen, Traralgon
Century 1873-1973
They were women of listening hearts
To them the Spirit spoke; ‘Come’.
So they rose up to follow.
He led them out of their quiet valley,
Over the rim of the world,
Where summer came in winter-time
And the very stars hung strange.
Listening, they could not rest from journeying…
Always a little further… always one pace beyond.
They set their course with life for their lode-star,
Faith and love and laughter brimming over,
And hope in their firm hands like seed.
Till the seed they planted became a great tree,
and many there were grew strong in its shade.
We stand where they once stood.
Listening… hearing our own world, new-born this day,
Life’s insistent cry – the Spirit’s voice.
Let us rise up and follow,
For though the Cross hang in our stars
Resurrection shouts in the sunrise,
And the tree of a hundred rings, deep-thrusting
Out of firm darkness lifts to the light
Branches vibrant with song.
Presentation Sister Raphael Consedine
