Newman News Summer 2008 - Newman College

Transcription

NEWM AN
NEWS
Newman College Newsletter – Summer 2008
Volume 40 – Number 2
content s
peter
2
paul in athens: after tiepolo
2
valete 2008
3
towards 2018
5
towards 2018 – donors
6
results for semester 1, 2008
7
scholar presentations
8
reflections on magis 08 and world youth day 2008
10
cardinals’ dinner
14
live well, learn plenty, laugh often, love much
15
luceat lux vestra
17
news around and about
20
“calm seas, auspicious gales”
24
town and gown dinner
27
noca president’s letter
28
mannix memorial lecture 2008
29
in my father’s house
38
news of former collegians
39
after apology, it’s back to the future
43
on the stone and a banker mark
44
spirituality and the intellectual apostolate
45
students’ club dinner
49
grass crown
50
the dining room
51
Cover: A painting of the Chapel of the Holy Spirit at Newman College by Hugh Cushing (2008)
Peter
They’d known him in his confidence – the sweep
Of arm and tunic as he bent to the oar, the show
Of a big man’s frown or smile, the practised leap
From prow to shingle, a haul of fish in tow,
The fast and joky talk, the easy air
Of a blowhard from the bush, the whetted knife
For smoother gutting, the readiness to pair
Laughter and love when the others named his wife:
So all the stranger, when the boat was beached
At cock-crow, and the baskets cried success,
That he should brood in silence, not to be reached
Wherever he had gone in wretchedness.
Measure by measure the bird proclaimed the day:
All he remembered was them both at bay.
– Peter Steele
Paul in Athens: After Tiepolo
So there he is with the whole catastrophe, never
a fluttering dove or silk kerchief
or fugitive drachma up his sleeve, the pillars
looming before him, the tessellation
clean-cut beneath him, the sixteen hearers
wearing their beards as though trophies
from time itself, their eyes upon him, their minds
God knows where in the cool evening.
At his back, Silas, the would-be helper, wordless
as Paul spins out the story, trumping
as best he may their unknown god with a lord
who’s come from the grave as live and fresh
as a baby in the caul. And close to the exit,
as though to mark the spinning ball
of disputation, one of them’s up from the pack,
a catcher, not to be caught out.
– Peter Steele
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Newman Newsletter Summer 2008 – Volume 40 – Number 2
VALETE 2008
On Friday, 17th October, 2008, the College formally farewelled
twenty-two students at the Valete Mass and Valete Dinner.
The address given by valetant,
Hannah Li, at the Valedictory Dinner
The following students were
valetants in 2008:
When I first arrived at Newman
College and heard the usual
rhetoric – that College is a
‘springboard to the university’;
that O-week is all about ‘volume
and passion’; ‘no, and please
don’t ask again’; and ‘you will
never be less busy than you are
now’ – the words that struck
me the most were those three
Latin words, Luceat Lux Vestra.
I thought it was a great motto:
very unassuming, not overtly
boastful, and simple in its
evaluation of who we are and
how we should live. It is a simple
instruction to share our individual
gifts, for the benefit of others.
Alexandra Batten
Kevin Ndungu
Sarah Bowyer
Hilary O’Dwyer
Douglas Brumley
Piermario Porcheddu
Stephen Clarke
Laura Riordan
Matthew Doyle
Nikolas Sakellaropoulos
Catherine Fricker
John Scanlan
Anna Garvey
Andrea Slater
Thomas Larkin
Felicity Stark
Hannah Li
Anne Staude
Yingda Li
Sarah Steele
Sarah McNicol
Iwan Walters
At the Dinner Father Rector also farewelled Father Richard
Leonard S.J., who is to take up a new position in Sydney in
2009. He thanked Father Leonard for his many
contributions over his five years in the College and made
a small presentation to him on behalf of the College.
It would be easy to tell you that I leave Newman College with
the best friends, memories and experiences of my life so far.
It would be easy to thank all of you for the sense of community
that makes this the best College on the Crescent. It would be
easy to tell you to continue letting that light shine. But I think
there is another, more subtle aspect to the motto which we
rarely consider.
I think there are, in fact, two things that the motto invites us to
do. The first is to let our lights shine. Nobody puts a lamp under
a bowl, as the scripture reads; a city on a hill cannot be hidden.
But the second, and I think the most important part, is to
look for the lights that others are shining. Even if a light is on
display, you still cannot see it if you are looking the other way.
You would never see the bright lights of the city if you had your
eyes closed.
People sometimes have the tendency to measure success in
absolute terms – scoring x number of goals, achieving H1's,
being elected to the GC – and these are not bad things in
themselves. However, when we let our lights shine only to be
the brightest lights in the room, we lose a lot of things. We fail
to realise when someone is shining a little bit more brightly
Father Richard Leonard S.J., Father Bill Uren S.J., Kevin Ndungu and Father Brian
McCoy S.J.
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Valetants all, Anne Staude, Stephen Clarke, Alex Batten, Iwan Walters, and Laura Riordan
Anna Garvey, Erin Spiden, Felicity Stark and Chelsea King
today than they were yesterday. We fail to realise when
someone’s light has grown dim, because we are so concerned
about our own light output. People all strive to be the star at the
top of the Christmas tree, without realising that it’s the string of
fairy lights circling the branches that bring the real magic.
despite a physical separation, its steadiness enables the other
point to complete a perfect circle and to always return to the
same place. Having left Newman for a few years and coming
back this year, sometimes I feel like that has been true. A Tehan
was president when I arrived, a Tehan is president as I leave.
Father Uren gave my first Valete Mass, Father Uren gave my last
Valete Mass. Sean still wears vests, Sarah McNicol still speaks
her mind, Matt Doyle still plays hockey, and Kev is still… Kev. My
point is not to say that nothing has changed, because, of course,
it has. But in completing this circle, the constant pivot point has
remained, not simply bringing me back to where I started, but
allowing for a never-ending journey.
We here are not like that, and this is why I leave Newman with
so many great memories and fond feelings. This place has been,
to extend the metaphor, a power supply that helps us all shine
our little lights. It is different to other places in that we do look
for the light in others, and we do notice if others are shining
more brightly, or more dimly than they were yesterday. It is the
little, day-to-day things of living, working and studying with
some of your best friends that we hold important. Perhaps that
is why it is so difficult to explain to someone not from Newman
about the importance of doing ‘calls’; Luceat Lux Vestra is about
seeing light in waiting and holding the aca gate open for others,
it’s the reason why we enjoy our flat dinners, and the reason
why participation in Stars’ footy is a measure of success. It’s why
we write for the Niffirg. It’s why we try and stay on as long as
possible at the end of the year, even though our exams finished
in the first week, or why a hundred people would drive for hours
to go to a 21st. By letting our lights shine we can see where
others are shining their's.
I am reminded of a line from John Donne’s poem, ‘A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning’, that reads: ‘Thy firmness makes my circle
just, and makes me end where I begun’. He writes that even
though it is time to say farewell, it is not a sad occasion, as the
constancy of a good friend is like the pivot point of a compass:
4
So, ladies and gentlemen, I leave Newman knowing that as
I enter the big city, looking for those little lights, that the
constancy of friends, memories and experiences had here,
connects us all on the journey, even if we are far away. Vale.
Hazwan Razak, Sarah Bowyer and James Nerney
TOWARDS 2018 – The
Stonework Restoration and
Scholarship Fund Appeals
Since launching the above Appeals, through the generosity
of a number of former Collegians, friends of the
College, the Ian Potter Foundation, the Archdiocese of
Melbourne, the Archdiocese of Sydney, and the State and
Federal Governments, the College has raised (received
and pledged) the following:
The Stonework Restoration Appeal :
$ 4,911,000
The Scholarship and Bursary Fund :
$ 2,215,000
Significant donations to the Scholarship and Bursary Fund
to establish new named Scholarships and Bursaries have
been received from Allan and Maria Myers (The Myers
Family Scholarship and Bursaries), Michael and Helen
Gannon (the Gannon Family Scholarships and Bursaries),
Brendan Dooley (The Margaret and Brendan Dooley
Scholarships), John Funder (Kate Funder Scholarships),
and Daniel O’Connor (The Daniel and Margaret
O’Connor Scholarship).
The College by providing Scholarships and Bursaries
($380,000 was provided in 2008) enables young men
and women, who would not be able to benefit from an
education at Newman College and the University of
Melbourne, to do so. They also enable us to promote and
acknowledge academic excellence.
The total cost of the Stonework Restoration is circa
$13 million. The progress on the restoration to date has
yielded wonderful results. The quadrangle-facing side
of the Mannix Wing is now complete. We have also used
the project to restore leadlight windows, in the original
Griffin design, to all the windows and doors. The results are
stunning. Work on the Carr Wing is well underway.
Just before the end of July, we received $2.5 million from
the State Government of Victoria towards the restoration.
We were visited by the responsible Minister, the Honorable
Mr Justin Madden, architect, Mr Daryl Jackson, and
Mr Ray Osborne from Heritage Victoria. All expressed
delight at the progress to date.
We are still in need of further funds for these endeavours –
especially towards the stonework restoration. I once again
appeal for your support. Every day, at Mass in the College,
we offer prayers for the benefactors – great and small – to the
College. Names like Donovan, Brennan, and Myers are well
known. There are, however, many thousands of others who
have given funds and time to the College over the decades.
A visit to the archives of the Archdiocese of Melbourne give
a glimpse into the countless people throughout Victoria who
gave so generously to enable the building of the College. Over
the years, many others have added to this roll of generosity,
some whose names are only remembered by God.
We are particularly grateful, in this instance, to the
following, who have given to the Towards 2018, Stonework
Restoration and Scholarships Appeals.
W. J. Uren S.J.
5
TOWARDS 2018 – Donors
Mr Graham Anderson
Mr Kevin Andrews
Mr Tom & Mrs Joan Antonie
The Archdiocese of Melbourne
Rector
The Commonwealth
Government of Australia
Dr Gerry & Dr Marie Joyce
Dr G D Putt
Dr Timothy Dillon
Dr Richard Juska
Dr David Quin
Dr R John Kearney
Mrs W M Reilly
Mr John & Mrs Alison Kearney
Mr Ian & Mrs Diana Renard
Mr Jack Keenan
Ms Naomita Royan
Mr Robert Kelson
Dr William F Ryan
Mr James Kerin
Mr Edmund Ryan
Mr Peter B Kiernan
Ms Brenda Ryan
Mr John Cronly Laughlin
Dr Gerard Ryan
Mr Chris & Mrs Rosemary Lester
Mr Joseph & Mrs Susan
Santamaria
Professor Richard Divall
Mr Vincent Arthur
Mr James Dominguez
Mr John & Mrs Angela Arthur
& Family
Dr William Donovan
Mr Brendan Dooley
Mr Lou Arthur
Mr Esmond Downey
Mr Geoffrey J Baker
Mr Leon Doyle
Mr T.P. & Mrs L.A Banting
Mr John Duke
Mr Simon & Mrs Mary Ann
Banting
Judge Frank Dyett
Mr John & Mrs Rosie Batten
Dr Dale Ford
Mr Douglas Bell
Dr & Mrs Bergin
Professor James Best
Drs JJ & EL Billings
Mr Adam Bisit
Mrs Marisa Bonacci
Judge Bernard Bongiorno
Mr Patrick Brady
Mr John Brady
Mr Fred Bramich
Dr Brian Brophy
Dr Mary Brown
Mr Bernard Buncle
Dr Jim & Mrs Gail Butler
The Michael & Andrew Buxton
Foundation
Hon Murray Byrne
The Reverend Michael Elligate
Mr Stuart & Mrs Grace Fowler
Professor John Funder
Mr David MacLean
Mr Alan Gallagher
Prof Margaret Manion IBVM
The Gannon Family – Helen,
Michael, Richard, Anneleise,
Lucinda & Sophie
Prof T.J. (Jack) Martin
Mr Dennis Gibson
Mr Frank Glynn
Sir James Gobbo &
Lady Shirley Gobbo
Mr Keith A Grabau
Mr Nicholas Green
Mr Gavin Grimes
Mr Edward Guinane
Professor John F Gurry
Mr Philip J Hammond
The Catholic Archdiosese
of Sydney
Judge Leo & Mrs Carole Hart
Mr Francis Healy
Professor Max & Stephanie
Charlesworth
Mr Edward Heffernan
Ms Jane Clark
Mr Peter & Mrs Jenny Horan
Mr Steven Cortese
Professor Anthony J Costello
Professor Harry & Mrs Carmel
Crock
Mr Denis & Mrs Ann Cullity
Mr William Cushing
Mr Richard & Mrs Irene
De Lautour
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Dr Christopher Lourey & Family
Ms Simone Lourey &
Mr William Randall
Mr Stanislaus Carroll
Dr Anne Connellan
Mr Simon James Lourey
Ms Morag Fraser
Dr Pamela Hanrahan
The Mary Carmel Condon
Charitable Trust
Mrs Iris L'Estrange
Ms Michelle Hodgson
Mr Tim Horkings
Mr Paul & Mrs Maree Hoy
Mr Peter J Hutchinson
Mr Robert Hutchinson
Dr Alison Inglis
The Invergowrie Foundation
Mr Brian Jackson
Mr Jack Jenkins
Mr Michael Jenkins
The Jesuit Community –
Newman College
Mr Patrick McCabe
Mr Paul & Mrs Maree McCaffrey
Mr James McCarthy
Mr D Peter McDonald
Mr Jeremy McGrath
Mr Paul McSweeney
Mr Michael Morris
Dr M.F.R Mulcahy
Mr Victor & Mrs Barbara Mulder
Mr Terry Murphy &
Ms Margaret Lodge
Mr Allan and Mrs Maria Myers
Mr John Jerome Myers
Ms Margaret Nerney
Mr Peter O'Callaghan
Dr Jim & Mrs Posy O'Collins
Mr Guy O'Connor
Dr Daniel J O'Connor
Professor Denis O'Day
Dr Justin & Mrs Sally O'Day
Mr John O'Donohue
Mr Michael O'Loghlen
Ms Josephine Parkinson
Mr Ian Pattison
Mr James Peters
Mrs Moira Peters
The Ian Potter Foundation
Mr Alistair Pound and
Ms Louise McInerney
Mr John Richard Sarvaas
Mr Peter Sharkey
Mr Peter F Shine
The Estate of Maria Concetta
Angelina (Lina) Sinelli
Ms Kathleen Spiden
Ms Erin Spiden
Mr Richard Stanley
Mr John & Mrs Sharon Staude
Mr Jack Strachan
Mr Keith & Mrs Marilyn Sutton
Mr Rowan & Mrs Amanda Swaney
Mr Anthony Tehan
Mr Michael W Tehan
Mr Terence &
Mrs Bernadette Tobin
Ms Rhona Tomlinson
Mr E. B Tomlinson
Mr Geoff Torney
Justice Richard Tracey
Dr Jeff Turnbull
Mr David Vote &
Ms Rowena Phillips
Professor Haydn &
Dr Julia Walters
Mr Kevin White
Ms Janet Whiting
The Hon. John R Wilczec
Mr Doug Williams
Mr Peter Woodruff
Mr Christopher Wren
Mr Robert Zahara
Mr Sam & Mrs Diane Zavatti
Dr Kazys Zdanius
RESULTS FOR SEMESTER 1, 2008
The following students obtained an H1 average (80% and over) for their Semester 1 results (* average over 90%):
Kristen Battye
(Optometry 2)
Ryan McMahon (Biomedicine 1)
Simon Belluzzo
(Science 3)
Ojas Mehta (Med/Sur/MedSci 2)
Karienne Black
(Science 1) *
Sarah Moeller (Science 1)
Mitchell Black
(Science 3) *
Gabriella Muto (Architecture 2)
Douglas Brumley
(Science Hons) *
Kevin Ndungu (Architecture 5)
Adrian Chong (Eng/Comm 2)
Michael Neeson (Science 2)
Alvin Chong (Optometry 3)
John-Paul Nicolo (Med/Sur/Med Sci 4)
William Chung (Med/Sur/Med Sci 2)
Xavier Nicolo (Med/Sur/Med Sci 1)
Joseph Ciantar (Biomed Sci/Sci 2)
Patrick O’Sullivan (Eng/Comm 3)
Stephen Clarke
(Commerce 3)
Jarryd Poyner (Geomatics/Sci 2)
David Clifford (Med/Sur/Med Sci 1)
Pratheepan Puvanakumar (Med/Sur/Med Sci 1)
Eliza Elliot (Arts/Law 4)
Shovan Rath (Engineering 1)
Sophie Gascoigne Cohen (Graduate Medicine 2)
John Richardson (Aerospace Eng 1)
Timothy Gorton (Arts 1)
Lauren Sanders (Arts 1)
Cristina Guo (Med/Sur/Med Sci 3)
Patrick Sloyan (Environments 1)
Michael Hanrahan (Software Eng 2)
Erin Spiden (Eng/Comm 4) *
Gillian Hatch (Architecture 1)
Anne Staude (Nursing Science 3)
Daniel Hickey (Engineering 2)
Nate Swain (Arts 1)
Simon Kelly (Science 1)
Yow Seng Tey (Commerce 1) *
Melissa Kelson (Science [Appl Sci] 1) *
Sarajane Ting (Med/Sur/Med Sci 1)
Luwa Lin (Eng/Comm 3) *
Claire Toner (Arts 1)
Tim Maltby (Science 1)
Tom Wilson (Science 1)
7
SCHOL AR PRESENTATIONS
Over the academic year a number of the scholars of
the College are asked to make a presentation to the
community. This years presentations have included:
Alexander Fin: Modern Feng Shui’s principles and
interpretations.
Joseph Macula: Building on the past – three generations
of the Macula family.
Kate Fitzgerald: Representation of human nature as
portrayed by different disciplines – Arts and Economics.
Shashini Dissanayake: Einstein’s brain.
Kristen Battye: Why do Pirates wear eye-patches?
Karienne Black: Finding Success in Science
Melissa Kelson: The Second Law of Thermo Dynamics
Breanne Irving: Inspiration Down Under
Stephen Clarke: The Subprime Mortgage Crisis
The presentation below was given by second year
Science student, Kristen Battye, who is the recipient
of a Cabrini Scholarship.
WHY DO PIRATES WEAR EYE-PATCHES?
I am going to unravel the mystery of one of a pirate’s most
valuable tools: his eye patch.
For the hundreds of years that pirates ruled the seas, the eye
patch didn’t change a lot. It was always black, or a dark brown,
and made of a thick material such as leather.
So, what was it about the black leather eye-patch that has made
it an accessory of the stereotypical pirate?
I was always under the impression that the pirate had lost his
eye in a battle, and it was too gruesome to show anyone. But
didn’t pirates try to create fear in their enemy. It would be to be
their advantage to leave the eye uncovered. Yes, there may be
some that would cover their injured eye to stop infection or to
prevent it from being knocked, but then what’s wrong with a
normal bandage?
Plus, pirates took their eye-patches off when they came to shore.
I suppose it’s not surprising, knowing how sea shanties are
told, that the truth behind the pirate’s eye patch is unknown to
most people.
8
Kristen Battye and
Elyse Shelley
Hopefully by this stage, I’ve got you all thinking hard about
a practical reason for the eye-patch. And before I tell you what
it is, I’d like to take you back to the early 1800’s. It’s a bright
sunny day in the Caribbean Sea, and you are the infamous
pirate, Blackbeard, approaching a Spanish ship taking gold back
to Europe. With all guns blazing you attack the ship and engage
in a sword fight with the Spanish captain. The fight takes you
below deck, where you immediately find yourself in the dark.
With your opponent unadjusted to the darkness and having
no idea where you are, you simply swap your eye patch to your
other eye, cut his throat, and steal the gold.
We’ve all experienced turning off the light and having to wait a
few minutes before we can see properly. Our sensitivity to light
gradually increases after we turn the light off. This process is
called dark adaptation. But it is a slow process. It takes about 40
minutes to be completely dark adapted. A pirate was often going
above and below deck. In the critical moments of modifying
the ship’s rigging, navigating, and especially during battle, he
couldn’t afford to wait for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
So, by using the trusty eye patch, of which the leather doesn’t
allow light through, the pirate would always keep one eye dark
adapted. So he used one eye above deck, and the other eye below
deck. Quite an ingenious discovery for a bunch of scallywags.
By the way, I’m sure you all know the show Mythbusters. This
was where I got my idea from, as they proved this theory earlier
in the year.
We tend to know what our body can do, long before we know
how it does it. We can touch our nose, but are still trying to
understand the neural pathways that allow us to do so. I doubt
pirates knew what was going on in their retinas when they
started using the eye-patch. Nowadays though, we have an
understanding of dark adaptation, the basics of which I’d like to
share with you now.
We’re able to operate over a wide range of light levels, because
we have two photoreceptor systems, our rods and our cones.
These are intermingled across our retina like bottles in a crate.
Each system deals with about half the range and therefore has
different sensitivities. Rods are more sensitive than cones.
Cones enable us to see when there’s plenty of light. Under these
photopic conditions, rods are inactive. This is because the rod
photopigment, which is the light absorbing molecules within
the rods, is saturated as a protective measurement. It’s to
protect against having too much of its photopigment bleached.
Once photopigment is bleached it can’t capture photons until
it is regenerated.
Just as his pupils would have dilated as he went below deck,
now his pupils would quickly constrict, to minimise light
entering the eye. The rod system would decrease its sensitivity
and saturate, before light bleaches a substantial proportion of
photopigment. Likewise, the cone system would also decrease
its sensitivity, depending on how bright it is, but unlike the rod
system, the cone system never saturates.
When we turn the light off, there’s no longer enough light
in the room to stimulate the cones, so we are reliant on our rod
system. However, because some of the rods were bleached,
they need time to recover their sensitivity. Dark adaptation is
this recovery of sensitivity. Even though the regeneration of
photopigment is exponential, like I said before, it takes time, in
the order of minutes.
Before I finish, I should point out a problem the pirate would
encounter. When he wears the eye patch, he loses his binocular
vision, which is the basis for our depth perception. Our two
retinas are imaged with slightly different views of the world.
We’ve all looked at our finger and seen it move with reference
to the background, as we alternate closing one eye. Try it if you
haven’t. These images of our world are processed in our brain,
enabling us to thread needles and judge where stairs are.
Therefore, if one eye is covered and kept in the dark, which is
achieved by the eye patch, it will remain dark adapted, and ready
to use below deck. A while back, aeroplane pilots also wore
eye-patches. When flying at night over bright cities, one eye was
used to look out, and the other eye was adjusted for the dim
lighting of the cockpit to read their instruments and maps.
In both cases, this is only possible because dark adaptation is a
separate process in each eye. The photoreceptors are physical
cells within the retina, so the dark adapted condition of one eye,
doesn’t affect the other. This is unlike the neural pathways that
control the size of our pupils for example, whereby, if a light is
shone into one eye, both pupils will constrict.
We don’t realise how reliant we are on having two eyes, not
only if we want to keep one eye dark-adapted, but also for our
invaluable depth perception.
Going back to our pirate, while having only one eye would
make life more difficult, knowing his ship inside out as I’m
guessing he would, he could probably sail the ship with eyes
shut anyway.
In all honesty, only last week did I discover that I have glow in
the dark stars on my ceiling. Lying back in bed, I could see the
Southern Cross out the corner of my eye, but whenever I went
to look at it directly, I couldn’t see it. Now that you know a bit
about the visual system I can explain that this is because our
fovea, or central point on our retina, consists only of cones.
Therefore, because of the absence of rods, at night we have
an extra blind spot, the first, of course, being where the optic
nerve enters the eye.
By this time, some of you will be wondering about the opposite
scenario. What happens when the pirate climbs above deck, and
all of a sudden it’s bright? By this stage both his eyes will have
been exposed to the dark, so he will be dazzled as he comes into
the sun.
Fortunately for all of us, the dazzling effects don’t last very
long. This is because light adaptation is a much quicker
process. It only takes a few seconds for us to be able to see
again. Light adaptation is the decrease in sensitivity as ambient
light levels increase.
Joseph Macula (Eng/Comm 2) gave a different sort of address at
the Scholar’s Presentation. He spoke with feeling about the debt he
owed his grandfather, Giuseppe Macula, who came to Australia from
Sicily in 1955. Initially unable to speak or read English, he found
work as a carpenter in a joinery shop. After numerous jobs and from
humble beginnings he was to found and build up an engineering
firm in Geelong. Later joined by his wife and child he created a
new life in Australia. Joseph is the third Macula to be at Newman
College – the others being Bianca (2003–05) and Daniela
(2005–06). Photographed above is Joseph with his older sisters and
his younger sister, Juliana.
9
REFLECTIONS ON MAGIS 08 AND
WORLD YOUTH DAY 2008
A number of students from the Junior and Senior
Common Rooms, attended World Youth Day
in Sydney. Many were also part of the Magis 08
programme – the Jesuit initiative prior to WYD
– and others were involved through their parishes.
The College sponsored twenty people to WYD and
Magis 08, and a number of pilgrims from around the
world were accommodated at Newman before and
after WYD.
At the Commencement Mass and Dinner to mark
the beginning of the second semester, several
students reflected upon their experiences. What
follows are extracts of their addresses:
MAGiS08: More for you, more for our world. With these words
in mind we commenced our spiritual and physical journey
towards World Youth Day. A preparatory programme for
pilgrims to WYD, MAGiS was intended to be the start of a
new journey with God, the world and ourselves. I chose the
experiment called “From Bush to Sea” as I hoped to experience
more of Victoria in the novel context of a pilgrimage. The
Mass held for all the Magis Victoria participants was an insight
into what we would experience during the Magis Experiments
and ultimately at World Youth Day. Young adults from
countries ranging from South Korea to Poland sang, prayed
and read in their native tongue to a congregation of over 250.
Following this illuminating experience we met our fellow
“Bush to Sea” pilgrims hailing from Australia, Poland, Hong
Kong, and the Sudan. Then in somewhat more cosy conditions
we, plus 25 backpacks, pillows, sundry supplies and a vast
quantity of snack foods that to everyone’s surprise except the
Newman students, rapidly diminished, were taken to our first
destination, Meredith.
The format for all the MAGiS experiments was centred
around the five core Ignation elements: Morning prayer,
liturgy, activity, Magis Circle and Examen. During our stay
in Meredith this meant commencing the day huddled around
the fireplace still soft with sleep but gradually awoken by the
morning prayer and contemplation it induced. In Anglesea,
the ‘sea’ part of our experiment, we prayed together amidst
unbroken vistas of the coast along the Great Ocean Road.
Beginning the day in this way provided a reference point for
the subsequent components of the Magis day and encouraged
an ongoing internal spiritual dialogue.
The activities each day were designed to engage us with the
local community and provide us with material for reflection
related to the gospel for that day. Our activities included
10
Newman College members, Leon Holt, Tom Moorhead and Sophie Gascoigne-Cohen,
with companions on their MAGIS 08 experiment.
planting trees, visiting the Meredith Dairy, meeting an
Australian Champion Surf Life Saver, learning about native
flora and fauna and expressing our Magis experience though
the medium of art. The activity that struck my group the
most, however, was meeting the Nolan family. Chris Nolan
and his parents founded the Meredith Music Festival in 1991.
In 1995 Chris fell critically ill and became a quadriplegic
without the powers of speech or sight. Despite Chris’s
condition, he and his parents have continued to host and
expand the annual festival on their property, and it now
attracts over 10,000 festival goers each year. Their stoicism,
generosity and motivation bore testimony to their strong
faith. One of the scriptures for our Magis week asked us:
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or
distress, or famine […] ?” (Romans 8:28), and the Nolan family
provided a poignant example in the negative.
The daily Magis Circle was a means to reflect upon and learn
from the Experiment activity. After silent prayer and time to
write in our journals, the animator led us in the sharing of
our experiences related to the activity and the day’s Scripture.
We did not discuss the points shared by members of the circle
but rather honoured them by listening and sharing our own
experiences. It was a valuable opportunity to gain some insight
into the individual experiences of our group members and
inevitably helped us to get to know one another more deeply.
Each day culminated with the Priest leading us through the
Examen, a prayer method established by St Ignatius. While
the Magis circle related to ‘outer’ aspects of the experiment,
the Examen was intended to make us consider our ‘inner’
experiences, such as what we were thinking at different stages
of the day, what we would express regret for, and what we
would give thanks for.
An important dimension of the Experiment was the cultural
diversity. As aforementioned, my group was an impressive
mixture. We did anticipate some inevitable cultural and
linguistic obstacles during the week but this proved an
incorrect assumption. It was possibly the campfire singsong
on the first night with each nation teaching the rest of the
group a song with actions in their native language that
cemented our group. Our hopeless pronunciation reduced the
charming traditional Polish songs to ‘ovga brovga’ combined
with elaborate knee slapping, while the Hong Kong version
of an African tribal chant reduced our Sudanese member to
hysterics. The entertainment on our final night together was
another highlight as we learnt among other things to sing “I’m
a little teapot” in Chinese and how to eat bananas with no
hands. The serious side to the diversity was that it reinforced
what World Youth Day was demonstrating: that Catholicism
is a faith shared worldwide. Additionally, for many of us it was
the first opportunity we had had to comfortably discuss our
religion with young adults from across the globe and learn
about the cultural aspects that naturally become entwined
with the daily practice of a religion.
time I spent with the Jesuits in Sydney I saw just what the
meaning of Magis is, and how it applies to this deceptively
simple concept. I saw the essential goodness in humanity,
regardless of circumstances. It’s not simply that we go to
Flemington Tutoring once a week, or donate to St. Vincent
de Paul so as to help those less fortunate. I was challenged at
Magis to change my entire mindset of how I view the world.
There is the Jesuit saying “To the Greater Glory of God”, but
another, though slightly cornier way of saying that is “To the
Greater Glory of Love”. We’re not all going to be aid workers,
but we are called to live our lives with the same love for
everyone around us as a parent has for their child, or as God
has for us. When we love indiscriminately, we at last begin to
realise that potential inside each person that makes humanity
so great.
Tim Gorton (Arts 1)
The Magis Experiment was unique for everyone, but what it
arguably provided for all pilgrims was a firmer understanding
of Ignatian Spirituality and how it can be applied to our daily
lives. It challenged us to think critically about our relationship
with God while providing us with the opportunity to explore
our shared faith with other young adults. As a metaphysical
and geographical journey, it was a wonderful way to prepare
for World Youth Day.
Sophie Gascoigne-Cohen (Graduate Medicine 2)
While wandering through the streets of Sydney a few weeks
ago I overheard a group of Dominicans, and one of the jokes
struck a strange chord. One of them said that a Catholic
education in Australia can do one of two things: it will either
inspire great faith in you or turn you into an atheist. But
either way, you'd still be a great candidate for the Jesuits.
And while I enjoy a religious joke as much as the next person,
it actually struck a chord with me. I am a less than constant
churchgoer and today I find myself frantically thinking what
great revelation I had received on World Youth Day. There
was no apparition, no voice calling me, but I decided that
there was something anyone could take from my experiences,
regardless of creed, nation or belief. To put it into biblical
terms, “Just as I have loved you, you should love one another”.
After Magis and World Youth Day, I've just about had enough
of religious-speak, so I want to speak in more human terms.
With Magis I made friends with an Irish student whose father
had gone into hiding for 5 years after destroying a British
Army Barracks, met a Somali teenager, only my age, whose
only remaining relatives were his mother and sister, from
a family of ten. Obviously this whole loving thing is more
difficult than the Bible would like us to think. And the more
Tim Gorton and Megan Marrs with a friend on their experiment.
All my life I have called myself a Catholic. Many of us sitting
in this chapel still do. But as I finished my Catholic schooling
and slipped into the highs and lows of life at Melbourne
University, I found myself questioning my faith.
I started to ask questions. Who is God? Why should I spend
time in order to know him? How does he affect me? Where do
I stand in regard to God in my life? What I have discovered is
that there are no clear answers to these challenging questions.
As Gregory of Nazianzus saw so clearly, “to conceive God is
difficult, to define him impossible”. This simple thought stayed
with me, and the more I thought for myself about it, the more
my understanding of God grew to be something I could never
completely conceive, yet something I wish constantly to be
open to. Being open to these movements takes courage. As
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Jesuit John Powell once said, “to reveal myself openly and honestly
takes the rawest kind of courage.” It is true of our relationships –
best friends, family members, that person who loves us more
than anything else in the world. And it is also true of God.
For in being open and honest, we are placing ourselves in
unfamiliar environments where we do not necessarily have
anything to fall back on or hide behind.
As a young adult who attended WYD, and also a student
studying theology, I find that my friends and others often
challenge my faith. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan
Williams, once suggested that those who seek definitive proof
of Christianity as a precondition miss the point. Some of us
say that if science can’t prove it, that thing cannot be true. But
if we stop to test that proposition, we also must acknowledge
that God cannot be distilled in a lab. In the words of
continental philosopher Kevin Hart, “science is wonderful at
telling us about nature; it’s no good at telling us what, if anything,
is behind nature”. All too often, we find ourselves immersed in
a world that would set God aside. A world where God’s name
is passed over in silence, a world where religion is reduced to
private devotion, and a world where faith is shunned in the
public square. As a young adult, having being brought up with
a Catholic faith, and in this world, I began to challenge, and
also explore, my faith.
I became involved in Magis, the Ignatian Young Adult Ministry,
about twelve months ago. In Melbourne we have dinner and
discussion once a fortnight. The point of doing this is to provide
a place where it is OK to ask the question: ‘what is the value of
faith?’ After all, especially for young adults, faith is a concept
which is often said to be irrelevant in today’s society.
For me, World Youth Day questioned this suggestion. On the
contrary, I was part of an international forum connected by
a shared meaning: we were called to reflect on our lives and
our world. In doing this, my two weeks in Sydney became an
experience like no other.
In the week before the World Youth Day week we were able
to experience a Magis ‘experiment’, a chance to challenge
ourselves, with Jesuit-related participants from all over the
world. My experiment centred on creativity, whilst others
were based around pilgrimage and service. These experiments
of about 30 people focused on different areas of faith and
allowed us time to meet people from different countries while
reflecting more deeply on our own lives, at our own pace.
“Magis” is the Latin for “more”. This “more” is what I speak of
above, the chance to know ourselves more deeply and explore
how we can give the most of our true selves. As a result,
I find myself asking: ‘Who was I yesterday? Who am I today?
And who will I be tomorrow?’ As such, I am striving to find
a deeper personal understanding of when I allow God into
my life so that I may be more open to these movements in
the future.
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For this reason, I found the Magis Programme was a
wonderful introduction to the celebration of our faith, which
permeated Sydney, and also Australia, during the week of
WYD. Sitting and watching the Stations of the Cross was an
extremely moving experience. Hearing the words of Pope
Benedict at his arrival, vigil Mass, and also final Mass were
inspirational for all who were present. Throughout the week
we were called to reflect upon how the Holy Spirit moves
within us, sending us forth on our own personal journey to a
deeper personal conviction of how God shapes our lives…
… So on behalf of all the Newman College students who
participated in both the Magis program and WYD I would
like to thank Fr. Bill Uren and Newman College for
supporting us financially and also spiritually as we continue
on our journey towards a stronger faith.
I would like to leave you with an image, which struck me
at the final mass. As I sat amongst the estimated 400,000
pilgrims to listen and hear the homily of Pope Benedict, I was
struck by the sheer size of this movement and overwhelmed by
the sense of this ‘more’. We were joined together. Something
more than ourselves. I realised how different we all are and
yet we each shared something. That something was the power
of the Holy Spirit, which as Pope Benedict articulated, “ flows
deep within us, like an underground river which nourishes our soul
and draws us ever nearer to the source of our true life, which is Christ”
(cf. 20 July, Mass). May that river nourish our community
here at Newman in everything we do, and may we continue to
question our faith and find it not to be wanting.
Alicia Deak (Arts/Theology 1)
Rather than deliver a blow-by-blow account of where I went,
who I saw and what I did over the two and a half weeks
of Magis and World Youth Day, tonight I thought I’d do
something a little different. Over the period of World Youth
Day, we spent many hours in reflection, so tonight I’m going
to share with you one of the ruminations that I thought was
applicable to people living at Newman, particularly when we
are all setting out at the start of another semester.
It was prompted by a quote I saw, from a young man named
Pier Georgio Frassati. Pier Georgio died at the age of 24 in
the early 20th Century, but had such an impact on those
around him that he has already been beatified, and is expected
to be canonised at some point in the future. He wrote this to
a friend:
‘To live without a faith, without a patrimony to defend, without a
steady struggle for the truth, that is not living, but just existing.’
And it struck me how exceedingly easy it is to live at
Newman, to make friends, go out and have fun, get good
marks, and ultimately, a job. And that is a good thing – we
are truly blessed. What Pier Georgio is imploring us to do,
however, is to discover and then develop our passions. The
Jesuits encourage their members to play to their strengths,
their passions. Even here at Newman, they discover their
passions, be they poetry, film and television, bioethics or
Aboriginal health – and then they throw all their efforts
into them. I think that sometimes we get too comfortable,
and we motor on through our lives in a neutral gear. If you
subscribe to what Pier Georgio believes, however, then you
will discover that that is not life, but mere existence. In more
colloquial terms, I was told once that if you sit on the fence
all day long, you’ll get a very sore bum. The two questions I
pose to you tonight are these: 1 – what are you going to be
passionate about? And 2 – how will you pursue that passion?
I don’t expect you to think of answers right now. Maybe you
won’t know for a week, a month, a semester. Certainly, the
atmosphere of fun, friendship and frivolity right now won’t
be conducive to any sort of deep reflection. Rather, it’s
something to think about on your own, when you’re free from
distraction. Hopefully it can help you as much as it has helped
to guide me…
Patrick Tehan (Comm/Law 2)
I shared my world youth day experience with a number of
other Newmanites, 12,000 Magis 08 participants and nearly
500,000 young Catholics from around the globe.
I also experienced the first miracle of the 21st century: that
World Youth Day actually lasted more than a week! It’s a bit
like the story of the loaves and the fishes…
To tell you the honest truth I was both apprehensive and
skeptical about attending such a large scale Catholic event, as
I believe faith to be quite personal. Thus, signing up for the
occasion was the first challenge. The second challenge was
finding meaning in the sometimes more ‘choreographical’
components of the event, i.e. interpretive dance and ‘happy
clappy’ choirs, though perhaps this was because I am not good
at either dancing or singing!
However I will briefly mention a couple of very positive
aspects of my own World Youth Day experience. Firstly, the
very fact that so many apparently normal, young people made
the effort to gather together and could openly acknowledge
and discuss their faith in a united and peaceful congregation,
was particularly inspiring.
Secondly, the Jesuit or Magis part of the program was
incredible. I did not go to a school founded by Jesuits, so to
be involved in this aspect was quite special. Jesuit principles
seemed to be grounded, realistic and honest regarding faith
and more specifically Catholicism. We were encouraged
to critically analyze our beliefs and values: what are our
deepest desires, what do we believe to be right and true and
then prompted to think about practically act on and apply
these principles. Thirdly, a highlight for me was the eleven
kilometer pilgrimage walk to Randwick Racecourse where we
were to have Mass with the Pope. I loved this, I think, mostly
because I like exercising: “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit”.
Go and do a lap around the “Prini” when you get the chance!
Much of the week was rather sedentary, and I enjoy being
physically active and match this with my faith.
Having been home for two weeks now I find it really difficult
to answer the question: “what have I got out of World Youth
Day?”… However, for all my initial skepticism I did return
with a renewed energy for my faith.
Paula Charlton (M.Physiotherapy)
World Youth Day engages young people with a truly unusual
mix of people and levels of faith involvement. You all would
fit somewhere along this broad spectrum. From the young
Catholics that can perhaps, and I apologise, only be described
as ‘religious fanatics’, to ‘pope worshippers’, to non-Catholics,
to those with little or no interaction with the church in the
past. All these types of people were there! But the beauty
of WYD is that we as young people begin to recognise this!
That faith doesn’t have to be scary, foreign, unachievable. It is
a gift that you are given to embrace and share with others on
whatever level you choose.
Maybe you can take that opportunity like us to step a little
out of your comfort zone… Talk openly about religion.
BUT importantly about what is good about it… it’s hope,
inspiration, and goodwill towards others. Maybe you engage
in community service, for example; that is living faith &
the example of Jesus Christ. I know I’d rather see young
Christians living a life in the model of Jesus than simply
attending Mass once a week and leaving it there at the steps of
the chapel on the way out. Gandhi said; “It is better in prayer
to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
What does this mean for each of us now and in the future?
Encouragement of you to more deeply engage your faith!
LISTEN to God’s purpose for you! Listen to that word of God
in our hearts… take time out from your busy lives.
Fr Pedro Arrupe, the great Superior General of the Society of
Jesus, left us with this. He said;
“What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will
affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in
the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your
weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in
love and it will decide everything.”
Ladies and Gentlemen of the College, this is what it means to
take up a vocation and live out your faith, follow what your
heart is calling you towards… nothing else matters.
Thank you very much.
Matt Doyle (Sci/Comm 4)
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CARDINALS’ DINNER
As part of the preparatory celebrations for World Youth Day, a Dinner was held at Newman
College to welcome Church leaders from other nations. The Dinner was hosted by the Archbishop
of Melbourne who is also the Chair of the Council of Newman College.
Father Rector with the Fransiscan Cardinal Wilfred Napier from Durban,
South Africa.
The Chair of Newman College Council and the Archbishop of Melbourne, the
Most Reverend Denis Hart DD, with the Governor of Victoria, His Excellency
Professor David De Kretser.
Mrs Maria Myers and His Eminence Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez from Hondouras.
Mr Ted and Mrs Fran Exell.
State Minister for Sport, Recreation and Youth Affairs, The Honorable
Mr James Merlino and Mrs Merlino.
Long serving member of the College Council, Mr Bob Fels, with his wife Marie.
14
LIVE WELL, LEARN PLENT Y, L AUGH OFTEN, LOVE MUCH.
reflection given by the chaplain,
chris o’connor to all new students
entering the college at the beginning
of semester 2, 2008.
In my opening
address to
students at the
start of the year
I quoted, among
others, this small
passage from
Emerson.
“Live well,
Learn plenty,
Laugh often,
Love much.”
I say it to you now, as you embark on your time here at Newman
College. This is a grace-filled time for you to embrace the many
opportunities presented to you at this College and in this
community to fulfil the sentiments expressed in that quote. In
order to do so, we have to be courageous enough to step out of
our comfort zone and confront those elements of our character
that prohibit us from being the people we are called to be. “Let
your Light shine!”
The famous American educator Helen Keller, who was deaf
and blind, said, “Character cannot be developed in ease and
quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the
soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”
When you come to Newman College you are entering a
community. Community is not about people living together,
but about people living together for each other. Genuine
openness and sharing with each other one’s struggles, triumphs,
disappointments and tragedies allows us to grow together. We
form true community when we attempt to help each other to
grow into the person we are called to become. Thomas Merton,
the famous American Cistercian monk and spiritual writer, said,
“In order to become myself, I must cease to be what I always
thought I wanted to be.”
Newman College presents a wonderful opportunity for us
all. As the Old Testament writer Qohelet says in the Book of
Ecclesiastes: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every
purpose under the heaven; a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a
time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and
a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to
cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to
embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and
a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away. I believe
that as we begin a new semester together within this new
environment it is appropriate to ask: What are the things that
we need to lose, what are the things that we need to cast away,
and what are the things that we need to embrace and gather?
What are the attitudes, beliefs and fears that you have carried
over from secondary education and from your own environment
that you need to discard so that you can grow emotionally,
spiritually and academically? What elements of growth as a
human person do you need to embrace? When you leave this
College how will you have grown into the person that you are
called by a Loving God to become?
Senior Common Room Members Sarah Steele, Piermario Porcheddu and Sarah Bowyer.
15
Sam and Diane Zavatti, joined the College for Commencement Mass and Dinner. They are
photographed here with Conrad Beer, Sam Flynn, Alexandra Batten and Ben Tomlinson.
Senior Common Room members, John Scanlan and Simon Kuestenmacher.
At Newman you will be encouraged to participate in all
that Newman has to offer. The first and most important
part of participation is in helping us to become a faith-filled
community. My job is not to enforce belief or to coerce you into
religious practice: it is to help you on your journey and to help
you grow into the person you are called to become. The Dean
has a bumper sticker on a filing cabinet in her office that states:
“They can send me to college, but they can't make me think!”
So it is with the religious life of this college. We can provide
opportunities for you to grow, but you must make the journey
of faith, and that requires courage.
in the religious life of the community. The challenge to you
is to make Newman an even greater place than it is today, and
you can help achieve that goal through your active participation
in the faith-life of the College. Through participation in the
celebration of the Eucharist, prayer, reflection, retreat, and
community service outreach.
The religious life of this College depends on you. You have
chosen to be part of this community, and with that privilege
also comes the responsibility to actively engage and participate
Senior Common Room members, Fr Richard Leonard, Lindsay Zoch, Paula Charlton
and Eliza Elliott.
16
I would like you to close your eyes for a moment: take a deep
breath, and just take a moment to reflect and remember the
times during your life when you have been surprised by joy, and
when you have been God’s instrument of compassion to others
in need. The golden moments when you have seen a glimpse
of your talent and your ability and have not shrunk from it;
when you have felt within you the courage to be all that you are
called to be. Fear not and embrace the opportunity to “let your
light shine”. May your time here as part of this College
community include many moments and days of wonder!
LUCEAT LUX VESTRA : SOME THOUGHTS ON LEADERSHIP
An Address given at a Dinner for Council, Parents and Members of the College by
former Collegian, and now a member of the Council of the College, Alice Muhlebach,
on 20th August, 2008.
more than half a million people had lost their homes, and
over one million Americans voted anti-capitalist. As Roosevelt
said, America was truly “a stricken nation in the midst of a
stricken world”. And yet, he came to office in the belief and on
the promise that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.
Instead of fear, Roosevelt counselled courage and action. And
he delivered both in spades.
To my mind, there are two great hallmarks of his presidency.
Father Rector with guest speaker, Alice Muhlebach.
I’m honoured, and thrilled, to be asked to speak tonight. I
confess, though, that I wasn’t sure what to speak on. When I
was at Newman, most people who spoke at Council dinner did
so from the zenith of their careers, but I’m barely through the
front door on mine! So I thought I’d start with something that,
being here tonight, we all have in common, and that’s the
College motto: Luceat Lux Vestra. It’s actually the same motto
we had at my primary school, although at St Anthony’s we said
it in English: let your light shine. It comes, of course, from a
passage in Matthew’s gospel:
“A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a
lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives
light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine
before others, so that they may see your good works and
give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”
“Luceat lux vestra” is vitally concerned with leadership. So,
having had the majority of my education to think about it,
I thought I’d offer some very idiosyncratic thoughts on the
subject, by looking at three leaders who have captured my
imagination: a President, a feminist, and a bank.
And so first, the President – the 32nd and longest serving
President of the United States, and my favourite President,
bar none: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Roosevelt came to office in 1932, at a time when modern
democracy faced two of its greatest challenges: the Great
Depression, and the rise of Fascism and Communism. In 1932,
one quarter of the American workforce was unemployed,
The first is Roosevelt’s conviction that democratic societies have
a moral obligation to help those members of society who are
least able to help themselves. He said: “The test of our progress
is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who
have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have
too little.” Roosevelt didn’t face our mining boom; he faced the
Great Depression; and still he sought to unwind entrenched
disadvantage among the third of the nation which, he identified,
was ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished. Roosevelt left no doubt
that “forgotten” Americans were the subject of his ongoing
concern, and spent much of his presidency on efforts to alleviate
poverty and hunger, and to create jobs, education and hope.
Which points to the second hallmark of his presidency – the
fact that Roosevelt put his convictions into practice. Roosevelt
was what I’ll call a constructive optimist; he promised, and
delivered, both hope and action. For example, Roosevelt’s first
100 days in office are the stuff of legend, a period spent working
with Congress to enact his controversial “New Deal”, a radical
program of high government spending and increased
regulation, to create jobs, introduce social security (including,
for example, what were then radical reforms such as
unemployment benefits), regulate securities markets, and kick
start the farm sector. It made him a lot of enemies, but
Roosevelt said he was happy to be judged by the enemies he
made, and the New Deal also earned him a lot of respect.
Roosevelt described his approach as “bold, persistent
experimentation” – if one method fails, try something else.
“But above all,” he said, “try something.” Roosevelt’s
constructive optimism also characterised his approach to the
coming, and the ending of the Second World War – in
pioneering the “lend lease” program to support the allies, and
subsequently by mobilising a mammoth domestic war effort,
and then entering the war. It was Roosevelt who insisted that
the allies should plan for peace, even before the war was
finished, and demanded the establishment of the United
Nations to keep the peace in the new world order. Roosevelt
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who wants the “feminine masquerade” when the alternative
is an enlightened and assertive individual?
Daniel Hickey (Engineering 2), Tanya Rajendra (Commerce 2), Luwa Lin (Eng/Comm 3),
James Gutteridge (Arts 3), Natasha Koo (Commerce 2), Nga Yau (Architecture 2), Adrian
Khoo (Comm/Law 3) and Alvin Chong (Optometry 3).
identified four fundamental freedoms – from fear and want,
and of belief and expression – and sought to deliver a world that
would be able to protect them…
…I want now to change tack, and to talk a little about a former
student of the Presentation Sisters and of this university;
a woman whose contribution to public life is a mixture of
inspiration, exasperation, determination and fury. That is,
I want to speak for a while about Germaine Greer.
Why Greer? When my Mum read Greer, she covered her books
in brown paper, lest her Dad find out. But when I was at the
University, Greer was an unfashionable second wave feminist.
Today Greer is known for firing up the opinion pages on all sorts
of topics; sometimes she’s inspired, sometimes she’s impossible
to agree with. But 38 years ago, she was famous for her then
latest book, The Female Eunuch. When I read it after leaving
University, I felt like someone had put a bomb under me. In
The Female Eunuch, Greer rails against the idea of “the feminine”
– the “characterless, passive female,” who aspires to match the
blueprint of the ideal woman, and in doing so denies her own
autonomy and identity. Greer’s book is furious, funny, direct and
deadly serious; it is a no-nonsense demand that women
recognise that they are individuals, and discover who they are,
and what they want. She wrote: “It is not a question of telling
women what to do ... The hope ... is that women will discover
that they have a will; once that happens, they will be able to tell
us how and what they want”. And, as Greer points out, anything
less is a “bad bargain” for women and men alike:
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Greer is nowadays wont to say that she “didn’t fight to get
women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the
board of Hoover” – she maintains an ongoing challenge to
women, not just to do what men have already done, but to add
something of their own, something more. Have women, as
individuals, really discovered and contributed all that we have
to offer? I’ve been thinking about this since I discovered that, on
Facebook, you can take a test to tell you which character from
Sex and the City you are most like, and then you can proclaim to
the world that you’re Carrie, or Charlotte, or Miranda, or
Samantha. Haven’t we come further than that – than defining
our identities on the basis of a limited menu of approved
stereotypes? Is this as good as it gets? Where is our
imagination? Where is our unique contribution? Perhaps we still
have a lot to learn from Greer’s leadership: her indignation and
well-aimed fury, her aspiration and her determination. And, as
my Dad recently pointed out: her common sense.
The third leader is, as promised, a bank – the Grameen Bank –
which is the only business ever to have won the Nobel Peace
Prize. I first heard of the Grameen Bank when I was debating in
first year university; it’s made me excited about the possibilities
of debating and economics ever since.
The Grameen Bank was established by Muhammad Yunus, an
economics lecturer in Bangladesh, who wanted to create
opportunities for the very poor to lift themselves out of poverty.
In 1983 he established the Grameen Bank, which seeks to
Senior Common Room member Felicity Stark (Education [Prim] 4)with her father, Kevin.
eradicate poverty by loaning small amounts of money to people
living at or below the poverty line. These loans are referred to
as “microfinance” or “microcredit”, and are designed for
investment rather than consumption, to allow the borrower to
generate income and make lasting improvements to their own
and their families’ lives. For example, borrowers might use the
loan to buy a cow and then sell the milk, or to buy a sewing
machine and sell homemade clothes. The money borrowed is
a loan, not charity; it attracts interest, but doesn’t require any
form of security or collateral. Borrowers are individually
responsible for their loans, but must join small groups, and
encourage other group members to make repayments.
And the system works! As at June 2008, the Grameen Bank
had loaned a total of over US$7 billion in these tiny loans, to over
7.5 million borrowers, most of whom are women. It reports a
repayment rate of over 98%, and has turned a profit in all but
3 years since 1983. But, most importantly, approximately 65% of
the bank’s borrowers have now lifted their families out of
extreme poverty. That’s over 4 million people!
And yet when Yunus was awarded the Nobel Prize jointly with
the bank in 2006, he said, “We didn’t do anything special … all
we did was we lent … to the poor people”. In other words, he
began with a well-known idea, and applied it creatively to a
problem in desperate need of a solution. He took what he
already knew, and used it to change his world and ours. How
many more problems might we begin to address, if we thought
creatively about what we already know?
What sort of leaders might we be?
Erin Spiden (Eng/Comm 4) with Chelsea King (Arts/Comm 4)
I want to finish by thinking briefly about this question, and by
quoting one of my favourite poems: “Lupins”, by Seamus
Heaney. Lupins are a type of flower; they grow on a long stem,
come in all sorts of colours, and can grow to be very tall. Heaney
says of the Lupins: “They stood. And stood for something. Just
by standing.” Standing is what lupins do – just as we go to class
or go to work, make dinner, catch a tram or go to the pub, lupins
stand. And yet, Heaney writes, even in doing what they always
do, they stand for something.
I wanted to talk about Roosevelt, Greer and the Grameen Bank,
because I believe in what they stand for, and I admire the way
that they stood, and stand yet. But “luceat lux vestra” doesn’t
just target presidents, feminists and banks – it demands
leadership of all of us. Our motto doesn’t let us off the hook if
we find ourselves doing something else; in fact, it never lets us
off the hook. In class or at work, at home or out, it asks always
two things: what is our light, and where will we let it shine?
I can begin to answer those questions for Roosevelt, Greer and
the Grameen Bank, but can we answer them for ourselves?
In the language of the lupins: when we stand, what do we
stand for?
The families Gorton and Toner
19
NEWS AROUND AND ABOUT THE COLLEGE
At the 2008 Forum Dinner, Mrs Maria Myers gave a personal
perspective on Issues to do with Indigenous Education in
Australia. Following her insightful address, she responded to
numerous questions from the gathering on the topic. We
were joined for Dinner, as in past years, by representatives
(staff and students) from several of our feeder schools.
The 2008 Swimming Teams; the Women’s team finished second
and the Men’s team fourth.
Luwa Lin (Eng/Comm III) appeared on the Dean’s Honours
List for 2007 in the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of
Commerce at the University of Melbourne. Stephen Clarke
(Commerce III) also appeared on the Dean’s Honours List for
2007 in the Faculty of Commerce. The Dean’s Honours List is
determined by academic merit and is awarded to the top 3%
of undergraduate students.
Maria Myers with Simon Kuestenmacher from Germany, James
Gutteridge from Tasmania and Robert Rudolph from the U.S.A.
Professor Margaret Manion IBVM, Dr Elizabeth Hepburn IBVM
(the Principal of St Mary’s College) and Karienne Black (Science 1)
During Semester 2, Faculty Dinners for our Law and Medicine
students were held in College. At these dinners, former
Collegians in these professions are invited back to advise our
current student cohort on aspects of their chosen profession.
The Rector and Deputy Rector with the 2008 President (Iwan
Walters) and Vice President (Stephen Clarke) of the NCSC.
20
During 2008, as part of the College's community service
activites, over $17,000 was raised for the Asylum Seeker's
Resource Centre.
The Michael Scott Prize for Art was awarded to first year
Arts student Laura Bardin. She was also the recipient of the
People’s Prize.
The following lectures have been given as part of the Allan
and Maria Myers Academic Centre Outreach Programme in
second semester:
Professor Peter Steele S.J.: Showing and Saying : Art into Poetry
(Professor Emeritus Steele spoke on the relationship between
five of his own poems and the work of art that prompted them
by Carravaggio, Leonard French, Hans Hemling, Giovanni di
Paolo and Nicolo Rosseli).
Dr Gerard Vaughan: Art Deco at the NGV: Planning, Delivery and
the Content of a Blockbuster.
Sr Mary Wright: Behind the Scenes at the Vatican.
Also as part of the Outreach Programme, the Australian String
Quartet gave a concert in the Oratory featuring music from
Beethoven and Debussy.
The Dome at dusk.
Michael Neeson, Tim Gorton, Daniel Hickey and David Crowden
avail themselves of the chess board in the Senior Common Room
after the Commencement Dinner at the beginning of Semester 2.
The men’s hockey team who narrowly lost to Queen’s College (0-1) in the finals of the inter-collegiate competition.
21
The Peter L’Estrange Prize for Music was organised by the Music
Committee, chaired by Adrian Khoo (Commerce/Law III). From
the Soirees held in the College a number of students are invited
to participate in a concert for the Prize. The Programme for this
year’s concert was:
Eliza ElliottPablo de Sarasate, Playera Op. 23 No. 1 –
Violin (accompanied by John-Paul Nicolo)
Nate Swain
Nate Swain, Fusion – Voice & Pianoforte
Adrian KhooFranz Liszt, Tarantella from Venezia e Napoli
– Pianoforte
Charlotte Kavenagh
Dolly Parton, I Will Always Love You – Voice
& Guitar
Rohan PhelpsClaude Debussy, Golliwogg’s Cakewalk from
Children’s Corner – Pianoforte
Kathryn LeeManuel de Falla, Danse Espagnole from La
Vida Breve, arr. Fritz Kreisler – Violin
(accompanied by Alvin Chong)
Xavier NicoloJohannes Brahms, Intermezzo Op. 118 No. 2
– Pianoforte
Tanya RajendraMariah Carey & Walter Afanasieff, Hero
– Voice (Accompanied by Alvin Chong)
Hannah LiModest Mussorgsky, IX The Hut of Baba-Yaga
from Pictures at an Exhibition – Pianoforte
Peter ChoVan Morrison, Moondance – Voice & Guitar
(accompanied by Rohan Phelps)
A view of the College in spring.
Architect Peter Corrigan has donated two works of art by Irene
Barbens to the Allan and Maria Myers Academic Centre.
The Drama Committee, co-ordinated by Lisa Currie, presented
a very enjoyable production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance
of Being Earnest.
During the mid semester break the Junior Common Room
received a major refurbishment. The outcome has been to
considerably enhance the facilities available to the Student’s
Club and to restore the space, as far as possible, to the original
Walter Burley Griffin design.
Alvin ChongClaude Debussy, Les Collines d’Anacapri from
Préludes, Premier Livre – Pianoforte
David CrowdenJoseph Haydn, Trompetenkonzert 2nd &
3rd movt. – Trumpet (accompanied by Dean
Sky-Lucas)
John-Paul NicoloFrédéric Chopin, Ballade No. 4 in F Minor,
Op. 52 – Pianoforte
The winner (as adjudicated by Dr Gary Ekkel, the Director
of the College Choir) was John-Paul Nicolo (Medicine IV)
with the runner-up being Charlotte Kavenagh (Arts 1). Further
presentations for contributions to the Soiree programme
throughout the year were made to: Alvin Chong (Optometry 3),
Peter Cho (Eng/Comm 2) and Piermario Porcheddu (Arts/Law V).
22
The women’s hockey team after losing to Ormond College (1-2)
in the finals of the inter-collegiate competition.
Senior Choral Scholar of the Choir of Newman College,
Jennifer Cook, has been awarded the “Bach Prize” from the
University of Melbourne.
Two current Graduate Medicine students, Sophie GascoignCohen and Andrew Mulligan have been awarded the GPSN
Schwartz First Wave Scholarship. Sophie has also been awarded
a John Flynn Scholarship for 2009. Former Collegian, Matthew
Dobson (Medicine 2) was also awarded a scholarship.
The 1st XVIII victorious in the ICSC final over Ormond College
SCR member Dr Augustine Meaher IV was part of a US Army
group that briefed the Democratic and Republican Campaign
teams on US Civil – Military relations.
Senior Common Room
member Bonnie Lander (right)
has received a Clarendon
Scholarship and the Wolfson
College Studentship and
will read for a DPhil (at Oxford
University) on Elizabethan
chastity and its influence on
the English epic in Spenser and
Milton. Whilst at Newman
College she completed her
Masters thesis on the intersection of theology, politics
and individualism in Milton's early poetry.
The victorious Women’s Netball team after having
beaten Ormond College in the ICSC competition final.
Members of the Choir of Newman College
23
“CALM SEAS, AUSPICIOUS GALES”
On the 20th June, 2008, Resident Scholar,
Father Peter Steele S.J., published his latest
book of poems entitled White Knight with
Beebox – New and Selected Poems. Fellow poet
Chris Wallace-Crabbe launched the book
with the following words:
I have known Peter Steele these many years. Perhaps I have
even constructed my baffled sense of the Jesuits around his
prime example: at once admirable, welcoming, and yet in
some sense agile as quicksilver. He is always present, like
Falstaff or Peter Pan, but when I turn around he has gone
again: has anyone ever tried to catch him on the phone? My
hand is left behind, full of brilliant metaphors and savvy
references, all bearing witness to the actual PDS.
As he would say, and has said in a poem about Montaigne.
“Wherever you turn/ a metaphor is brought to life”; but it is
more typical of Peter, as poet, to be epistemologist and
spruiker at once, as wittily in the opening lines of his poem,
“Things”:
Things aren’t so bad, though not as good as people,
the philosophers and the people say.
Things are all over the place, which itself
is another, larger kind of thing.
Things are said to go better with Coke
though I don’t see it myself,...
That tone, oh, that tone! It’s as though Horace had been
translated by Emerson, or Randall Jarrell embraced once
more by Peter himself. But above all it has been marked by the
Steelean generosity. And the Steele-idiom, it must be added,
which is part of the same thing.
What Pascal said once could apply like billy-oh to Peter,
whether in his verse or even in his nutritious prose; at heart
the two are like cheese and cheese:
Where one finds a natural style, one is amazed and
delighted, for
where one expected to see an author, one discovers a man.
24
Always he has been the most personally modest of men,
generous to a fault. This might make him seem either a
chameleon or a milksop, a veritable bowl of junket; but a
genial DNA makes itself strongly heard in everything he
writes, something far deeper than his Latinate verse-forms,
his cool enjambments, and that rhetorical legerdemain which
is worthy of Cicero, whose name, he merrily pointed out to
me, actually means “chick-pea”.
Sometimes it is pertinent, sometimes improper to align a
writer’s work with the originating personality, depending on
the powerful little toy train of intellectual fashion; but I found
something in Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which
put me strongly in mind of Peter and his writing. No, it wasn’t
one of Dr Johnson’s asides, although you might well think so;
but a memorial to Sir James Macdonald, a Hebridean, which
contained the lines:
His eloquence was sweet, correct, and flowing;
His memory vast and exact;
His judgement strong and acute;
All which endowments, united
With the most amiable temper
And every private virtue,
Procured him, not only in his own country,
But also from foreign nations,
The highest marks of esteem.
Peter will probably blush at this, and I don’t know whether
the Hebridean knight’s monument still stands in Rome, but
for me our poet does combine vast knowledge, accurate
judgement, fluency, and the most amiable temper.
Characteristically, he can declare that a world – our world –
“calls for a dash of the festive, as surely/ as Adam needs Eve or
the feathery angels a lift.”
Who else in Australia could have written of corridors, “For
longer / than Keats lived I’ve lived on them or off them”? Or
of the Biblical Jacob that he had “a weather-eye on angels”?
When Peter cracks his kindly whip the English language
comes meekly to his home paddock, like a horde of invisible
riders; and the Anglesea coast transforms itself elegantly into
language. Let me add about these recent poems from the surf
coast that they display a new attention to surrounding fauna
and flora, to our birds and trees. A small point perhaps, but it
does show that his vast range keeps on extending.
This, in the midst of “A Mass for Anglesea” we find these busy
stanzas, crammed with the world’s stuff: its daily busyness:
The rocky spine of Roadknight glints like mica
across the bay; on the little river,
a parade of two, cob and pen are cruising
a world of their own; on the Shell forecourt,
all tats and brawn, a haulier grips the wheel
and swings clear for the spooled miles.
He’ll take the rig by mountain ash and blackwood,
by manna gum and melaleuca,
More fox than hedgehog – if that can be said with propriety
about a Christian priest – Peter Steele has a remarkable ability
to focus rapidly on one thing after another. In the one poem,
for instance, he bounds rapidly from Lethe to a “raffish
boozer” to a boneyard full of the clumsy resurrected, and on
to the poetry of Donne, to the high seas’ haul, and to a
farthing in the scale pan. Elsewhere, he can corral within two
lines the disparate words, “charmer”, “cocky”, “gorget”,
“chain”, “slashed sleeve” and “furred tabard”, in seeking to
evoke the Rembrandt who painted “Two Old Men Disputing”
(its current title), lodged in the NGV. His mind leaps about
nimbly, and persuades us wittily.
Both wit and playing are important to Peter because they help
our mortal selves to survive, if we are supple enough, among
“disparate recognitions”. For him, if I may say so, poetry like
prayer uses the resources of language to negotiate the mortal
shoals that trouble and confuse us all. His poems yearn, they
seek truth, they express faith, but they also rejoice in the
buoyant dance of ideas, “for ever/ matching and measuring,
fluent and questing.”
Peter’s marvellous new book will be an excitement to all of
us who read it. I joy that my dear old friend has entrusted me
to launch it with a splash of verbal champagne in his, and in
its, praise.
His poetic practice calls to mind a comment by the Dutch
psychiatrist, J.H. van den Berg, that
What really touches us are the little, the futile, the very
perishable things. Man is a creature of trifles; things that
slip between his fingers are valuable to him, they will stay
with him. What is perishable appears to enfold everything.
But of course little things make up the parquetry, the
tessellation, of our created world, as Peter must feel most
powerfully, as well as respond to with his lively, generous wit.
By wit, I mean nothing frivolous, of course. It has long been a
term subject to the zany tides of history, just as Peter has
observed of the noun, “play”: as he nicely put it, indeed, in his
critical study of Jonathan Swift,
By this time the notion of “play” has become at best so
supple and at worst so omnivorous that once again the true
character might not emerge because, this time, it has
nowhere in particular to get a footing.
Fr Peter Steele S.J. at the book launch.
25
Father Steele’s reply:
Ladies and gentlemen, friends all! Chris has been
characteristically generous in what he has just said, and
I regard his remarks as another milestone in the long journey
of friendship which we have shared from a time when his hair
had a different hue, and I presented a very different spectacle
in silhouette.
If we were all at the Academy Awards tonight, and if I were to
follow a prevailing custom there, I suppose that I should thank
God, my parents, and perhaps the milkman. You may safely
assume that I do thank God, but as a matter of fact I hardly
ever drink milk, not even when it is called ‘Rev’, so the
milkoes will be ignored. But I should like to salute my
parents, neither of whom was much of a reader of poetry, but
who did everything they could to foster a love of the word in
me, something for which I am permanently in their debt, as
for much else.
And placed where we are, I think inevitably of two other
debts. I have never been able to take seriously the notion of
being a high flier – I think of myself as a kind of grouse,
scuffling around in the undergrowth most of the time – but
in order to be any sort of flier I have been blessed with two
wings, one of them the Society of Jesus, and the other the
University of Melbourne. The first of these has schooled me,
and supported and encouraged me, for fifty years: the second
has taught me, indulged me, and sometimes confronted me,
for only a few years less than that. There is no way that I
would have been so eager to voice insights if it were not for
the Jesuits: and there is no way that I would have embarked on
the choppy waters of poetry if it were not for the University.
Comparisons are odorous, as Shakespeare’s Dogberry says,
but salutes may smell sweet. Happily, two of my oldest poet
friends are here this evening – Chris, from whom we have
heard, and Evan Jones. It is a continuing sadness to me that
Vincent Buckley died so soon, not least because he was so
telling an exemplar, so fine a teacher, and so dear a friend.
Beyond these three I think of a company who might be
compared with what in Catholic tradition is referred to as the
‘communion of saints’, a company of the living and the dead,
the dead whose life’s work is now achieved, and the living
26
who, as you and I do, sweat things out more or less graciously
from day to day. There is by analogy a communion of poets,
some of them badged in anthologies as ‘Anon’, some ancient,
some modern. Because all of these are or were human, there
are some odd fish among them, and they would not all give
one another the time of day. And yet they are all swayed by
a sense that the languages in which human beings commune
may equally be laid under tribute and themselves be offered
tribute in the using. Writing poetry is an affair in which,
ideally, both of these things happen at once. The very wanting
to engage in that pursuit is itself a privilege.
Leonardo da Vinci said that ‘the poet ranks far below the
painter in the representation of visible things, and far below
the musician in that of invisible things’: so now we know.
There are, as it happens, both painterly people and musical
people here this evening, and I hope that this means that they
are indulging the lesser mortals. But all of us are in fact bent
on both visible things, like bananas, and invisible things, like
justice: we have far more in common than the things that may
keep us apart.
If I may conclude my earlier tally of those to whom this book
is indebted, let me name once more the Jesuits, and in
particular the present Provincial Superior, Mark Raper,
without whose generous support neither this book nor its two
immediate predecessors would have been published: and that
decorous buccaneer, my publisher and editor, John Leonard,
a friend for fifty years, and a better friend to Australian
poetry than it has often deserved. Thank you to Sophie Gaur
for her so-handsome design of the White Knight: to Margaret
Manion, who incited and facilitated both of those earlier
books: to Angela Gehrig, who was what we might call the
watchwoman of all those attending tonight: to Becky Daley,
the Business Manager at Newman, who saw to it that we were
fed and watered: and especially to Bill Uren, the Rector of
Newman, who shepherds black sheep and white sheep alike in
this College, and who folds them home if they have the wit to
agree to that.
All that being said, let me read a few poems from the book.
TOWN AND GOWN DINNER – 11th JUNE 2008
27
FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE NEWMAN
OLD COLLEGIANS’ ASSOCIATION
It is hardly surprising that a 90 year old university college
through which thousands of men and women have passed
should have a sense of its history. This is particularly so when
so many of those men and women have made distinguished
contributions to the nation’s life as leaders in fields such as
politics, the Church, the armed services and the professions.
It is also unsurprising that former members should harbour a
strong affection for their alma mater and continue, in various
ways, to contribute to its life. One such venture which has
enhanced the intellectual reputation of Newman has been
the Mannix Lecture.
In 1977 three of the College’s student leaders inaugurated
these lectures. They were: Kevin Andrews who continues
to serve as a Federal Member of Parliament and was, for
many years, a senior government minister; Nicholas Green
QC who is now a leading member of the Victorian Bar; and
Frank Moore who now manages the extensive financial and
property interests of the Archdiocese of Melbourne. Each
lecture was intended to explore the part played by its subject
in public leadership.
The first lecturer was Archbishop Mannix’s biographer, the
late Mr Bob Santamaria. The second lecturer, in 1978, was
Australia’s then Governor-General, Sir Zelman Cowan. These
early lectures each attracted over nine hundred people to
Wilson Hall. Over succeeding years the lectures have been
given by many distinguished speakers who have examined
the contributions of other Australians, both prominent and
humble, who have given public leadership in this country.
The series has been well supported by both current and
past students.
It was most fitting that this year’s Mannix lecturer should be
an eminent Old Collegian, Sir James Gobbo, one, who in due
course, will himself be an appropriate subject for a Mannix
lecture. Among his many public roles Sir James has been a
Supreme Court Judge, the Governor of Victoria and President
of Co-asit. His theme was migration to Australia from the
earliest days of settlement. He examined the pioneering
social welfare work of Caroline Chisholm and, in later
generations, the contributions of a Spanish Benedictine, Dom
Salvado and of his parents. The lecture was both scholarly
and inspiring.
28
The Mannix Lecture is living testimony to the vision
of its founders and the commitment and hard work of
their successors.
As this will be the last edition of Newman News for 2008
may I conclude by wishing all members of the College
community a joyous and safe Christmas season.
Richard Tracey
President
MANNIX MEMORIAL LECTURE 2008
On Wednesday, 27th August, 2008, former Collegian (1950 – 52), Supreme Court Judge and Governor
of Victoria, Sir James Gobbo, delivered the 2008 Mannix Memorial Lecture. His address was entitled:
Australia’s Immigration Story – Caroline Chisholm and Profiles in Leadership.
I thank the Newman Students Club for inviting me to deliver this
lecture to honour the memory of a great Archbishop. I agreed to
speak on the subject of Immigration and Leadership. The focus
of this Lecture in the past has been on leadership in public life,
and previous lectures have covered areas such as politics, religion
and the law. Immigration has never featured, and leadership by
women has only featured once, namely, Blessed Mary McKillop.
This Lecture brings a change in both areas as in part I will speak
about Caroline Chisholm and her role in Australia’s Immigration
story. It is especially appropriate to focus much of this lecture on
her as this year is the 200th anniversary of her birth.
Immigration does not readily conjure up leadership. The popular
notion of immigrants is of working folk moving to make a fresh
start in a new, distant land and there confronting many
challenges, including hardship and tribulations. One of the most
significant works of public art on this subject is the Statue of
Liberty, erected in New York Harbour to greet the millions of
immigrants who crossed the seas from Europe. The famous and
moving inscription on the plaque at the Statue is, “Give me your
tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.
When first considering Australia’s immigration, it is even more
difficult to conjure up notions of leadership as most of our early
immigrants were convicts. We should not be too put off by this.
After all, some of them saw themselves in a positive light, as
was reflected in their popular refrain, “True patriots we; for be it
understood, we left our country for our country’s good”.
But, in any event, I hope to persuade you that there was much
leadership of a high order to be found in Australia’s Immigration
story. This will be easier for me if you accept that Immigration
is much more than the preparation and journey from one
country to another. It has to include the process of settlement
– a process which for some is a lifelong one. The adaptation to
new surroundings, new political, social and cultural institutions,
not to mention a new language, is one that may extend
over decades so it is reasonable to treat immigration and its
attendant processes of settlement and integration – or
assimilation – as all part of immigration. It is in this wider area
that we should look for leadership.
Indeed, the lawyers present might remember from their
constitutional law studies, that the distinguished High Court
Judge, Mr Justice Isaacs – later Governor-General of Australia
– once said, “Once an immigrant, always an immigrant”. You will
no doubt have noted that my lifelong mentor and friend, Sir
Zelman Cowen, gave the second Mannix Lecture on Sir Isaac Isaacs.
I have to confess that I once argued against this proposition
when my client’s interests so required. I was desperately trying
to prevent one Tropeano, a young Italian, from being deported
the next day. I submitted that Tropeano, who was one of a large
family which had been here for some years, was no longer
subject to the Migration Power of the Commonwealth because
he had ceased to be a migrant. In spite of Justice Isaacs’ dictum,
I managed to secure an Order Nisi for a Writ of Habeas Corpus
and eventually the Minister allowed Tropeano to return to
the bosom of his family. That early experience led me to become
a lifelong believer in the humanity of the common law and
to question the current fashionable push for a Bill of Rights
or Charters.
May I turn first to Caroline Chisholm, the person who, more than
any other, can be said to have made a significant contribution to
Australia’s Immigration story, especially if Immigration is seen in
its wider meaning as including settlement.
Caroline Chisholm was born in Northampton, England in 1808.
Her father was a yeoman farmer called William Jones. There is
little known about her upbringing save that she was brought up
an Anglican, a fact which caused some family tension when she
decided to marry a Catholic, Archibald Chisholm. Chisholm was
an officer in the East India Company. There had been delay on
her part in accepting Lt. Chisholm’s proposal because she
wanted him to understand – and recognise – that she was not
simply going to be an officer’s wife and that she wanted to
pursue her own vocation to help others. Soon after they were
married, she became a convert to Catholicism.
Father Rector with the Banting family.
29
In 1838, they migrated to New South Wales. Sydney was
flourishing, and the colony boasted a Government House,
eleven churches, four gaols, a lunatic asylum and three
courthouses. But Sydney had few paved roads, drainage was
primitive, there was no sewerage and there was constant crime
and drunkenness, not to mention many disorderly houses.
There was assisted immigration, which was bringing large
numbers of free settlers to the colony, for transportation was
soon to cease. But there was no effective method of having
labour deployed to the rural areas where it was most needed.
Worse was to come. In 1841, some 20,000 immigrants arrived in
Sydney, which had a total population of some 130,000 people.
The early prosperity faded and a depression followed.
Unmarried females suffered particular hardships and many
were recruited into prostitution. Caroline Chisholm, in her vivid
account, “Female Immigration”, written in 1842, wrote with
deep concern of the plight of these women as follows:
During the season of Lent of that year, I suffered much; but
on the Easter Sunday, I was enabled at the altar of our Lord,
to make offering of my talents to the God who gave them.
I promised to know neither country or creed, but try and serve
all justly and impartially. I asked only to be enabled to keep
these poor girls from being tempted, by their need, to mortal
sin; and resolved that, to accomplish this, I would in every way
sacrifice my feelings – surrender all comfort – nor, in fact,
consider my own wishes or feelings, but wholly devote myself
to the work I had in hand. I felt my offering was accepted, and
that God’s blessing was on my work: but it was his will to
permit many serious difficulties to be thrown in my way, and
to conduct me through a rugged path of deep humiliation.1
Margaret Kiddle, in her biography of Caroline Chisholm,
describes how Caroline Chisholm was deeply moved by the
plight of homeless immigrant women but notes that there were
two formidable obstacles to Chisholm taking any action. The
first was what she describes as prejudice of the time against
women taking any part in public affairs, so strong that only the
bravest dared to flout it. “At heart,” she writes, “Caroline
Chisholm was conventional and had no wish to flout public
prejudice.” The second was “the fact that she was a Roman
Catholic and animosity towards Catholics was intense.”2
Eventually she “mounted the stump” as it were, and was almost
certainly the first woman in the history of Australia to speak up
and write on a public issue.
1Chisholm, Caroline, Female Immigration (Sydney: James Tegg, George
Street, 1842), p. 4.
2Kiddle, Margaret, Caroline Chisholm (Carlton: Melbourne University Press,
1996), p. 13.
30
The Dean with Mr Michael Tehan, Justice Richard Tracey and Rosemary Tracey (Arts 1).
Her first step was to write for help to Lady Gipps, the wife of the
Governor, and then to the Governor himself, with whom she
secured a meeting. I read of Governor Gipps with particular
interest, being especially intrigued by contemporary accounts
which described Gipps as “every inch a Governor!” Eventually,
she persuaded him to support her in the establishment of a
Female Immigrants’ Home, for which she was given the use of
part of an old wooden barracks building, but on her express
guarantee in writing that the Government was not to be put to
any expense.
She herself spent some nights alone in the Barracks to test out
what she needed. Rat Poison was to be high on the list as her
own account shows. She wrote:
I retired, weary, to rest. Scarce was the light out, when
I fancied from the noise I heard that dogs must be in the room,
and in some terror I got a light. What I experienced at seeing
rats in all directions I cannot describe. My first act was to
throw on a cloak, and get at the door with the intent of
leaving the building. My second thoughts were, if I did so, my
desertion would cause much amusement and ruin my plan.
I therefore lighted a second candle, and seating myself on my
bed, kept there until three rats descending from the roof,
alighted on my shoulders. I felt that I was getting into a fever,
and that in fact I should be very ill before morning; but to be
out-generalled by rats was too bad. I got up with some
resolution. I had two loaves and some butter (for my office,
bedroom and pantry were one). I cut the bread into slices,
placed the whole in the middle of the room, put a dish of
water convenient, and with a light by my side I kept my seat
on the bed reading “Abercrombie” and watching the rats until
four in the morning. I at one time counted thirteen, and never
less than seven did I observe at the dish during the entire night.
The following night I gave them a similar treat, with the
addition of arsenic, and, in this manner passed my first four
nights at the home.3
Later, Caroline Chisholm expanded her work to assisting single
women and family groups to settle inland, requiring her to
travel great distances in incredibly difficult conditions.
Both in the conduct of the Home, in her direct assistance to
women in grievous need and later in her work in the country
helping to secure employment for the unemployed, she showed
enormous energy and endurance. Her journeys were either on
horseback or by bullock dray. She covered huge distances, often
in scorching heat, across country with few, if any, roads and as
far afield as Armidale to the north and Goulbourn, Yass and
Gundagai to the west. When a journey took several days – a
frequent situation – she slept underneath the dray. She often
rode alone through country infested with bushrangers but was
never once molested. Kiddle describes her as “known and loved
throughout the length and breadth of the colony” (p.32). All this
was an entirely different picture to that commonly associated
with genteel Victorian ladies descending briefly from their
carriages to visit the deserving poor.
In 1846, Caroline Chisholm returned temporarily to England, in
part because she believed that there she could more effectively
present her arguments for change. An additional reason was to
locate and assist children forsaken by their parents who were
prevented from bringing children to Australia with them
because of the bounty system – a much criticised form of
assisted migration. She succeeded in securing a meeting with
Earl Grey, who had become Secretary of State. She had
broadened her agenda to cover schemes to facilitate
immigration and settlement of family groups. She laboured to
secure support from a broad range of persons but struggled
until she gained the support of Charles Dickens. Out of this
came the Family Colonisation Loan Society, which at its peak in
1852, sent six shiploads of immigrants, mostly family groups, to
Australia. The scheme would have continued to flourish had it
not been overtaken by the Gold Rush, which brought huge
numbers to Australia.
In 1854, Caroline Chisholm was able to return to Australia and
turned her attention to Victoria, eventually settling in Kyneton,
where she became more and more active in the movement to
free land for selection, despite the strong opposition of the
Victorian squatters. She visited the Goldfields and joined in a
group which secured Government support for the creation of
some ten depots – also known as “shake-downs” – which were
positioned between Melbourne and the Goldfields. Food and
shelter were provided for families on their journey inland. She
and her husband conducted a store in Kyneton for a time and
she suffered severe illness. Their store failed and they suffered
real poverty. They moved to Sydney where they set up a girls’
school. Eventually, in 1866, she and her husband decided to visit
England to help complete the education of their children. But
any eventual return to Australia became out of the question as
her health became very poor and she struggled physically and
financially, being bedridden for the last five years and living in
dingy accommodation. It is recorded that she spoke generously
of her old foe, Dr J Dunmore-Lang. On 25th March 1877, the Feast
of the Annunciation, she died in Fulham in London. It was Holy
Week. Her husband died a short time afterwards. They are both
buried in Northampton.
One of the best illustrations of the way Caroline Chisholm
traversed important issues is her letter to Earl Grey in 1847. It
marks her out as at once compassionate, visionary, energetic
and practical. In one portion of her letter she wrote:
ne of the evils which I would take the liberty to press upon
O
your Lordship’s notice, and that of Her Majesty’s Government,
is the frightful disparity of the sexes (men being out of all
proportion in number to women), and from which flows
misery and crime, I dare not dwell upon, and to this unnatural
anomaly of the human race in that Colony, may be traced in
a great degree the gradual but certain extermination of those
unfortunate tribes, the Aborigines of New Holland; they, the
original holders of the soil, demand the speedy and parental
interference of a humane Government.
The cry of compassion for the Aborigines of New Holland,
pleading for intervention of Government needs no underlining
given the current realisation that the case for speedy
intervention is now at last recognised on almost all sides. In her
reference to disparity of the sexes, she was again an inspired
visionary in her warnings, which were not really heeded. Indeed,
the same disparity marked our immigration policies, especially
in the 1950s. I recall a graphic newspaper picture at that time of
a long queue of young Italian men waiting in a lane to use an
itinerant brothel. Eventually, Government created a fairer and
more humane policy, part of which is sometimes described as
the Family Reunion Policy.
Thus far, I have not discussed a critical driving force in her life,
namely her religious faith. This was to sustain her in her years of
endeavour. It was a generous faith which never attributed the
poverty and misfortune of others to their feckless or sinful ways
– a trait which sometimes infected Victorian philanthropy. She
was open and genuinely close and friendly with those for whom
she fought.
3 Chisholm, Caroline, Female Immigration, pp. 10-11.
31
There is evidence in Mary Hoban’s biography, Fifty One Pieces of
Wedding Cake, demonstrating Caroline Chisholm’s spirituality
and recourse to prayer to aid her in her practical, often unsung
life of charity. There was nothing about her religious faith that
was aggressive, except her crusade against neglect of the
homeless and the desperately lonely.
But this was an age of sectarian conflict. This is dramatically
illustrated in the diatribes of Dr John Dunmore Lang, a Minister
of the Scots National Church, who became, as Minister of the
Scots Church in Sydney, the embodiment of militant
Presbyterianism. Though he, at first, expressed admiration for
Caroline Chisholm, his view changed when he learnt of her work
in organising assisted immigration. In 1847, he published a
pamphlet entitled, “Popery in Australia and how to check it
effectually”, which Margaret Kiddle describes as, “marked by
unreasoning bigotry”. The pamphlet stated:
Mrs Chisholm is a Roman Catholic, of no common caste,
a perfect devotee of the Papacy.
In all her efforts on behalf of emigration she is completely
identified with the Romish priesthood of New South Wales ...
her whole and sole object is to Romanise that Great Colony
and by means of a second and, if possible, still greater
land-flood of Irish Popery under the guise of a great scheme
of National Emigration, to present it in one time to God, the
Virgin Mary and the Pope, purified, or at least in the fair way
of speedily becoming so, from the foul and pestilential heresy
of Protestantism! 4
Chisholm’s scheme, he said, was designed to increase mixed
marriages, which were “engineered”, he said, “by an artful
female Jesuit, the able but concealed agent of the Romish
priesthood in Australia.” This charge was met by a restrained
and reasoned reply from Caroline Chisholm herself entitled,
“The Threatened Rebellion in Australia”. In this she referred to
the recent official figures which disproved the contention that
the majority of emigrants were Irish. As to religious persuasion,
6,558 were Protestants and 1,317 Catholics. Lang was not
deterred. It is hard to escape the suspicion that in a sectarian
age some of this bigoted attack left its mark, in the eyes of
some, and affected in the long term her place in Australian
History and in particular, in the history of Australia’s
Immigration. At the same time, it should be noted that Lang did
not wholly reflect the attitudes of non-Catholics, for both the
New South Wales and Victorian Parliaments voted to make
significant testimonial payments to Caroline Chisholm. Happily,
in today’s Australia, we are now relieved to be able to see Lang
as an historical curiosity.
4 Kiddle, Margaret, Caroline Chisholm, p. 88.
32
The Oxford Companion to Australian History states in the entry
on Caroline Chisholm: “British Victorians placed Caroline
Chisholm beside the Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry and the
Anglican founder of the nursing profession Florence Nightingale
in their pantheon of outstanding women”5. In the same entry,
the contributor, Patricia Grimshaw, describes Anne Summers,
writing in 1975 as a champion of feminism, as reaching a less
enthusiastic view of her work than historians Kiddle, Hancock
and Manning Clark. Grimshaw writes of Summers’ book
entitled, Damned Whores and God’s Police, as follows:
In Damned Whores and God’s Police, Anne Summers took
Chisholm’s phrase as emblematic: she interpreted male
acceptance of Chisholm in the public sphere as purchased by
her accommodation with traditional policies that matched
female values of of domesticity and subservience. It is a view
of her work that has generally prevailed.
The phrase, “God’s Police”, had been coined by Caroline
Chisholm to convey how mothers and children were the
backbone of stable families and stable communities. It is
somewhat bizarre that the agendas of modern feminism in the
1970s should be used to undervalue Caroline Chisholm’s
contribution in the harsh social, political and religious realities
and frontier conditions of New South Wales in the 1840s and
the 1850s when she did her most significant work. Does anyone
suggest that what was a reasonable course in the 1970s was
remotely practicable in Sydney in the 1840s? In any event,
Caroline Chisholm never practised or preached subservience.
Anne Summers’ very comprehensive book on the history of
women and feminism in Australia is a formidable work, but her
summary of Caroline Chisholm’s legacy, as reflected in these
following passages, is open to criticism. She writes:
arolyn Chisholm had thought that the mere presence of large
C
numbers of women would be sufficient to alter the mores of
convict Australia; she was confident that what she considered
to be women’s innate desires for marriage, children and homes
would, if encouraged by the authorities, secure a reversal of
the Damned Whore stereotype. What she did not see was that
the God’s Police stereotype was just as much an imposition on
women as the one it replaced.6
The author speaks of women firmly circumscribed by the limits
of family and home who had lost all powers of self
determination. She goes on to write:
5 O
xford Companion to Australian History (Oxford University Press, 1998),
p. 124.
6Summers, Anne, Damned Whores and God’s Police (Camberwell: Penguin
Books, 2002), p. 359.
Thus, while the women who fulfilled the God’s Police role were
idealised and given a token status, they had no economic
independence, and there has been a steadfast refusal to
investigate just what their lives entailed. It is these women
who are the predecessors of the majority of women in
Australia today: economically dependent and culturally
impotent, their activities and their influences were hidden
within the home and hence could be overlooked. The price of
being rescued from the ignominious fate of the female
convicts and immigrants was to disappear from society, and
from history.7
One phrase particularly grates, namely, “economically
dependent and culturally impotent.” Not only are these words
untrue of Caroline Chisholm herself – I suggest they are very
questionable of many other female immigrants – and here you
can draw on your own family history.
Finally, we should see what public acknowledgments exist of
the standing Caroline Chisholm enjoys in Australia. A Federal
electorate and a TAFE College bear her name, as do a number of
nursing homes and some Pregnancy Counselling Services. Best
known in Melbourne is the Caroline Chisholm Library and the
Caroline Chisholm Centre for Health Ethics. Her image once
appeared on our $5 note. There are also a number of plaques,
the most interesting of which I found – or rather, my wife found
– a few days ago at St Mary’s Star of the Sea Church in West
Melbourne. A plaque there records that Caroline Chisholm was
involved in the early Tent church which preceded St Mary’s, and,
even more interesting, that Archibald, her husband, was the
Godfather at the christening of Mary McKillop. Oddly, there is
seemingly no statue of Caroline Chisholm anywhere in Australia,
in contrast to another, more recent participant in the story of
Australia’s Immigration and Settlement. I refer to the late Al
Grassby, Minister for Immigration in the Whitlam Government
for two years from 1972 to 1974. Recently, after some
controversy, the Government of the Australian Capital Territory
caused a statue of Al Grassby to be commissioned and erected.
He was extravagantly described at the time by some as the
Father of Multiculturalism. No Immigration or Settlement
policies of any significance can be properly attributed to Al
Grassby who was a very minor contributor.
There is no doubting, however, the dominant place of Caroline
Chisholm in Australia’s Immigration story. She represents all the
qualities of courage, initiative, perseverance and inspiration
associated with leadership. She is a classic model of leadership.
In addition, she was heroic and dare I submit, saintly. As to this,
if suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous bigotry with
7 Summers, Anne, Damned Whores and God’s Police, pp. 359-360.
Senior Common Room members, Dr Guglielmo Gottoli, Dr Catherine Playoust and
Dr Augustine Meaher IV.
charity and restraint is a qualification for sainthood, Caroline
Chisholm is surely a strong candidate. As to sainthood, I refer to
a very thoughtful address by Clara Geoghegan presented in
2000. She argues cogently that the processes for recognition of
sainthood are much more difficult for the laity than for
religious, a view supported years before by then Cardinal
Ratzinger, who urged the Church to recognise more lay saints.
Now, as Pope Benedict, he particularly invited us this year in his
World Day of Migrants Address to pay particular attention to
young migrants – Caroline Chisholm’s main area of concern.
I wish now to suggest another model of leadership in the
Immigration story, one I will describe as the Unknown
Immigrant, unknown, not as being anonymous but as being
largely unacknowledged or unsung. I refer to those many
immigrant families and individuals who made their way across
the seas to Australia and there demonstrated similar attributes
of courage, initiative, perseverance and inspiration to others.
Some of these travelled to Australia at the time Caroline
Chisholm was performing her noble work, indeed possibly some
on the ships she arranged or met.
I have confined myself to a few of these stories. The first of
these was a Spanish Benedictine named Dom Salvado. His
Congregation was expelled from Spain and took refuge in Italy.
Dom Salvado accepted a request that he and some fellow
monks travel to Western Australia and there set up a Mission to
serve Aborigines. He set off from Italy in 1845 and after some
months, arrived in Fremantle and travelled north to what
became known as New Norcia, then “in wild bush country well
beyond the limits of the existing colony.”8 Dom Salvado
eventually chose a site for a permanent Mission some 80 miles
8Stormon, S.J., E.J. (ed. & trans.), The Salvado Memoirs (University of
Western Australia Press, 1977), p. XI.
33
north of Perth but not before he had spent over two years living
with the Aborigines and learning their language. New Norcia
was named after Norcia, the Italian birthplace of St Benedict.
Dom Salvado inspired one of his fellow monks to open a Mission
for Aborigines at Port Essington, in what is now the Northern
Territory. Salvado was an extraordinary man who made the
welfare of Aborigines his highest priority. He visited Rome and
took two Aborigines with him to meet the Pope. He also wrote
an account of his early experiences. These were written in
Italian and constitute the first book every written in Italian
about Australia. The memoirs remained relatively unknown
until over a century later when, in 1977, they were translated
into English by Father Ted Stormon S.J., then a much loved Dean
of Newman College. The Memoirs contain lengthy and careful
details of the customs and traditions of Aborigines and they
show Salvado as a humane protector of their interests. He was
also an accomplished musician and set the foundation for
making New Norcia a cultural centre with many fine paintings.
Many of these and books and objects were acquired by Dom
Salvado when he returned to Europe to fundraise for the new
Mission. Don Salvado left an extraordinarily beautiful Mission,
New Norcia, which has survived to this day as a Benedictine
monastery, thanks to his courage and vision.
The second profile of immigration and leadership I wish to share
with you is one Carl Ludwig Pinschof. I doubt whether any of
you have ever heard of him. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1855,
he settled in Melbourne in 1881, then aged 26. He was a member
of an Austrian Jewish family with wide interest in the arts,
business and finance. He married a lady called Elise Wiedermann,
also presumably Austrian or German. She was an accomplished
soprano, who had sung “Carmen” in a number of the opera
houses in Europe, but who retired from the stage on her
marriage. Interestingly, she was an early supporter of Nellie
Melba, then Nellie Armstrong, and it was Mme. Pinschof who
recommended her to Mme. Marchesi in Paris. Marchesi became
a crucial influence that really opened up Mme. Melba’s great
career as a soprano. She eventually became the great soprano of
the world, sang with Enrico Caruso and dominated the opera
scene for twenty years or more.
From 1900 to 1916, the Pinschofs lived in a large house called
Studley Hall, Kew, which some of you would know as Burke Hall,
the preparatory school for Xavier College, opposite Raheen in
Studley Park Road.
Studley Hall, when the Pinschofs occupied it, was a centre for
art, music and hospitality and Pinschof was an early patron of
the Heidelberg School of Painters, who were our first great
painters in Australia and really our early impressionists. He was
also a supporter of an Austrian artist called Carl Kahler, who
34
became famous as a portrait painter. Kahler also painted
Melbourne Cup Race meetings, with dozens of recognisable
faces and these were turned into engravings, which were then
published with a glossary underneath. He became very well
known around Melbourne as a recorder of Melbourne history,
especially the social history of the Melbourne Cup.
Pinschof became a close friend of the great Australian artist,
Tom Roberts, for whom Studley Hall became a second home,
especially when he was painting what is said to be his greatest
work, Shearing the Rams. Pinschof also helped in bringing about
the huge painting of the first sitting of the Federal Parliament,
which can be seen in Canberra, in which Tom Roberts painted all
the people who were present, and painted them in a way that
meant that they could be identified so that there were at least
several hundred identifiable faces in his painting.
At the height of his influence, Pinschof became a director of the
Herald and Weekly Times and the first chairman of Carlton and
United Breweries. He was partly responsible for the great
success of the brewing empire that we now know as Fosters.
Although he had become a naturalised British subject, and was
a dominant influence in the commercial and cultural life of
Melbourne and, indeed, Australia, when war broke out in 1914
between the Allies and Germany with which Austria-Hungary
was allied, he was subject to the strong ill-feeling and
antagonism towards Germans and Austrians. The Australian
authorities behaved with extraordinary severity towards enemy
aliens, even though some were British citizens who had been
here many years, in Pinschof’s case since 1880. These people
were automatically put under suspicion, some were interned
and some were deported. By the outbreak of war, he had ceased
to be the Honorary Consul General for Austria-Hungary. Those
who were overseas Consuls, in accordance with the usual
practice, were given the immunity of being able to leave the
country and be repatriated, but this did not apply to Honorary
Consuls. When the war broke out in 1914, he was forced to
resign all his directorships and he was driven out of his home at
Studley Hall. With a little persistence, I managed to find out
from the Foreign Affairs Department in Canberra, that there
was a file on Pinschof in relation to his coming under notice
when the war broke out.
He was never actually interned but he was treated as though he
was an enemy of the State and his file makes interesting
reading. It has some quite bizarre entries made in long copperplate handwriting from some clerk, saying, “Informant so and so
(who happened to be a maid) who had worked in the Pinschof
house and who acknowledges that she has been well treated,
said that four years previously she had noticed a revolver in the
house.” This automatically put him under suspicion. Here he
was in a house full of valuable artworks, so what is so sinister
about owning a revolver? In any event, this was long before
the war had commenced. Anybody who had any kind of half
rumour or half gossip was encouraged to report it to the
Military Intelligence. The file also contained a note saying that
Mrs Wiedermann, Pinschof’s sister-in-law, had been heard to
say, “That she did not care for Australians and that Australians
should not have so many holidays.” The result was that the
Pinschofs had to give up their lovely house and they went to live
in Windsor. In 1926, he visited Europe for the first time since
1881, and on the way the ship called in to South Africa where he
died quite suddenly. So his whole wonderful career ended in this
rather sad way. His body was brought back and was buried in
the Boroondara Cemetery in Kew. There was a very glowing
obituary written by a leading citizen of the day, Theodore Fink.
But the obituary makes no reference to the shabby treatment
received by Pinschof. It is an object lesson as to how hysteria can
overcome people that we think are balanced and fair. I have
been unable to discover who took possession of Studley Hall. It
appears that the house was confiscated by the Commonwealth
Government whose plan to use it as a hospital came to nothing,
and it was purchased in 1920 for some £5000 by T. M. Burke,
a leading real estate agent. He offered the house to Archbishop
Mannix, who offered it to the Jesuits, who later renamed the
House, Burke Hall.
My father had rented a house in Newry Street, Carlton, and
when Regina arrived – the first time she had travelled any
further than Padova – she found she was also cooking for some
four lodgers. On Sundays an even bigger group assembled to
enjoy her Veneto cooking9.
Pinschof remains relatively unknown. His achievements and
those of his wife in Australia are, unfortunately, overshadowed
by the shabby treatment he received from a nation which failed
to recognise their contribution.
But all of this happy childhood was to be the subject of a major
dislocation. In 1938 my parents decided to sell up and to migrate
to Australia again. This was a courageous decision given the
magnitude of their first failure and given that their business
venture in the centre of Cittadella was flourishing. There were
no assisted passages so this long journey was entirely at their
own expense. They had always spoken well of Australia in their
anecdotes and travellers’ tales. It may be that there was some
uneasiness about future war but all this was very remote from
tranquil Cittadella. It may also be that my father, who had never
espoused any political views, was uneasy about Fascism and its
obvious heavy handed presence even in quite small towns. In
1938, Australia had not yet recovered from the Great Depression.
My impression was that my mother had been the driver of the
courageous return to Australia and the purchase soon after
arrival of a restaurant at 274 Victoria Street, North Melbourne,
opposite the Queen Victoria Market. It had the highly
improbable name of St Kilda Grill Rooms. The owner had been
a Scottish lady – perhaps thinking of the island St Kilda in the
Outer Hebrides – or perhaps simply a fervent St Kilda Football
Club supporter!
The third and last of the alternative profiles I wish to put before
you is one closer to me. I offer this further example, not because
it deserves to be put above others, but because I can speak of
it with direct experience. I refer to my own parents and I offer
them as a further profile of leadership and a contrast to more
conventional models. I hope to persuade you that the classic
qualities of courage, initiative, perseverance and inspiration can
be found in their story. Further, let me say at the outset that
I believe that this story is mirrored by many, many others.
My father was almost a professional immigrant. One of ten
children, he migrated more or less alone from Italy to Argentina
at the age of 15, returned several times to Cittadella, some
40 kilometres from Venice, and eventually married. My father
was a terrazzo maker and decided to migrate to Australia in
1927 when he heard that there was much demand for terrazzo
in Melbourne. As was the practice then, he went ahead, leaving
my mother, Regina, to follow next year in 1928 with their two
year old son, my older brother Flavio.
Then came the Depression which affected Australia as badly
as anywhere in the world. In the middle of all this, with an
unemployed father, I arrived in March 1931 in the Women’s
Hospital in Carlton.
The effect of the Depression became steadily worse and the
family moved to Kerang where living was cheaper and one could
grow vegetables and run pigs and chickens. Those with a rural
upbringing like my parents were well equipped for this change.
In early 1934, there was still widespread unemployment and
economic misery. This and my father’s poor health brought the
family immigration experiment to an end and we all returned to
Cittadella, the home town – a beautiful small walled town near
Padua, some 30 kilometres from Venice. My parents, with great
spirit and resourcefulness, opened up an “osteria” – a combined
bar and restaurant in the centre of Cittadella and proceeded to
rebuild their modest family fortunes.
There were some twenty uncles and aunts and even more
cousins, all either in Cittadella itself or close by, so there was no
lack of friends and relations. It was a very happy time.
9See entry and photograph in Victoria’s Italians, Italian Historical Society
– Co.As.It., Melbourne 1985.
35
There was, however, one very Italian feature of the restaurant,
namely an espresso machine. It was a Cimbali which had been
purchased for the premises in Cittadella. It was part of the
Gobbo baggage which came to Melbourne in 1938. It was
almost certainly the first espresso machine in Melbourne – if
not Australia – and was to do sterling service for years. Nothing
could be more demonstrative of their initiative.
The early years at the restaurant were very difficult for both my
parents and involved remaining open for long hours. The great
breakthrough came in 1942 when a large number of United States
Marines were stationed in Melbourne in preparation for the
offensive to turn back the Japanese invaders. A quite significant
proportion of the Marines were of Italian origin and many came
to the restaurant to eat Italian food. In spite of the heavy burdens
on her, my mother managed to take me to weekly talks on Dante
and Mazzoni, hardly a sign of “cultural impotence” to use Anne
Summers’ phrase (the talks were given by Fr Ugo Modotti, S.J.,
an Italian Jesuit). When I reflect on the phrases economic
dependency, cultural impotency and subservience used to
characterise the legacy of Caroline Chisholm and I relate this to
my own mother, I find these phrases totally out of place.
Economic dependency scarcely reflects the true situation where
there is a partnership and an interdependence in the common
venture of immigration. I am sure many of you who are children
of immigrants would find these phrases equally inapplicable.
It seems appropriate that I insert into this account of my
parents’ second immigration to Australia how, “metaphorically”,
Archbishop Mannix crossed our path. One of the first schools
I attended was St Mary’s Christian Brothers School, West
Melbourne. Like most Catholic schools in Melbourne, St. Mary’s
took part in the annual St Patrick’s Day Parade in the city. Much
time was spent in rehearsing for this by marching round and
round the small asphalted school yard to the beat of the school
drums. My father would say to me when I got home “Cosa
hai imparato oggi?” (What have you learnt today?) I answered
“niente” (nothing), and he said to me in Italian, so what do you
mean “niente?” I still said “niente.” “What have you been
doing?” “Abbiamo fatto la marcia” (We’ve been marching).
“Che marcia?” (What march?) “La marcia di San Patrizio.” My
father asked “chi è sto San Patrizio?” (Who is this St Patrick?)
For my father’s disdainful view of St Patrick, I apologise to any
Irish folk hearing or reading this paper, but in mitigation may
I say that these martial activities may have struck a raw nerve
for my father – and my mother – who may have included
distrust of Fascism’s public posturings in their reasons for
migrating to Australia again in 1938. I must have inherited this
suspicion for I was a dismal failure in the Cadet Corps at Xavier,
being reprimanded for persistently having a dirty rifle barrel.
36
The actual march was an elaborate affair for it took place from
the Spencer Street end of Bourke Street up to Parliament House
and then the serried ranks turned and marched into St Patrick’s
Cathedral. At the top of Bourke Street, we were to do an ‘eyes
right’ where Archbishop Mannix sat in a large open Daimler
convertible. We were so fascinated by the Daimler convertible
that we scarcely noticed the Archbishop. “Crikey, look at that
car!” we said to each other.
But St Patrick’s Day left no hint of ethnic bias in me against
things Irish. On the contrary, thanks to Newman College, I came
to an appreciation of Irish History and at the same time earned
the approval of Archbishop Mannix.
It arose in this way. In my second year in Matriculation at Xavier
College, I had time to spare. I noticed that Newman College
advertised an examination in Irish History. It was known as the
Joseph Winter Prize for Irish History. When I made enquiries at
Newman College, I was advised that no one had presented
themselves for this for some years. With some difficulty,
Newman found a visiting Jesuit, a Father Mansfield, to set the
paper. When I asked about the curriculum, the simple reply
came back, “All Irish History!”
I sat for the exam in splendid isolation. It was not surprising in
the circumstances that I was awarded the prize which was ten
pounds, a significant sum in 1948. I was told by Father Hackett
S.J., then living at Xavier, that when he told his good friend
Archbishop Mannix of my success, the Archbishop lamented
what a sad reflection on the Irish it was that the first time the
Irish History Prize was awarded in many years, it was won by the
son of an Italian immigrant!
May I conclude these accounts of further profiles in Immigration
and Leadership by reiterating that my parents’ story is mirrored
by many others in our history. Some of you here tonight may
well be able to point to similar qualities of courage, initiative
and achievement in your parents or ancestors.
It is this common theme which gives Immigration a heroic
aspect. It underlines both the contribution of those who came
and the generosity of an Australian nation, which welcomed
them. It explains, if explanation be needed, why I am and
always have been, a passionate advocate of a large scale
immigration program.
But such a program can only continue if three conditions are
satisfied, namely that there be jobs and opportunities for our
newcomers, secondly, that there be social cohesion, more
particularly, tolerance of a diversity of cultures and faiths, and
thirdly, that in an age of bewildering international terrorism
directed against innocent civilians, there be security and respect
for the Rule of Law, even if on occasion this results in some
restriction on traditional human rights. There will always be
tension in the interplay of these factors. Here then, there will be
great need for wise leadership – not just in political leaders but
in the wider community.
I am confident that this leadership will come to the fore. If it
does so, it will enhance the legacy of compassion and
perseverance left by Caroline Chisholm and by the example of
the many Unknown Immigrants who have made this country
their home.
bibliography
Chisholm, Caroline, Female Immigration (Sydney: James Tegg,
George Street, 1842)
Dening, Greg, Xavier. A Centenary Portrait (Kew: Old Xaverians’
Association, 1978)
Gobbo, James, “Italian Migrants in Victoria” in Journal of Royal
Historical Society, December 1984, March 1985.
Kiddle, Margaret, Caroline Chisholm (Carlton: Melbourne
University Press, 1996)
Oxford Companion to Australian History (Oxford University
Press, 1998)
Stinson, Rodney, Unfeigned Love, Historical Accounts of Caroline
Chisholm and her work (York Cross, 2008)
Stormon, S.J., E.J. (ed. & trans.), The Salvado Memoirs (University
of Western Australia Press, 1977)
Summers, Anne, Damned Whores and God’s Police (Camberwell:
Penguin Books, 2002)
Victoria’s Italians, Exhibition in State Library of Victoria, 1985,
Italian Historical Society.
Sir James Gobbo ac cvo qc
Sir James Gobbo is a former
Governor and Justice of the
Supreme Court of Victoria. After
spending his childhood years in Italy,
he emigrated in 1938 and had to
learn English as a second language.
He attended Xavier College, and was a member of the
First Eight, which won Head of the River in 1948. He received
an Honours degree in Arts at the University of Melbourne
and attended Newman College. He then won a Rhodes
Scholarship and read law at Oxford. After being called to the
Bar in England, Sir James returned to Australia as a barrister.
He took silk in 1971, and in 1978 was appointed a Justice
of the Supreme Court of Victoria. He held this post for
sixteen years, before retiring and become LieutenantGovernor of Victoria in 1995. In 1997, the Premier, Jeff
Kennett, appointed Sir James to the position of Governor
of Victoria.
Sir James has a keen interest in immigration and
multiculturalism, and was one of the founding members
of the Immigration Reform Group, which sought to
abolish the White Australia policy. He has subsequently
served on a large number of boards and councils, and
is currently Chair of the Council of the National Library
of Australia, the Council of the Order of Australia and the
Australian Multicultural Foundation. Sir James remains
active in Italian Community affairs, especially Aged Care
and the Italian Historical Society. He is also Vice President
of the Order of Malta of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller
Order of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, founded as a
Hospitaller Order in 1113 and active in Victoria in Home
Hospice Care.
He was knighted in 1982 and became a Companion of the
Order of Australia in 1993. He is also the patron of Monash
University’s Prato campus. He lists winning the Oxford/
Cambridge boat race as one of happiest memories, along
with the day of his marriage to Shirley, his wife of 51 years.
37
“IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE THERE ARE MANY MANSIONS”
Homily given by the Rector at the funeral of former Collegian, Nat Bonacci,
a long serving member of the Council of the College.
As you drive up Swanston Street past Newman College at the
University of Melbourne, just before you come to the roundabout leading into College Crescent the dome of the College
comes into view. Surmounting the dome is a rather elaborate,
almost baroque, architectural structure. It is set of thirteen
delicate stone pinnacles – twelve minor pinnacles and one major
pinnacle, and then a cross to crown the structure. The pinnacles
represent Christ and the Twelve Apostles.
When Walter Burley Griffin designed the pinnacles in 1916 they
were constructed, like the rest of the College, in reinforced
Barrabool sandstone. It was only a matter of time, however,
before the delicate Barrabool sandstone weathered away, and
by the 1940s the whole elaborate design was replaced by a
rather squat and ugly metal cross. It stayed that way for almost
forty years.
In the early 1980s Father Brian Fleming, the Rector of the College
at the time, commissioned major restoration works on the
College. Should the pinnacles be restored, and if they were to be,
how could they be restored to meet demanding heritage
requirements? Nat Bonacci was the junior member of the
Building Committee at the time, and through his expertise and
enthusiasm the original Griffin design was restored. Concrete
and steel were Nat’s line of business, and it was in these
materials with a crusting of sandstone – to satisfy the Heritage
requirements – that the original design symbolising Christ and
the Twelve Apostles was reinstated in its pristine glory. It is there
to this day.
I mention this incident because in a way it was typical of Nat.
He was the problem solver par excellence. Professional expertise,
innovative thinking, boundless enthusiasm and the ability to
enthuse others, and total generosity in making his talents and
counsel available in whatever way and to all he could assist –
family always first, but then friends, colleagues, the board,
councils and building committees on which he served, the
beneficiaries of the Order of Malta, anyone virtually who sought
his advice or was in need.
I first came into association with Nat back in 1970 when I was
Dean of Newman College and Nat was the tutor in engineering
at the College and a member of the Senior Common Room. He
was then a graduate of both the Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology and the University of Melbourne. My father had
been like Nat, a civil engineer and also a graduate of RMIT, and
I used to bait Nat with my father’s dictum: “Anyone who is
smart enough to be an engineer should be smart enough to be
something else” – presumably a doctor or a lawyer. I think we are
all very glad that Nat did not take that seriously! He was an
excellent tutor – practical, down-to-earth, always available
(especially at exam times), engaging, congenial, personal and
utterly straightforward. Those same gifts which endeared him to
students he carried into his personal and public life. We didn’t
38
realize it then, but we had a quite distinguished Senior Common
Room in the early 70s – young men destined to make their marks
in their later careers – a High Court and a Federal Court judge,
the first Federal Privacy Commissioner, Professors of Law and
Medicine, academics, researchers, public servants, distinguished
lawyers, doctors and businessmen. Nat was the leaven in the
group, down to earth and eminently practical, and, as I say,
engaging, charming, uniquely personal and absolutely straightforward and honest. There is a phrase in St John’s Gospel when
Jesus first meets his soon-to-be apostle Nathanael: “An Israelite
in whom there is no guile”. That was Nat. And smart, too.
When I came back to Newman fifteen years later in 1987,
Nat was still there, the Chair of the Building Committee and
a member of the College Council. I soon learned that such
appointments were repeated in a whole variety of institutions
which were fortunate enough to call upon his expertise. The
renovations at St Patrick’s Cathedral and at St Mary’s, West
Melbourne, the Mercy Hospital, the Order of Malta – you name
it, there was Nat – and all this pro bono.
Sometimes he was late for meetings, not surprisingly for he had
so many commitments. But he was always worth waiting for. So
often he expanded the options and clarified the decision-making
process. He was expert in reviewing tenders and facilitating their
implementation. He always seemed to have time for people, and
he had so many personal and professional contacts.
That’s the way it’s been for at least the last twenty years as he
became more and more eminent in his profession. But he was no
less committed to all that he valued and esteemed, especially his
family – Marisa, Mara, Dana, Nina, Anthony and Leia – but also
his faith, his friends, his colleagues – and the St Kilda Football
Club (which even tested his loyalty!) – a Christian gentleman in
every sense of the word.
The last eighteen months have been very difficult as the original
cancer spread and chemotherapy and radiation treatment were
instituted. But nothing seemed to deter Nat. He was still
attending meetings and giving advice less than a month ago –
so much so, I suspect, that his death has taken us all by surprise.
In today’s Gospel Jesus reminds us that in his Father’s house
there are many mansions. I’m sure there is one specially reserved
for Nat, and I wouldn’t mind betting that before very long he
will be suggesting to the heavenly Father that there are a few
structural items that need looking into and that he knows
exactly the contractor who can do the job competently and
cost-effectively!
So, farewell Nat – a humble (in the best sense of the word), that
is down-to-earth, honest, generous and decent man, a man of
integrity and practical wisdom, for God’s own purposes taken
untimely from his loving wife and family and all of us, but whose
memory will remain ever a benediction.
NEWS OF FORMER COLLEGIANS
Former Study Abroad student, Julie MacMahon (2005–06),
writes from Dublin that she was awarded a First Class Honours
degree (a feat which she attributes to her enriching time spent
in Melbourne) and is currently writing her thesis for a Masters
Degree in International Relations.
Former student Dan Bongiorno (2001) has recently
been awarded the Thomas Bradbury Chetwood S.J. Medal for
the highest grade point average in the LLM course at
Georgetown University.
Former Collegian John Laughlin
(1952–1955) writes from Kingston,
Tasmania informing the College
that he has recently received
a publication from Newman
friend and contemporary from
the early 1950’s; John Maneschi
(1952–1955), entitled: Giovinezza:
Wartime Memories of an
Italo-Australian Schoolboy.
Debaters of 1958: N. Quinn, P. Bourke and N. Woodford. The
President of the Albert Power Debating Society in 1958 was
T. John Martin.
Former Collegian James Sprunt (1989–90) has been back in
Melbourne for two years after working in India for the previous
two years. He started a project with the local NGO involving
small and marginal farmers growing rice and vegetables using
biodynamic and organic methods.
Douglas Williams (1912–2008) a former Collegian died earlier
this year. He appears in the photograph above which shows the
1939 Cricket team: Standing: T. Ahern, J. Billings, D. Williams,
J. Kargotich, W. Harris, and G. Robinson. Seated: H. McLennan,
D. Dowling, G. Westmore, J. Maloney, and K. Pierce.
James Forsaith (2003) has received a Patrick Moore Scholarship
from the Cambridge Australia Trust to pursue a Masters of
Philosophy in International Relations. His thesis is to be on the
effect of the rise of China on Australia. He will begin his studies
in October. He was resident at Newman in 2003.
Former Collegian and member of the Council of the College,
Esmond Downey (1941–43), has received an Award as a Member
of the Order of Australia.
39
Former Collegian Grant Fraser recently visited the College.
Grant has for many years worked as a lawyer and barrister,
and now lives in Geelong. In 2001 he published a book of poems
entitled Some Conclusion in the Heart. A poem from that
collection, entitled: Sound Bethlehem Softly, appears on the back
cover of this edition of Newman News.
There was a sense of history and achievement at the University
of Melbourne’s Graduation Ceremony on Saturday 6th
December, 2008. In the morning, former Dean of the College
and current member of the Council of the College, Jane Page,
was conferred with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. In the
afternoon, former Collegian, Harry Crock was admitted to the
degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa). At the same
ceremony, former Collegians Megan Kwong, Rong Bing, and
Calvin Phang, along with current SCR member, Yingda Li, were
conferred with their Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of
Surgery and Bachelor of Medical Science.
Former Collegian Gemma Rice (now Gemma Sisia) published
a book entitled St. Jude’s in 2007. It is a remarkable tale of love
and generosity. In 2002, Gemma opened a school (St. Jude’s)
in Northern Tanzania. Since these humble beginnings the
school has thrived and grown to almost 1000 students. At
the beginning of 2008 a free primary school for 550 children
was opened. To contact and support the school go to
www.schoolofstjude.co.tz or email [email protected]
Another image from the Archives: J.Grigsby, R. Ireland and
P. Stevenson – the 1961 Debating Team.
Something from the Archives: the 1933
General Committee. Back: G.E. Delany,
R.J. Triado, J.C. Whitehead. Front: M.V.
McInerney, C.G. Heffey, H.J.Sinn. Inset:
J.B.L. Johnston. Murray McInerney
(later Sir Murray) joined Newman
College in 1928. In 1931 he was awarded
the Wyselaskie Scholarships in Political
Economy, English, and Constitutional
History and the Dwight Prize for
History and British History. In 1934 he
was the Resident Tutor in Law and
remained so until 1939. The 1935
College Magazine describes him as
“still with us if not of us”, noting that
“he continues to lecture, though now
to hear him is compulsory.”
40
The College in 1953 – the last year in which Father Jeremiah Murphy was Rector. Father Murphy was Rector from 1923–1953.
Newman College in 1918.
41
Former Collegians
Ted Ryan (1932–1938)
and Maurice Mulcahy
(1939–1943) visited
Newman College earlier
this year. Maurice
recalled how he had once
sat next to Archbishop
Mannix at a formal dinner
– hence the photograph!
1969
42
AFTER APOLOGY, IT’S BACK TO THE FUTURE
A reflection from Father Brian McCoy S.J., a member
of the Jesuit Community at Newman College (first published
in Eurek a Street) .
that lay between the two dormitories. However, the children
always returned to the dormitories to sleep at night. It was
from there that they went to school and it was here where
they lived. They were not allowed to visit ‘the camp’ where
their families lived, 200 metres away.
The girls experienced more family separation than the boys.
They were only allowed to go down to visit their families on
Christmas day. For the rest of the year both boys and girls
remained under the care of those who ran the dormitories,
removed from the daily care and affection of their parents and
extended relations.
Thirty-five years ago, March 1973, I first went to live in a
remote Aboriginal community. I was accompanied by another
Jesuit, Pat Mullins. We had been asked by the local Bishop to
work at Balgo, an Aboriginal Mission south of Halls Creek.
Our task was to look after the boys’ dormitory, where around
50 boys aged from five to fifteen lived.
We were students at the time. Moving from Melbourne and
the university of the early 1970s to a very remote part of the
Kimberley proved a great shock. The weather always seemed
to be hot, the facilities were basic (no air-conditioning or
phones), the resources were few (only a small number of
staff, mainly religious) and the roads were unsealed, rough
and poorly maintained. What I particularly remember was
a vast social and communication gap between the Mission
staff and the 250 desert people who lived there. My ability
to communicate with the people in Kukatja was as severely
limited as their ability to communicate with me in English.
The few notes I took at that time remind me how much I felt
out of place. The sounds, smells and isolation took time to
accept. I recorded my initial confusion about the dormitories,
and why ‘we’ needed to place nearly 100 children in them. At
that time, the young men would stay in the boys’ dormitory
until their late teens when they found jobs as stockmen on
neighbouring cattle stations or in work around the Mission.
The young women often stayed in the dormitories until
they married.
While there were opportunities for oral communication
between the children and their families, contact was strictly
controlled and limited. Children could meet their parents and
younger siblings in the ‘playground’, a large recreational space
In April 1973, a process to close the dormitories began. The
children whose families lived at Balgo Mission were returned
to their parents. Those children whose families came from
neighbouring cattle stations remained in the dormitories for
a few more years.
When the Prime Minister recently apologised to the Stolen
Generations I wondered if he intended to include those
dormitory children who were not taken away from their
communities, but who spent large parts of their young lives
separated from their families. Adults now, they remember
their parents being forced to give them up when they were
young. They continue to feel the hurt of that separation.
As I recall those days of change when children were returned
to those who earlier had been considered unfit to raise them,
I also remember the different conversations of the missionaries
at that time. The arguments always returned to what the
missionaries thought was best. For some, the removal of
children ‘for education’ was both the good and only thing to
do. They didn’t believe they needed to communicate with or
consult the parents. It was as if the missionaries did not know
or could not consider any other way.
I continue to wonder how modern attitudes reflect old ones,
especially when people enter Aboriginal communities with
a set of ready-made answers around employment, health and
education. I am reminded of a mind-set that seeks to change
people’s lives for the better, always ‘for their own good’.
At the same time, I also hear that we do not know how to
acknowledge the social and cultural gap that still exists
between us. We forget our history and the lack of trust that
has developed. We are not comfortable to sit, listen and
develop long-term relationships. We struggle with the use of
the word ‘partnership’. We prefer ‘outcomes’ instead.
43
ON THE STONE AND A BANKER MARK
During the restoration of the
stonework, the current stonemasons
have come across a few stones where
the original stonemasons have left
their mark. This is an ancient practice.
Senior Common Room Member,
Dr Jeffrey Turnbull has prepared the
following statement which will be
attached to one of these stones for
archival display.
A banker was the bench upon which a mediaeval mason cut
stone for inclusion in stonework construction. The mason
would chisel an assigned personal mark, his banker mark, onto
an internal face of a stone block. Thus the stone blocks he
produced could be identified and counted by the master mason
and contractor before such blocks were placed within the walls
of a building. The practice of making banker marks ensured that
a mason could be credited and paid for his work cutting and
rendering the stone blocks needed in the construction. As this
example shows, banker marking became a mason tradition.
The block here came from above the voussoirs (the wedge
shaped blocks of the arch) in the third bay from the domed
rotunda along the Carr Wing roof promenade. This small block
was removed in its entirety from the original wall construction
during the 2008 stone restoration work undertaken by
Newman College on Chicago architect Walter Burley Griffin’s
Initial Structure, 1915–18. Other blocks with banker marks have
been retrieved during the restoration work, but these blocks
were already broken and friable due to the poor state of the
stone. The banker mark on the stone displayed here apparently
44
consists of the stonemason’s initials and his own symbol, with
arrowheads to one major horizontal line crossed with two
minor vertical bars. Research is underway to try and identify
the mason.
The stone facing for the original building was obtained from the
Barrabool Hills quarries near Geelong. The Building Committee
during 1916, chaired by Coadjutor Archbishop Daniel Mannix,
determined a stone finish for the new college building in
preference to a brickwork finish or to cement render. Griffin
had earlier offered to manage the construction of his design in
rendered reinforced concrete, but architect Bart Moriarty was
persuaded by Archbishop Mannix to act as the builder, who
managed the building budget and organized and oversaw the
various tradesmen, including stonemasons.
The superior Sydney sandstone was prohibitively expensive.
For the Building Committee Barrabool Hills stone was ranked
first in relation to other Victorian building stones by a principal
of Swansson Brothers Builders of Melbourne. Others in the
building industry, however, including Griffin, were aware of the
questionable durability of Barrabool Hills stone. Exfoliation,
the splitting off of layers, can occur when the beds of this
mudstone are exposed to rain. However, Griffin dutifully
visited the Barrabool Hills quarries to select the best available
material. The large blocks from the quarries were stored on
the site during construction, ready for lifting up onto banker
benches to be cut into single blocks finished in rusticated
or smooth-ground surfaces. After ninety years many blocks
have deteriorated due especially to exfoliation requiring a full
restoration of the initial structure’s stonework.
Senior Common Room members
Dr Jeffrey Turnbull and Brother
Elias Mokua S.J..
Spirituality and the Intellectual Apostolate
On Saturday, November 29th, 2008, in the Newman College Oratory, Dr. Brendan Niall launched, or, as she
preferred, opened “Golden Years: Grounds for Hope”. “Golden Years”, edited by Val Noone, Terry Blake, Helen Praetz
and Mary Doyle, is a collection of essays and personal recollections reflecting on the years 1950–1966 when
Father Jeremiah Golden, S.J., was the chaplain to the Newman Society at the University of Melbourne. Newman
News presents in the following pages, with the permission of the author, an edited version of Professor Tony Coady’s
contribution to the collection. We hope it will be of interest to some of our Newman readers who were also
members of the Newman Society during those heady days.
“Golden Years: Grounds for Hope” is available from Rainbow Book Agencies, 303 Arthur Street, Fairfield, Vic. 3078.
Phone (03) 94816611. Email [email protected]
I have some difficulty with the term spirituality because it has
become a voguish word, conjuring up pictures either of wan,
pre-Raphaelite denizens of a special ethereal world or
well-heeled hippies flooding the verbal environment with
sentimentality and destroying the currency of words like
“love” and “peace”.
Nonetheless, in spite of these distortions, the idea of
spirituality makes some sense as indicating a set of attitudes
that orient an agent towards values and outlooks that exhibit a
capacity to reflect upon one’s place in the world in a way that
goes beyond an obsession with self-promotion, material goods
and wealth accumulation.
Against this background, we might ask what was the
spirituality of the Catholic movement known in Melbourne
University as “the Intellectual Apostolate”? Answering this
question involves me in offering a personal perspective, but
how it appeared to me may help others understand their
experience, and I hope that it contains some truth about how
things were back then.
One thing distinctive of my experience was that I was
something of an outsider. I had my first undergraduate
experience as a Catholic at the University of Sydney and came
to Melbourne to do an M.A. in philosophy. At Sydney, I was
influenced by the Catholic chaplain, Fr. Roger Pryke, who
was a vigorous, extroverted man of considerable, very
Australian charm. Pryke, who had a degree in psychology,
was full of the ideas of Catholic Action, particularly those
articulated by the Young Christian Workers movement in its
French form and the writings of the French theologian,
Cardinal Suhard. These ideas plus the influence of the
American Catholic Worker people, especially Dorothy Day
and Peter Maurin, made a big impact on me and several others
I associated with, notably Dick Hall and Bob and Margaret
Vermeesch, as well those of an older generations, such as
Edmund Campion, whom I knew at the university before he
went into the seminary to study for the priesthood.
This formation melded well with what I began to hear about
the Catholic movement at Melbourne University and to read
about their ideas in The Incarnation and the University. In the late
1950s, Dick Hall and I made several visits to Melbourne,
spoke at conferences, and made friends with Vincent Buckley,
Peter Wertheim, Paul Simpson, and Brian Buckley amongst
many others. This led to our holding a conference in Sydney at
which several of the Melbourne people spoke, and it resulted
in a small book called The Life of the Apostolate. I also met in
Melbourne some outstanding women involved to one degree
or another in the Apostolate, notably Marie McKenna,
Margaret Aughterson (whom I was later to marry), Marie
McNally and others. Later, in Sydney, I met the Melbourne
and Oxford-trained philosopher, Bill Ginnane, who returned
from Oxford to a lectureship in the Sydney Department where
I was studying philosophy. Ginnane had been a significant
theoretician in the development of the Melbourne apostolate.
When I moved to Melbourne in 1961, I became a member of
the Senior Group as it was rather grandly known. This was an
interesting group, notable for many things, one of which was
the striking absence of women in its membership. In my time
in it I think the only woman ever a member was Joanne
McLean. But more of this later.
The spirituality characteristic of the Melbourne Apostolate
was complex and mostly, I think, positive, though there were
some negative aspects. But first, the positive. There was a
great stress upon the spiritual significance of a vocation in the
world. I had already encountered this as a liberating idea in
45
the Sydney apostolate. Indeed, the very idea of an apostolate,
a lay apostolate, was a move away from a dominating idea in
the Catholic Church to the effect that a calling from God
was basically a calling to the priesthood or to some dedicated
Order. The term vocation was invariably used in the fifties
and earlier for a calling to “the religious life” construed as a
life somewhat removed from the everyday world and highly
clerical. There is a good novel by Benjamin Black, called
Christine Falls, which paints a slightly jaundiced but mostly
accurate portrait of Irish Catholicism in the 1950s in which
the obsession with swelling the ranks of the clergy goes hand
in hand with hiding young unmarried mothers away in
institutions and forcibly removing their babies to be later
groomed for “the religious life”. Benjamin Black is a nom de
plume for the famed Irish novelist, John Banville, who writes
mysteries under this name. His picture of Irish religiosity is
highly pertinent to Australia where the Irish influence on the
local Church has been dramatic. Much of what you could
read in the new theology of the 1950s and 60s contributed to
liberating your outlook from the clericalism that had been
such a feature of the Catholicism that you had been raised in.
Yves Congar’s Lay People in the Church was a landmark in
dismantling the extreme deference to, and misplaced
significance of, the clergy that is the heresy of clericalism.
I recall reading an excellent paper by the young Canadian,
Charles Taylor, nowadays a famous philosopher, which made
a devastating critique of clericalism and the underlying
contempt for God's creation that lay behind it.
This broad sense of vocation, which had indeed been long
present in various forms of Protestantism (it is notably
present, for instance, in Calvin’s theology) was given a
particular emphasis in the Melbourne Apostolate where the
intellectual vocation was stressed. I was not alone in being
impressed with Terry Mahony’s idea of “the charity to think”
which extended the force of the concept of an intellectual
vocation by claiming that a response to the call to intellectual
work was itself an exercise of charity. It was an exciting idea
that you could love your neighbours and, indeed, the world
God had created, by thinking hard and working to solve
intellectual problems, whether they were philosophical,
literary, engineering, medical or legal.
Another positive associated with the assault on clericalism
was an increased sense of the responsibility and the legitimate
autonomy that devolved to ordinary Catholics once the
clericalist confusions had been cleared away. This meant that
46
we were much less inclined to swallow whole what came
from the pulpit or the pastoral letter, and were more inclined
to see the bull in Papal Bulls. Taking an intellectual vocation
seriously meant not only that you had to think hard for
yourself, but that you were obliged to find truth in places
often remote from official Church teaching and proclamation.
It also became less and less plausible to see the Church as a
monolithically united body with but one authoritative opinion
on every important issue in faith, morals and everything else.
I recall being very stimulated by Karl Rahner's booklet Free
Speech in the Church, and I wrote an enthusiastic, though not
uncritical review of it in Prospect. Apparently I made the book
sound more enlightening and radical than many found who
were moved by my review to read it.
Once clericalism was rejected there was not only room
for a greater stress upon the role and dignity of the lay person
in the Church, but also for a less enclosed set of attitudes
towards the world itself and towards all human beings. Instead
of a focus on the nobility of saints (themselves overwhelmingly
clerical persons), attention turned to the value of human
beings more generally, and hence the need for some form of
Christian humanism. The remark of the Roman author
Terence: “Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto (I am a
man; I count nothing human foreign to me)” provided a pithy
summary of this value. I recall giving a talk in which I quoted
Baron von Hugel, the Catholic lay theologian who was
associated with the modernist movement at the end of the
19th century and start of the 20th, as summing up an insight
that seemed to me crucial to the apostolate. Von Hugel saw
the work of Christians as following the example of “Christ in
the Church calling to, and answered by, God in the world.”
All these attitudes made available a spirituality that
foreshadowed that later projected by the Second Vatican
Council, but at the time it was novel and rather feared
by Church authorities. Indeed, in spite of the Council, it still
is in many quarters. We were, I think, in many ways ahead of
our time in the repositioning the Church, what John XXIII
called its “renewal”.
So much for the positives. What about the negatives? One of
these was that, in spite of the emphasis on opening up to the
world, most of us had very little interest in the merits of other
Christian denominations. We had broken down clericalist
barriers to spiritual development, but we still had a touch of
the triumphalism that has marred so much in the Catholic
tradition. It used to be common in the fifties and even much
later to talk comprehensively of Catholics and non-Catholics,
and to lump somewhat dismissively all other Christians,
agnostics, atheists and, of course, Buddhists, Hindus etc all
together in the latter category. We would have rejected this
in theory, but it did, I think, influence our stances. In 1961,
at the annual UCFA Conference I think it was, I gave a talk
which I think was called “The Kingdom of Heaven”,
exploring this scriptural idea and drawing from it some
positive conclusions about the redemptive role of nonCatholics including all these groups, and my views received
a very hostile reception from many quarters, including
apparently the threat of “delation” to Rome. Part of my
inspiration for the talk came from the writings of the great
Protestant biblical scholar, C.H. Dodd, and it was perhaps
this source, as much as anything, that caused the fuss.
Another negative was a certain arrogance about the
importance of our apostolate in the scheme of things. We
thought that we had made a new start in understanding the
Church and its role in the world, and that what we did in our
group discussions, our summer (and other seasonal) schools
was supremely important. It was, I think, pretty important,
but we had little realisation that similar things were going on
in other parts of the world; at least we didn’t show that much
interest in those developments. I remember being surprised
as late as 1994 to find during conversations in Princeton that
there had been a group of Catholics in Harvard in the 1950s
harbouring similarly radical views about the Church. This
group included the distinguished American lawyer/historian,
John Noonan, whose book Contraception was such an
important contribution to the hope, fears and debates around
the morality of contraception that featured so profoundly in
the 1960s. I also found it a surprising thing that we were not
very open to other Catholics who were of a liberal persuasion,
though not (we thought) as radical as we were. Indeed, there
was a degree of animosity between the senior Apostolate
people and those on The Catholic Worker. When I joined the
Board of The Catholic Worker in (I think) 1967, I recall Vin
Buckley’s surprise, and his telling me somewhat darkly that
I had made a very significant decision. I also felt that in the
early years my colleagues on the CW board viewed me with
a certain amount of caution. There was of course a history to
this connected with Vin’s previous membership of the board
and his resignation from it.
Then there is the issue of women. I’ve already mentioned the
composition of the Senior group, but there were other signs
that the apostolate was not immune to the sexism of the day.
When I first came from Sydney, I was struck by the strange
attitudes of many apostolate men to women. It was not just
that women’s role was neglected; indeed, there were a fair
number of women who gave talks at the “schools” and
“conferences”. It was rather that there was great fear amongst
the males, or at least a number of the significant leaders, that
love and marriage would domesticate men. It would interfere
with boozing and work – there didn’t seem to be any fear that
boozing would interfere with both work and marriage! There
also seemed to be a general assumption (no doubt related to
the fear of domestication) that women needed to be subject to
male domination; I recall one leader assuring me of the need
for an Arabian attitude to one’s female partner. These views
were no doubt part of the sexism then common (though I
didn’t have the concept in the early 60s), but even so they had
a quite specific flavour that I hadn’t encountered in Sydney.
Another negative of the Melbourne Apostolate was the
somewhat virulent anti-communism that infected the group
under the influence of Frank Knoplemacher. Knopflemacher’s
dominating influence upon much of the apostolate produced
a mindset of paranoid suspicion, and shifted concern with the
inequities of Australian society to insubstantial conspiracies at
home, genuine outrages overseas, and a misguided attachment
to the follies of American foreign policy. Knopflemacher’s
manipulation of the Apostolate produced a sense of political
orthodoxy within it that was destructive of the essentially
exploratory, critical nature of the community, and of the
tolerance that should have informed it.
In conclusion, I shall just mention two issues that seem in
retrospect to raise some questions about spirituality and the
apostolate. The first is prayer and second is scripture.
Worship was certainly an important aspect of the apostolate,
especially the Mass, and group meetings always began with
discussion of selected pieces of the scripture. I recall our
group working through the Gospels from start to finish and
often also Epistles. But there was very little emphasis upon
private prayer or meditation, partly because, in line with our
understanding of vocation, we had emphasised that our lives
and our work should be seen as forms of prayer. There were
important insights in this approach, but it did neglect or
discount the quiet realities of the individual’s relationship of
47
prayerful attentiveness with God. As for scripture, we
largely ignored the great boom in scripture studies that
began in Protestantism but had, even in the 50s and certainly
in the 60s, penetrated the Catholic Church. This meant that
we were cut off from a significant source of religious insight,
but also that we had nothing to contribute to absorbing this
stream of scholarship into Catholic consciousness and giving
it a critical appraisal from intellectual perspectives external
to those of the biblical scholarly community.
Nonetheless, with all its faults and distortions, the Newman
Society/Intellectual Apostolate during the 1950s and 60s
created in most of its participants a sense of excitement and
commitment, a feeling of communal confidence and optimism
about the Church and its prospects for reinvigorating itself
and the world that many of us have rarely encountered since.
The specific hopes have so far proved largely illusory, but hope
is a complex virtue and its energies can extend beyond myriad
disappointments. Christians have often been seduced by
superficial criteria for the success of religious effort, but
we have the book of Job to warn against short-sighted
optimism. The future shape of the religious engagement with
the world at large is obscure, but the invitation to be part of
that hazardous engagement still appeals.
C.A.J. (Tony) Coady was Boyce Gibson Professor
of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne and is
now Professorial Fellow in the Centre for Applied
Philosophy and Public Ethics in that University. His
book, Morality and Political Violence, was published
by Cambridge University Press in 2007 and another
book, Messy Morality: the Challenge of Politics, has just been
published by Oxford University Press.
Father Jeremiah Golden S.J.
48
NEWMAN COLLEGE STUDENTS’ CLUB DINNER
Guest speaker, Hugh Boylan (NCSC President 2005), Father Rector
and NCSC President 2008, Iwan Walters.
General Committee member Luwa Lin (Eng/Comm 3) with
Professor Margaret Manion IBVM.
The Rector and Deputy Rector with Hugh Boylan and Senior Common Room
member Hannah Li (Arts/Eng 5).
2008 General Committee members, Jane O’Connor, Stephen Clarke,
Phoebe Hollins and Sam Banting.
Other 2008 General Committee members, Jack Lahy, Daniel
Schneider and Laura Riordan with Fr Richard Leonard and
Cardinal Newman.
49
GR ASS CROWN
Father Peter Steele, Scholar-In-Residence has been visiting Georgetown
University, where he gave this homily in September, 2008.
I have a friend in Australia whose name is Jacob Rosenberg.
Jacob is a Jew who was born in Poland. He and his family
were sent to Auschwitz, and within a few days of arriving
there, he was the only member of his family who was
still alive. He himself survived several of those camps. In
one of his books he described how a man who was about
to be hanged in front of the prisoners asked as a last request
whether he might touch one of the SS men who were there.
When he was asked why, he said, ‘I want to know whether
he, too, is someone who was created by God.’
It is a terrible moment in that epic of evil for which the word
‘Auschwitz’ has become a piece of shorthand. The man who
made the request could have been excused for thinking,
together with all the other prisoners, that the SS men were in
fact demons – excused for thinking that by some monstrous
mistake, they themselves were all in Hell. ‘Why this is Hell,
nor am I out of it’, Mephistophiles says in Christopher
Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus: had I been there, I might myself
have thought so.
Why relate so distressing a story of a Sunday morning? It is
on account of what St Paul has to say to the Christians in
Philippi, and has to say to us, in today’s Second Reading. In
that passage, he gives us a little catalogue or checklist of the
things that go to make, not the hellish, but the heavenly:
‘Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is
honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is
lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if
there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.’
St Paul is describing what might be called the ecology of
heaven, the divine milieu as lived in and lived out. Ecology,
as you know, refers not to something static, but to a dynamic
which has many expressions, and many fruits. Yes, Paul is
profiling a certain ‘character’, is detailing elements which any
of us might be glad to have on his or her CV today, or at the
last day: but he is also looking to the living up to our moral
and spiritual capacities in sickness and in health, for richer or
for poorer, for better or for worse, so that as he would put it,
‘Christ may be seen in us’, the Christ who, in an absolutely
unqualified way, was in his human element both created by
God and faithful to God – was of a piece with God.
50
Jacob Rosenberg, who is a man of special sweetness, denies
that he is religious man. On the other hand, in a radio
interview, he said that ‘I look at… all I have ever written as an
endeavour to restore face to a brutally defaced humanity.’ In
my experience of him, he carries this wise and resolute
aspiration through in the ordinary joys and sorrows of life.
More than once when I have thought of him I have been
reminded of what the villainous Iago, in Othello, says of
another character – ‘He hath a daily beauty in his life/ That
makes me ugly.’ Leave the comparison aside for a moment,
since none of us is Iago: that notion of ‘a daily beauty’ is
something to which to aspire. It is, as a matter of fact, exactly
what St Paul is talking about. ‘Whatever is just, whatever is
pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious’ – this is a
figuring of a daily beauty, and it can never be either obsolete
as an aspiration or irrelevant as an accomplishment.
The vendors of exercise machines or of cosmetics say, and
have to say, that their products will make the buyer less ugly,
or even positively beautiful, and who am I to begrudge them
their claims, worthless candidate though I should be for their
ministrations? But it is part of our conviction as Christians
that when it comes to the deepest kind of spiritual beauty,
Christ and his words and his way are the only way to go. In
the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, as you remember, Julia
Ward Howe says, ‘In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born
across the sea,/ With a glory in His bosom that transfigures
you and me’, and it is true. Ungainly as we are, vestiges of
ugliness though we wear, the transfiguring is something
which Christ is about in his holy Spirit, for the ‘Glory’ of his
Father indeed.
Think for a moment not of the Union armies but of the
Roman army. The highest and rarest of all decorations there
was called ‘the Crown of Grass.’ This was presented only to a
general or commander who broke the blockade around a
surrounded Roman army, thus saving a legion or in fact the
entire army. The decoration was, uniquely, awarded by the
soldiers themselves after a crisis of extreme desperation. The
crown was woven of grass, weeds, and flowers taken from the
battlefield. Commercially, it was worthless: institutionally, it
was beyond price. To think of our own thorn-crowned
General, the rescuer of us all and of all who will ever be, is to
think of the one whose own ‘daily beauty’ was never more
evident than in his giving his life for our sake. For us to go
his way must be for us, in our degree, to be open-handed in
our giving.
A painting by Hugh Cushing (2008). The College commisioned a number of paintings from Hugh Cushing.
Two of these appear in this edition of the Newman News. A limited edition set of signed prints of these
paintings are available from the College.
51
ENQUIRIES
Further information can be obtained
from Newman College
Website: www.newman.unimelb.edu.au
or from The Rector, Newman College
887 Swanston Street, Parkville VIC 3052
p: 03 9347 5577 f: 03 9349 2592
e: [email protected]
Sound Bethlehem Softly
For those who endure grief without horizon,
sound Bethlehem softly.
For those whose longing
is spent in wild, distracted things
and voices raving in the night,
sound softly the sound of Bethlehem.
For those who spend their braveries
in acts beyond revocation,
who wait alone,
abandoned by lesser friendships,
sound Bethlehem.
For those unnerved by silence,
a Bethlehem.
For those powerless in the world,
the strange belonging folk
at watch on hillsides,
the babes, the fools, the wordly-wise,
sound the season blessedly,
in every voice a Gloria,
in every heart a Bethlehem.
– Grant Fraser

Newman News Summer 2008 - Newman College

Transcription

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