By Dr Catherine Kovesi
Frustratingly for any would-be biographer, the motto chosen by the Irish Sister of Mercy, Mother Ursula Frayne, on the day of her religious profession was ‘But Jesus was silent’.
Perhaps it was in recognition of her forthrightness, her desire to speak in order to get the job done, that Ursula had this motto as a personal reminder that she had taken a vow of obedience, not just to God, but to her religious superiors, no matter how unreasonable, unjust and counter productive they might prove to be.
Certainly for Sisters of Mercy both in Newfoundland and in Melbourne it is always something of a conundrum that nothing in the way of personal reflection or even basic correspondence remains from their foundress; with problematic outcomes for foundation stories in the case of the former, and frustration for the latter given Ursula’s 28 years in Melbourne of religious, educational, and charitable activities of the highest order.
Fortunately, however, there is a remarkable legacy of personal correspondence, and a unique document of missionary reflection, from Ursula’s years in the fledgling Swan River Colony and its Catholic mission.
And it was her relatively brief time in Perth, controversial and painful as it turned out to be, that seems to have had the most enduring impact on Ursula’s sense of herself and her mission in Australia.
When, finally, in a period of ill health in Melbourne shortly before her death in June 1885 of cancer, it was not to Dublin, Newfoundland or Melbourne, but to Perth that her mind turned, and about those years that she chose to write; to be silent no longer.
Perhaps it was partly because Melbourne was a cosmopolitan, well-established city and, whilst her work there was demanding, it was not on the same level of strangeness, otherness, and extraordinary difficulty (both practical and spiritual) as that posed by the fledgling Swan River Colony in the mid-19th century.
But also maybe because a mission to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, which had first brought her to Australia, and its ultimate failure, led her to reflect more deeply on the nature of mission, of conversion and religious faith.
Ursula wrote her Sketches of Conventual Life in the Bush and Anecdotes of the Native Australians in part “to encourage members of the religious order to which I have the honour and happiness of being associated, should they find themselves in positions of trial or difficulty”.
Ursula Frayne was already an experienced missionary when she arrived in Perth in 1846. Born Clara Frayne in Dublin probably in 1817 at the age of 16, she was drawn to join a new and dynamic religious order for women in the city, that of the Sisters of Mercy founded by Catherine McAuley in 1831, and became a fully professed sister in January 1837, taking the religious name Ursula.
The Sisters of Mercy were granted an unusual and historic privilege, that of being unenclosed, seen by Catherine as essential if her focus on dispensing Mercy wherever it was most needed was to be fulfilled adequately.
Not seen on the streets of the world since the papal bull Periculoso in 1298 (reinforced by the bull Circa pastoralis of 1566), nuns out of enclosure ensured that the Sisters of Mercy—the ‘walking nuns’—were to be one of the most visible and influential Catholic female missionary orders of the 19th century.
The three principal objects of the Sisters of Mercy were: education of poor girls; visitation of the sick; and protection of poor women of good character.
Ursula completed her novitiate under Catherine McAuley’s tutelage, was professed by her, was shortly under her close guidance as her chosen Superioress of the convent of St Anne’s in nearby Booterstown, was the sister chosen to nurse Catherine McAuley on her deathbed in 1841, and was also one of the sisters named personally by Catherine in a codicil in her will.
The charism of Mercy which Ursula imbibed and in turn brought to remote corners of the globe was, therefore, one learnt directly from her charismatic foundress.
Although Ursula was always eminently practical, there must also have been something of a 19th-century romantic about her.
Apart from its spiritual rewards, joining a religious order gave a single woman scope for travel and adventure that other single women of the day could only rarely experience.
As a Sister of Mercy, Ursula was to travel an astonishing 62,480km—from one end of the world and its extremities of weather to the other.
Ursula was sent to the island of Newfoundland in 1842 in order to bring the Sisters of Mercy to that country. Her period there under Bishop Michael Fleming was difficult and ultimately untenable, and, just one year later, in 1843, she and another of the founding sisters returned to Dublin.
Then, in 1845, the newly elevated Bishop John Brady from Perth came to call on the sisters in Dublin. Ascetic, undoubtedly holy, but naïve, misguided, and ill-informed, Brady was seeking sisters to join a missionary band which he had convinced (and had somehow convinced himself) was to tend to more than 5,000 European children and two million heathen Aboriginal peoples awaiting Catholic instruction in the 16-year-old Swan River Colony.
Fired by Brady’s words, the Sisters of Mercy agreed to send three sisters and three novices on this mission and Ursula Frayne was selected as their Superioress.
The Irish sisters were part of a group totalling 27 missionaries from Spain, Italy and France.
She arrived in the blistering summer heat of a Perth January in 1846, dressed in her dark Irish serge woollen habit, with no accommodation prepared for her band, and a small, dominantly Protestant community in the city hostile to their presence.
Ursula’s first experiences in the colony were in stark contrast to the vision of millions of souls ripe for conversion inspired by Brady.
There were, in fact, only 337 Catholics in the colony, and an unspecified, but not large, number of Aboriginal peoples.
When only one Catholic girl turned up at the newly minted Mercy School on 2 February 1846 (a number which rose only to five after a week), Ursula wrote: “[t]his was rather discouraging to persons who had come a journey of sixteen thousand miles in order to teach some at least of the four thousand little ones … I fancy His Lordship had mentally included the Aboriginal natives who might possibly number 4,000 roaming about the wilds of Australia, and whom it might be possible to Christianise”.
Although they did end up being visited quite regularly by Aboriginal people, Ursula and her sisters quickly realised that converting Aboriginal adults to Christianity was not ever going to be their chief mission in Australia.
However, the original ideal of heathen conversion, which had brought her to the colony in the first place, proved remarkably tenacious.
This ideal underpinned the establishment of the so-called Benevolent Institution – a small residential house for Aboriginal children and destitute European children adjacent to the sisters’ convent.
Initiated when Dom Rosendo Salvado brought an abandoned Aboriginal child to the sisters in 1847, the Benevolent Institution soon housed a shifting population of nine Aboriginal children, all of whom were baptised and given Christian names.
The importance placed on this by Ursula is made clear by an extraordinary letter she penned to Queen Victoria asking for aid in the care of these children.
And, in a manner strikingly similar to that of Bishop Brady in 1845, when Ursula travelled back to Ireland in 1850 in order to inspire others to join her mission in Perth, it was not the needs of the children of English settlers in Perth about whom she spoke.
Instead she brought with her a young Aboriginal girl whom she left behind to be educated in England as evidence of the need for, and success of, her mission. (Tragically, this child, baptised Mary Catherine Palamira, died shortly afterwards in an English boarding school from pulmonary tuberculosis.)
The greatest legacy of Ursula Frayne in Perth, however, was not to be in the problematic moral minefield of Aboriginal care and conversion.
It was, instead, her role as an educator that is still clearly in evidence today.
Mercedes College in Victoria Square at Perth’s centre traces its origins back to Ursula’s first school of 1846 and was the first school Australia-wide to be founded by a religious order, the first permanent school in Western Australia, and Western Australia’s first secondary school.
Similarly, when she arrived in Melbourne in 1856, Ursula established the first secondary school for girls in Victoria, the present-day Academy on Nicholson Street, Fitzroy.
But I wonder whether, in her heart, Ursula still craved the role of missionary to the Aboriginal people in the bush and whether that is why in the months before she died her final effort was to write about those early days in Perth.