Will ye go, Lassie go: Celebrating the life of Sr Bridget Harley D.C., ed Sr Maeve O’Brien, D.C., Blue Mountain Education and Research Trust, ISBN 978 0 9941555 04.
Sometimes you enter the world of an ordinary person who lived an extraordinary life. Born in Scotland, Delia Harley learned resilience early. When she was 12 her mother died. Her miner father enlisted Delia and her older sisters to care for the family. She won a scholarship to secondary school and studied teaching before joining the Daughters of Charity as Sr Bridget. Into her late forties she taught poor and disadvantaged children in Sydney and Melbourne. In 1967 she was asked to teach in Ethiopia, where she met Emperor Haile Selassie, and helped found a school for poor children in the slums. From Addis Ababa she was sent to distant Dembidollo, which only two or three planes a year connected to the capital. She was asked to train kindergarten teachers.
This work was dangerous and difficult. After Haile Selassie was overthrown, military officers introduced a Communist system with local spies and military discipline. The country was ravaged by war and periodic famine. Sr Brigid had to deal with the hostility to religion and to foreign workers displayed by the Menghitsu regime. Working in isolated areas where bodies often lay in the streets, occasionally she also had to face down bands of roaming soldiers who wanted to enter the school. In once case she had to deal with an abandoned missile launcher full of guns and ammunition that had broken down in the school property. During the famine she closed the school and established a feeding station for the people dying of hunger.
This little book is a tribute to an extraordinary woman, who is a source of pride and self-reflection at a time when Australian governments are closing their eyes to the outside world.
Mannix, Brenda Niall, Text Publishing, ISBN: 9781925095111.
Brenda Niall’s splendid new biography of Archbishop Mannix begins with a bonfire. He had ordered his papers to be burned after his death. The fire kept his inner life secret.
Brenda Niall’s central challenge was to uncover the personal face of Mannix from his speeches, his actions and from the responses of people to him. Mannix was a wonderful performer. With his gift for eloquent, rhythmic prose, with the deadly phrase and silent pause, he could control an audience and turn high affairs of state (such as his arrest at sea) into farce.
But beneath the props lay a passionate, reflective man. After the killing of leaders of the Easter Uprising, he lived with a barely controlled rage. He argued fiercely against conscription in the 1917 Referendum, and became the international face of the Irish struggle. His sympathy for the underdog was consistent – for Jews under Hitler, for workers, for immigrants and refugees. It also fuelled his opposition to Communism.
Mannix focused on what mattered. This showed in his neglect of what mattered less to him: entertaining and being entertained, using the telephone, attending to his own comfort, popular devotional practices, developing amicable relationships with leaders of other churches. But he was strong in his prosecution of the causes that did matter: trusting his priests and those to whom he had given responsibility, the freedom of the Irish from British rule, the encouragement of an active Catholic laity both in Ireland and in Australia, a just Australia, and – in his last years – a church free from clericalism and sanctimonious speech.
Brenda Niall knew personally many people in Mannix’s circle. She has written a generous and penetrating biography.
