Love In a Sunburnt Country (9 page)

The commitment to join a religious order embraces all parts of life. Your earnings are shared, your costs are borne and possessions are minimal. Together you work, eat and pray on a daily and weekly timetable. All of that helps you develop another discipline—accepting that everyone is different and letting that be so, day in and day out. Religious life placed Cathy where she could give and surrounded her with others of faith with whom she could grow.

‘Life in an intentional shared community is all about the quality of relationships you can achieve. Liking someone, disliking someone … it all becomes rather more important in a situation where you are at close quarters and where everyone is trying hard to act with love.

‘I had a novice mistress, Sister Elizabeth, with whom I didn't get on very well. Not Elizabeth's fault, not my fault, just our two personalities didn't gel. I really loved going to the seminary. There were very good lecturers there, very good courses. I enjoyed talking to the other students. But then someone (and I am sure it wasn't one of the students) went to Sister Elizabeth and told her he thought I was a flirt. So she called me in to her office. And I thought, “I don't know that I've been flirting, but I know that I am in really big trouble because nuns are not meant to flirt.” I was so embarrassed! I couldn't believe it. And Sister Elizabeth said to me, “You are going red—you are going very red!”'

Cathy's pale face is filling with colour: this is a story she is telling with humour but she is clearly still mortified by the accusation all these years later. The accusation of behaving inappropriately was a blow to her confidence. Elizabeth's words had the potential to destroy not just Cathy's pleasure in being at the seminary but also her confidence in working with men. That this did not happen was due to Sister Joan.

‘Joan was in charge of the congregation of sisters that lived in the professed house (where the sisters who had taken their vows lived). She did some work with us as novices one morning a week, about reflecting on life, getting to know yourself and using scripture to inspire you, to find out what touches you. I related really well to Joan. She was the person who really helped me grow as a person, and in the Christian sense too, for the two years I was there. So I went to see Sister Joan at the professed house, and explained that Elizabeth had said to me that a man at the seminary (because Elizabeth had stressed to me that it was a ‘he') had said that I was a flirt. And I remember Joan saying to me: “So what if you are?” I said, “I'm a nun!” and Joan said, “It's nothing, what are you worried about it for?”'

Sister Elizabeth was one of those religious women who felt that Eve needed to take full responsibility for the business with the snake and the apple. Joan clearly was not.

Cathy had encountered one of the everyday ways that the schisms in belief among religious people are brought to life—in this case, who carries the responsibility for the sexual desire felt by a man? And for Cathy it was vital to hear that some religious leaders felt it was okay for her to be herself around men—lively, passionate, caring. She could be all those things and still be a nun. However the accusation, once made, did not go away. The hours Cathy was allowed to be at the seminary were reduced by Sister Elizabeth. Cathy feels that Sister Elizabeth was trying to protect both Cathy herself and the rest of their congregation (all those of that religious order) from what she saw as a possible scandal.

‘So I didn't stay the whole day any longer. I said to the guys I knew, “I can't come for a whole day because someone here has told them I'm a flirt,” and they just thought it was ridiculous.'

Despite the limited time she was allowed at the seminary she still needed to work closely with the other students, many of them male.

‘The priest who taught one particular course said, “Well, normally we would do a section on evil here but if you young ladies are going to be in the group we might change it to Mary”—and I remember saying, “Evil is fine; we'll do evil,” and the other girls saying, “Yes, just because we are women, don't change this stuff around!” In that course I had to lead a tutorial with a Marist seminarian.'

Her co-presenter for this tutorial was Chris Uhlmann (now a political commentator for the ABC), who was one of the Marist students. They became friends.

‘One day Chris rang up the novitiate and Sister Elizabeth answered the phone. And then she came to me and said, “There is a phone call for you and it is a young man, apparently from the seminary.”'

But Sister Elizabeth had lost any traction with Cathy, who could immediately see the funny side of this. Taking heart from Sister Joan's words, Cathy remained open to making friends with men. She had male friends among the seminarians but she liked none of them in a way that suggested to her that she needed to leave religious life. She related best to those who planned to lead active lives of service in the real world—the Columbans and Marists. She did not relate as well to the Conventual Franciscans, whose Catholicism was less about service and more about contemplation and preserving tradition.

‘The Grey Franciscans were nice guys but they were conservative and I was not a conservative Catholic. They would pick me up and drop me off at the seminary so Sister Elizabeth expressed her concern … and I said to her, “Well, you don't need to worry about them!” but Sister Elizabeth continued to monitor me closely.'

At first I am surprised by just how honestly nuns speak of this type of threat to their vocation. Cathy was taught that nuns can have infatuations: ‘You have the infatuation, but then it is gone.' I am not surprised at the advice not to trust infatuation, as it can be such an unreliable indicator of the real state of your heart. But Cathy did not have any infatuations and neither was she worried about missing out on romance. She'd had boyfriends at school and afterwards. She'd liked them, but after about three months all such relationships had fizzled.

‘I just thought that I wasn't very good at having boyfriends—and in the back of my mind was that maybe I'd be a nun,' she says, casually.

In 1979 she became a nun and moved from school to school and state to state at the direction of the order. For a long time she didn't admit to herself that she longed for children of her own. Instead, all the love and care that would have gone to her own children was showered on her students and on others in her community.

‘Then, in the last year before I came to Western Australia, when I was working in Adelaide, we had a Mother's Day service. They were giving flowers, praying for mothers, and I started to cry. I remember friends saying to me, “Oh, you poor thing, you are missing your mother in Melbourne.” And I went back to the convent and I started to wonder about just why I'd cried. I realised: “I'm not missing my mother. I'm missing being a mother.” It really hit me then that I was never going to have children of my own and I loved children so much.'

In a single night Cathy acknowledged for the first time this grief for the children she would never have, and worked it through into acceptance in a cataclysmic crying jag. ‘It was just as well I was by myself at the convent that night.'

It was not long after this that Cathy was offered the chance to go to Western Australia, and she leapt at it. Almost as strong as her conviction that she needed to be in religious life was her conviction that she needed to be working in Western Australia and, more particularly, in the remote mining and station country.

‘My first placement was in Campbelltown in NSW after I'd done my training in Sydney. And there was an education assistant, Robyn, in Campbelltown who'd come from Western Australia. Her sister lived on a station. Robyn had spent Christmas on her sister's station. She spoke about the shearing shed and the heat, the corrugated iron. I was fascinated and I thought, “I wonder if I'll ever get to see a station?”'

But her congregation, the Good Samaritan Sisters, had no foothold in Western Australia and Cathy was very disappointed. Not long afterwards this changed. The Good Samaritans were first appointed to New Norcia, and then Perth and finally to Mt Magnet. Immediately Cathy began saying how keen she was to go to the outback. At congregational gatherings in Melbourne, Cathy prioritised attending the sessions where the four sisters from Mt Magnet presented. Cathy did not understand why she, from suburban Melbourne, felt so attracted by the red-dirt country and the frontier towns of Western Australia.

But in January 1991 a place opened up at the Mt Magnet convent and Cathy applied immediately and was successful.

Cathy was under no illusions about what she'd find in Mt Magnet. When Western Australia was first colonised Mt Magnet became a major centre, along with the rest of the Murchison, with its rich veins of gold and substantial grazing opportunities. Beginning in about 1860 all wealth was systematically sent out of the region. First, knowledge of land held by Aboriginal clans left, as whole families were moved to reserves. Then mineral wealth was dug up and sent away. Stations were unknowingly overstocked and so the nutrients in the soil were exported as wool and meal, breaking the natural cycle in which nutrients were consumed but eventually returned to the soil. Now, in many places the old iron-red soil looks thin, the bush water-starved, and the trees low and ragged. The ground itself looks iron-hard and resilient, but that is an illusion. In each decade the carrying capacity of the land (the number of stock that can be run per acre) has dropped.

Some of the money from the sale of minerals, wool and meat came back to Murchison—you can see it in the old town buildings—but most did not. As the resources left in trucks and trains, so did the jobs and the people. With loss of population came loss of political power. Loss of political power means fewer services—and with fewer jobs and services and less power comes rural malaise. To begin with this malaise only affects the most vulnerable in a community, and the strongest in the community may not even believe that those vulnerable people really need help from outside. Frequently those strong community members, the ones in positions of relative power, have turned down many offers of outside help over the years. But eventually the malaise has them too by the throat. So it was not hard for Cathy to believe that God had called her to Mt Magnet—a place where inequity was the rule rather than the exception and where people of capacity and goodwill were desperately needed—simply for the help she could give.

Cathy was tasked with writing a family faith program for Catholic families on stations. This program aimed to help parents pass their faith on to their children in the absence of Catholic schooling. The church has a three-year cycle of readings, so Cathy, together with the other nuns stationed at Mt Magnet, had to write an exhaustive, all-ages, three-year curriculum.

She arrived in January and began on the required getting-to-know-yous. Almost immediately she met the station families for whom the curriculum she was writing was intended. Of these, the Jones family at Boogardie was located closest to Mt Magnet. Josephine and Henry Jones had five children—some of them adults with children of their own, and others in their teens, away at boarding school.

‘Their third son, Paul, was married to Janet. Janet and I got on well—she had three little kids: Jeremy, Simone and Nicholas, who was a baby. We became friendly, and I loved kids, so I helped her with them.'

She also met David Jones, Paul's older brother. David, like his five brothers, was well known throughout the Murchison region for his ability to find fun in unexpected ways, his enthusiastically deployed skills in working stock and machinery, and his loyalty to his family and to the land. He was very tall, lean, slouchy and easy in his movements, his demeanour calm (except when his ferocious temper was evoked), his features blunt and even under his curls and pushed-back Akubra hat. He was just thirty years old but already his eyes had the downward lean which comes from a great deal of time looking for stock in the far distance under a bright sun. Flashes of humour frequently brightened his face as he listened, and he generally listened more than he spoke. But people liked to listen to him. He was very funny and his insights were widely respected.

Cathy is unsure when she became inescapably aware of that extra quality to her friendship with David—the unmistakably emotional connection that seems to wrap itself around the two of you, tugging you tighter with every meeting.

‘I knew a little bit. I think I knew unconsciously, but consciously I didn't.'

I cannot help thinking of the veil Cathy wore for so long. In our culture, it is perhaps the strongest symbol that a woman has joined a celibate religious order: a celebration of a nun's new status as being reserved for God and his work, set apart from the world. But in the months after she met David it seems to me that the veil had another function: from behind it Cathy was shielded from understanding that her interest in David was a romantic one.

She did feel a connection to David, but she didn't recognise it for what it was. Free from the consciousness that recognition would have brought, she simply enjoyed being with him and getting to know him better. Christmas Day is Cathy's birthday. At a shared Christmas dinner at Boogardie at the end of 1991 she learned from David's mother Josie that his birthday was on New Year's Day. Both had birthdays that were important for other reasons, and because she knew just what that felt like she sent him a card—carefully designed not to come from her alone but from all four nuns stationed at Mt Magnet.

David felt that same connection but he did not deceive himself about the nature of his interest in Cathy. He didn't see ‘a nun'. He saw Cathy and he saw something that had escaped most people about Cathy's nature. Cathy was not in the convent to hide, but to see deeply into the sad and ugly places in communities and people and to help out wherever she could. She was not a woman who needed to be sheltered or protected but a woman to stand shoulder to shoulder with.