The Ark

Until the 1960s most Catholic girls in Australia were educated in convents. The Ark this week tells the story of one of these convents - Kerever Park, in the Southern Highlands of NSW, run by the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Christine Trimingham Jack, a former convent girl herself, reveals what life was like for students and nuns at Kerever Park from the mid-1940s through to 1965, the year the school closed. That closure also marked the end of a long tradition of educating Catholic girls in enclosed convents.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: During the Second World War, when children were evacuated from Sydney, a school was established in the Southern Highlands, dedicated to 'Growing Good Catholic Girls'.

Hello, this is The Ark, and I'm Rachael Kohn.

Kerever Park Boarding School was founded by the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The nuns taught the girls to be obedient, quiet and prayerful, and also graceful like the tulips in the English country garden at the school's entrance. Personal sacrifice was a key ingredient in the girls' education, and it would leave a lasting impression on all those who went through.

Now the head of Primary Education at the University of Canberra, Christine Trimingham Jack, was one of those students and she's written about Kerever Park Boarding School in a book called Growing Good Catholic Girls.

Christine Trimingham Jack: Part of the book is about the last sort of bastion of monastic life of young girls being brought up in convents, in closed convents. And so I had really faced the personal history of that in my late 20s, which I think one does often in the late 20s, which is to look at yourself and your relationship to your family, and try to work out who you are. So that when I came to actually writing and researching the book, I was much more interested in being an educational historian and wanting to understand what happened there in terms of the educational practices and the influence on women, and particularly middle-class women, the whole construction of ourselves as women. So I think I had a more academic interest when I came to doing it.

But of course, what you discover is that notion of love expressed as sacrifice as suffering, I didn't realise how deeply embedded that was on my psyche, and how that had been a theme running through. You can see it when you look at the iconography associated with Catholicism, you can see it when you read the literature, the stories; the stories of martyrs that we were brought up on as children.

Rachael Kohn: Well that certainly would have been part and parcel of the curriculum as children, but the school you went to in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales only lasted about 22 years. But from the outside, an objective observer might look at it and say, my goodness, what an ideal school.

Christine Trimingham Jack: Well it was meant to be an ideal school. I think that it was intended that very young children who were sent to boarding school, living in a country atmosphere, might find a more homelike environment, and you discover that this sort of ideal of a homelike environment was strong in the early years, but the long-standing educational traditions of the order really came through, because how could you have little children living with nuns who were enclosed, who were under a very strict regime where they were only allowed to speak to each other by the way of duty, that they weren't allowed to develop friendships, they weren't allowed to be physically close to the children, in fact to cuddle them, I don't see how under that kind of regime with all the good intentions of the world, that you really could provide a homelike environment for the children.

On the other hand, the country setting was lovely.

Rachael Kohn: Could you just describe it? Because you spent some time focusing on the English country garden.

Christine Trimingham Jack: Well that's right, that's exactly what it was. It was a big old house that was built for the Fairfaxes, the kind of media dynasty, and it was a large country home built in the fashion of the country homes in England, which is where people escaped to from the city. So it was a beautiful big old two-storey in a sort of neo-Gothic style with little overhanging verandahs, and bay mullioned windows, long gravel drives, sunken gardens with tulips and annuals in it, which is current at the moment, and so it looked very, very beautiful. And at first it was just that original home and then there was the chapel and the dining room was built on the side. But as it became a little larger and they ran up to 55, 60 children, they built much more institutional-type buildings, you know, rectangular blocks with regular sort of boarding/sleeping accommodation behind it. So what happened after a while is the children started to be confined to the back.

Rachael Kohn: Confinement is a theme that comes through. You've mentioned it with respect to the nuns, but how much did that extend to the children who were in this almost island of English country garden, somewhat separated from the surrounds?

Christine Trimingham Jack: Well they were very much confined because the nuns weren't allowed to leave the convent grounds, so that the only way that the children could leave the convent grounds is with their parents. Now some of those children didn't see their parents at all during the term, I think there were three terms a year at that stage, that's 12-14 weeks. And my parents came to see me about every three weeks, and I went out on the Sunday, so it's really kind of interesting, and there was also a great fear of the outside world.

I think I talk in the book about one classic story about the Chevalier boys. Of course the boys' schools, they did go out because the priests and the teachers in those schools weren't confined to the convent grounds, so some of the Chevalier boys used to go across the land of Kerever Park on Saturdays and swim in the river, but unfortunately, two of them drowned there and we were told this story, so we became very concerned, I remember this story being quite pivotal, and it was in the memories of some of the people I interviewed, that yes, males had their freedom, but it came at a cost. And so perhaps it was better to be a girl and to be safe, and confined in our very small world.

Rachael Kohn: Well that world was referred to as a moulding haven, the term the school used to describe its function, which in the 1950s would reflect the values of that era, such as moulding young ladies to learn to sew and to darn socks, and that sort of thing. But what were the Christian values of the order of the Sacred Heart that were imparted to the students?

Christine Trimingham Jack: I think it's very in keeping with the vows of the nuns themselves. For example the nuns took a vow of poverty, so that while in many ways it was quite a lovely environment and our parents paid good money of course for us to go there, we led a very simple life, we weren't allowed to have fancy pencil cases or toys or things like that. We were allowed to have one doll, and that was the only toy that we had. And so we learnt a rather austere life.

We learnt to sacrifice, to think about poorer children overseas, so we were encouraged not to, if we got a prize, the best thing we could do would be to donate it to somebody else. So poverty was important. Chastity of course was very important, another vow that the nuns took. Our bodies were not something to take pleasure in but to be embarrassed about to some degree. So we learnt to dress underneath our dressing gowns, and never to expose our bodies, or really to talk about them at all. Love for God was a premium of course in the religious order, so that prayer was very important.

Being an enclosed order they spent about five hours a day in prayer, so we were encouraged to pray a lot. We went to mass virtually daily, we had the sacraments, we had a lot of prayer time, we were encouraged to visit the chapel, and of course obedience. That was one of the key vows that the nuns took, so we were taught that as well, that obedience was really important.

But of course the religious society of the Sacred Heart were also committed to education and they were founded in the period after the French Revolution to restore education to the elite France, a Christian education, so we learnt to value education enormously. And it's interesting, I think that many of the students from there have been involved in education in many ways in their adult life.

Rachael Kohn: Well you yourself have taken up the headship of primary education at the University of Canberra. But how about the people you interviewed, that were the basis of this book? How did they react to that rather tall order of obedience and sacrifice and these very noble Christian values, not to mention the ideal of the hardworking, frugal and simple mother of noble families?

Christine Trimingham Jack: Well I think it's still there in many of the women that I interviewed. For example, one woman said she's learnt to put off little pleasures, so for example, when she gets mail, she'll still as an adult, say to herself, 'I won't open that now, I'll open that later.' So putting off pleasure, which was part of it.

A number of people are teachers. One of the students that I interviewed who had a very difficult time there, and was very rebellious, she actually opened an alternate school in her adulthood. Another one is a teacher in a mainstream, a small Catholic school, she calls it not one of the elite schools, but she said she really values her education there because she can go and hobnob with more elite schools when she needs to with her students. So I think that education really became important, and I think also that that notion of hardworking, I could see it in each of the women that I interviewed, that working hard was very, very important for them in their adult life.

Rachael Kohn: So do you think that system of education worked for you and your peers?

Christine Trimingham Jack: I think we learnt to value education. I think it was a very gendered education which most of us really question now, because I think we believed that we were going to be educated really to be wives and mothers, and we weren't really meant to use it to earn a living. It taught us to be very much individuals, to work as individuals, because in a boarding school, in order to survive you don't have parents to turn to, you can't turn to the religious because they kept a distance, so you turned to each other as friends, but it was very difficult to learn how to be inter-dependent. You learnt to struggle alone on your own, to suppress your feelings. I don't think that's a good education.

Rachael Kohn: In fact I was struck by when you returned to the school how Mother McGee apologised to you for the way she treated you as a student. Now that was interesting, because you both got a chance to redress the past, or at least to face it.

Christine Trimingham Jack: Yes, we did, and that really I think was the beginning of quite a significant change in my life, because I had been difficult at school. I think I'd wanted to be good but didn't really know how to be. I was a questioning person, I had quite a good mind, so that it wasn't easy for me to be good and conforming. And so when she said that to me, I remember thinking, 'Perhaps it wasn't me, perhaps it was them', and that was the beginning of quite a significant turnaround in my kind of consciousness, and I think really began a very long process of recovering my childhood, and beginning to understand what it had been about, and how it had impacted on me, of growing up in that kind of environment.

Rachael Kohn: Of course that kind of environment came to a crashing halt around the late '60s when Vatican II and its recommendations changed education as well as the Federal government supporting Catholic schools; that would have changed the curriculum, the whole thing.

Christine Trimingham Jack: It did indeed. I think three things really happened. I think with Vatican II and the religious being encouraged to question more, I think a number of them realised that this was not a good way to educate children, and that they were much better at home with their families, and I think they probably spoke up and said, felt free enough to say that in the environment.

I think also with the change of the curriculum, the school would have needed to dramatically upgrade its, well it didn't have a Science Block, it didn't exist, we really weren't taught science, so it would have had to upgrade its facilities. But also I think that with Vatican II and the religious being much more open in their lives, I think they wanted to do other things, and so it closed.

Rachael Kohn: Christine, we're seeing a run of publications now about people who've been in Catholic schools or seminaries, looking back with anger at their experiences. How is one to judge these memoirs, given that people usually remember the hurtful, the contentious, the unresolved aspects of their past?

Christine Trimingham Jack: I don't think doing that in a book is really a helpful thing to do. I did that in my 20s, but I think that's just part of growing up too. I'm happy that I didn't feel any need to express anger, I didn't feel any anger, I had when I was young, but I didn't when I wrote this book. And in fact when I'd worked through my personal anger in my 20s, I was then able to really mine what was there, and the beauty of the garden and the sense of God that was there, I was able to take on in my own life. So there was a whole healing process that had occurred before, and I think it's good if you can come to the book well after that period. At least I'm speaking for myself.

Rachael Kohn: And undoubtedly for many other women who with the benefit of distance, now reflect on their primary education. Christine Trimingham Jack's book is called Growing Good Catholic Girls.

The Ark returns again next Wednesday at 2.15.

Guests

Christine Trimingham Jack
was born in Sydney and educated at various schools run by the Religious Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, including Kerever Park. She has taught at a number of Catholic schools and is now Head of Primary Education at the University of Canberra.

Publications

Title: Growing Good Catholic Girls: Education and Convent Life in Australia
Author : Christine Trimingham Jack
Publisher: Melbourne University Press, 2003