The unlearning of Clare

pathways, NOVEMBER 2007

 

 

 

Although born in Ireland and educated there by the Sisters of Mercy, she came to Australia to join the Sisters of St Joseph.

 

She had been in Australia six years before she met an Aboriginal person for the first time.

 

"She was living in appalling poverty in rural NSW.  I was startled, as I had been educated to believe that Australia was the land of a fair go for all."

 

Then, she voted in the 1967 referendum.  At the time a permanent resident but not yet an Australian citizen, " ... here I was a young 23 year old nun and an Irish citizen, making decisions about people who had lived in this land for thousands of years.  That appalled me.  From that day on I aligned myself with the Indigenous cause and volunteered to go to the Kimberley."

 

Sr Clare's life in the Kimberley began in 1976 at St Joseph's School, Kununurra "...under the watchful eye of a wonderful Aboriginal teaching assistant called Marjorie Ward.

 

"She began the re-education of Sr Clare into the mysteries of Indigenous education, the kinship system, the country, the four languages in the classroom and the ways of the children.

 

"However, enlightenment only came when I travelled for two weeks on the back of a truck with a group of Aboriginal adults and their children.  We travelled from Kununurra, across the Tanami Desert to Alice Springs and back through Katherine to Kununurra.  We visited various Aboriginal communities along the way.

 

"In between flat tires, broken axles, camping out in the cold desert, getting lost and empty petrol tanks, I learnt much about the culture and the behavioural patterns of the children.  I also unlearnt what I had read in books and began a whole new life of discovery ..."

 

Sr Clare said that the late 70s and early 80s were times of renaissance in Kimberley communities with the reclaiming of cultural practices and the Land Rights movement.  Many Kimberley communities dreamt of a new day, a better life and schools in their communities for their children.

 

"Turkey Creek, now known as Warmun, was one of the communities asking for a school on their land and I was chosen as the first principal," she said. "Armed with the pedagogy of Paulo Freire - a pedagogy of hope involving, dialogue, respect, knowledge and working together to transform situations that needed transformation - another sister and I helped the community to establish their little Catholic school, Ngalangangpum school.

 

"We all had to learn new ways of operating: the community, that they were the policy makers and that we were not totally responsible for the school and we had to learn to consult at all levels.

 

"This was the era of the birth of the policy of self-determination for Indigenous peoples which simply put meant Aboriginal people having control in the decision-making process relating to their own communities within the legal structure common to all Australians.

 

"The new ways took time, challenge and pain and many mistakes and in between I was struggling to learn the local Kija language and avidly applying some of the knowledge from Phyllis Kaberry's 1939 book Aboriginal Woman, Sacred and Profane which was about the Kija women still living in Warmun Community."

 

Sr Clare said that the school began under a tree and progressed to a bough shed.  The Sisters lived in a small caravan and the community lived in lean-tos and shacks.

 

"The community was totally involved in the school and we were treated as members of the community.  I was called before the Community Council to account for staff behaviour that was not seen as consultative and at other times the elders requested me to translate the complicated spoken or written English of the spokespeople from the mining companies or departments into more comprehensible English.

 

"We learnt to be better teachers, to consult and negotiate, to live in a world without air-conditioning, telephones, newspapers, radios, TV, a library and to manage with an unreliable water supply and an erratic mail service.

 

"The men and women became our teachers and friends modelling for us how to live happily in a community that was under-resourced and poor but free of alcohol and drugs.  The children came to school every day and also wanted to come on weekends.

 

"We caught whatever sickness and unhealthy bugs which were travelling through the community and we learnt to queue up when the flying doctor arrived ..."

 

She said that through the school's introduction of art materials into the community and marketing the resulting artworks in Melbourne, artists were nurtured and many emerged to become recognised nationally and internationally.

 

"Without realising it we were helping to establish the Warmun School of Art and an embryonic Warmun Art Centre."

 

Sr Clare said the Warmun Community was and is a Catholic community.

 

"All the new energy alive within the community ... brought changes into the way the major liturgical festivals and feasts were celebrated.  Combined with the energy of the neighbouring Catholic communities, camping weekends celebrating Pentecost were organised, hymns were translated into the local languages and a host of singer/songwriters arose to compose the new hymns of the East Kimberley.

 

"It was all so enjoyable, learning so much in a community free of narcotics and almost alcohol free."

 

After studies in New York, Canada and Scotland, Sr Clare returned to live on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert.

 

"This was the era when Aboriginal Women's Law was being celebrated and recognised," she said.

 

"The women of Yaruman invited us to their law ceremonies and gave us the opportunity to learn some of their Indigenous beliefs.  The community was also on a search for God and we were asked to tell them about Christianity.

 

"We followed the method set out by Albert Nolen in Christianity Rediscovered which he had used with the Masai in Kenya.  We dialogued and discussed and answered the ever persistent request of the community to become Catholics.

 

"One night sitting in the caravan at Yaruman, in the light of a kerosene lamp, reading a book by liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian Roman Catholic priest, I realised that there was a missing element in the Kimberley Catholic Church.

 

"All our educational endeavours were for children and we had neglected to create a space where we could dialogue as adult to adult with Indigenous people and so Mirrilingki Spirituality Centre, a small adult education centre, was born in the East Kimberley.

 

"This little centre provided a peaceful space for the Kimberley people to attend courses they requested in their leadership roles in their Church communities, in addition to providing skills to address the rising problems within their society.

 

"The centre developed the confidence in the leaders to take the opportunities as they arrived, to complete further education in all areas of life, in addition to theology and spirituality."

 

After some years at Mirrilingki, Sr Clare when to Dublin for two years' further study.  On her return to the Kimberley in 1994, she became a founding member of the Broome Campus of the University of Notre Dame.

 

"... as a staff we were united under one dream, to establish a branch of Notre Dame University in the Kimberley, for the peoples of the Kimberley and for anyone else who wanted to study in the Kimberley.

 

"Indigenous people hoped that their children would become teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers and acquire the skills to run the enterprises in their communities.

 

"Mature aged students, Indigenous and non-Indigenous attended the university, studied together and modelled for us all what a Campus of Reconciliation could do."

 

In 2002, Sr Clare left the Kimberley to become Province Leader for the Sisters of St Joseph in Western Australia.  She was awarded the Honorary Doctorate at the Broome Campus graduation on July 27, this year.

 

 

This article was adapted from Sr Clare Ahern's occasional address at the graduation ceremony.  For the full text, please click here.