‘Simon!’ said Brenda ‘what are you doing up there?’
He laughed and it seemed to me that I could no longer exist as she ventured into duologue with him, ignoring me. He ignored me.
I never saw her more animated. Whereupon I dumped her and took up with a Sydney girl, though we did eventually marry. It was probably nothing more sinister than glamourous newsreader chats with bland weatherman under final credits, but you never forget the face of a rival, not at that age, if he’s platinum-blond.
It was surely Simon Bourke, who on profession took the name ‘Simon of Cyrene’, which is pretty much the same name, but seeing his stat dec had been conferred on him by Mercy Sisters, it may have been some kind of twisted tribute he was making them, who would know. He was a creature of the Catholic Church, our Reverend Rocky Buzzacott.
And always I see him clinging to that Ninth Station, Jesus Falls a Third Time.
Can be hard in the retard yard to scab a tab of eccy
While finding little boys to woo would take a deal of reccy
But ‘pon my soul if that’s your goal you’ve not been thinking clearly
You don’t need pill or partner should you judge yourself sincerely
Let execution then proceed
A smidge past the last-minute reprieve
Fall of the House of Paul
Mumbles died powerless, and don’t we mostly? Can you suppose Don Bradman, up the road there in Bowral, the greatest sportsman who ever lived, with batting average four standard deviations from the international mean, succeeded in putting from mind he’d scored a duck in his last innings? No one draws comfort from what he used to be.
The day after Mumbles’ funeral I returned to Kenmore Cemetery, formerly St Patrick’s Cemetery, to inspect the headstones on Craig’s Hill. The Gothic chapel, extended to incorporate smokestacks and catafalque, was once the Marulan Catholic Church. The date ‘1869’ may still be seen on the stone tympanum. In 1937 the church was moved to its present location to become the mortuary chapel for the local religious. One of the still-extant stained-glass windows was donated by the Sisters of Mercy, another by the Sisters of St Joseph, a third by the Christian Brothers, a fourth by the Sacred Heart Sodality, a fifth by the Children of Mary. They remain, as it were plucked from the bowl of eyes on a taxidermist’s bench, as the property of Sidney Craig Funerals. In 2005 the Church sold the chapel for use as a crematorium. The bones of Cork-born Bishop Barry beneath the floor were disinterred and the statue of St Patrick, widely considered a remarkable likeness, removed. Most of St Patrick’s Cemetery had already been sold to the Council but a moiety was retained by the Church, so that spilling down the slope of Craig’s Hill today you will see the remnant of an era now dead and buried as the folk beneath, for no more Sisters of Mercy depart Westport, County Mayo, and no more local graziers’ daughters put their hands up for a life of unpaid labour. Australian nun population peaked in ’66 even as traditional garb was being replaced, post-Vatican Two, initially by that laughably cut-down version, soon to be binned entirely.
I was looking for the grave of a certain Mercy Sister which, when I found it, implored me ‘Pray for Sr Mary Bridget Poidevin’, which I did. I learned she ‘died 15/7/86. R.I.P.’ which was the day after the day I began work at Goulburn Gaol. The headstones of religious don’t give you the date of birth or profession (item: not true of the Galong Redemptorists). There are more than two-hundred Mercy Sisters, Sisters of St Joseph and Sisters of St John of God buried in Kenmore Cemetery and from the late 1940’s the family name is included on the headstone: ‘Pray for Sr Mary Josepha Coen, Sr Mary Juliana Johnson, Sr Mary Aquinas Chalker’. Prior to this Mercy nuns were stripped, in death as in life, of original sin: ‘Pray for Sr M Baptist, Sr M Magdalen, Sr M Columba’. The most recent religious grave I saw was that of Sister Mary Lucina Burt, who died in 2007, the least recent that of Sister Mary Teresa, who died in 1871.There are eight-hundred-odd Mercy Sisters more or less alive in Australia today, none I imagine Celtic youngsters and many of them very old women. Madeleine Lawrence RSM, Religiosa Soror Misericordiae, died in 2012 at the age of one-hundred-and-ten, having entered St Michael’s Novitiate and Scholasticate in Kenmore Street Goulburn in 1919, an era when the Code of Canon Law specifically forbad a Church funeral being given anyone about to be cremated. Maddy died at Mt St Joseph’s, the Mercy retirement convent in Young, up the hill on Campbell Street from the now-abandoned, sadly-derelict Mercy Care Hospital, which served briefly as a backpackers’ hostel for itinerant cherry-pickers. They thought for a time they’d sold it and broke out the Guinness but the cheque bounced. Mercy Sisters, six of whom sailed from Ireland in 1859 to take up initial residence in the stables of the Goulburn presbytery, ran St Michael’s Novitiate House until the year 2000. Built around a granite homestead dating from 1873, the complex today comprises three two-storey buildings holding a great many Spartan bedrooms (‘cells’) and some dormitories, all alas with shared facilities, a number of small caretaker-style cottages and stable-style outbuildings, generally weatherboard, a courtyard and a tennis court. The old milking shed with extensive acreage running down to a picturesque bend in the Wollondilly River, think Abbotsford Convent in Collingwood on a similar bend in the similar Yarra; memories of Clonmacnoise on the Shannon? Hardly: nuns had to live outside the wall there, was sold by the Church in 2000. No shortage of takers and today consists in a housing estate with a dedicated riparian park and a view of the Police Academy, where freshly-minted rozzers throw their caps in the air. The five remaining Goulburn Mercies live in a clutch of villa home units two blocks down Grafton Street from the Black Joeys’ Convent. They wear mufti. Not so much as a rosary, not so much as a badge to be seen, just the usual short, unveiled blueish hair and twin set. From 2000 to 2011 St Michael’s Convent, subject to heritage order, limped along in the usual style as the furthest thing from a luxury resort, conference centre cum retreat house in a city where the best restaurant in town remains the Thai in the Bowlo, till after ten years on the market, having been passed in at auction on numerous occasions, it sold in 2014 to the Antiochian Orthodox Church.
To my north across a lawn beam cemetery I see a water tank amid eucalypts and against the wire fencing, fluttering in the wind, scattering in the sleet, plastic floral tributes of mauve, yellow and blue that have blown away from their companion toy windmills. To my east I see on a hill our famous memorial lighthouse, of which we may boast there has never been a ship wrecked within purview of its rotating beam, while in the foreground is the Police Academy, indifferent in style as the rozzers it produces. To my west are the rolling hills of Middle Arm and the road to Roslyn, but to my south, beyond the electricity substation, over a myriad frames and trusses amid the bare, recently bulldozed earth of Merino Country Estate, with its blue portaloos and opalescent utes of the chippies and Colorbond roofing promptly affixed as soon as the frame and trusses are up, a few untidy conifers spring from a hillock like a gyre of hair on a wart and look down on the remnant of what in my youth was a fifty-acre garden, featuring vineyard and orchard, with a view I imagine pretty well unobstructed a century ago across the river to St Michael’s Convent. It was in that terraced garden between 1955 and 1974, in which year they were transferred to the grounds of St Michael’s Convent, stood the fourteen white Carrara marble Stations of the Cross, clinging to the Ninth of which I first saw Reverend Rocky Buzzacott. And behind the tatty conifers, Ravenswood, a hilltop mansion purchased in 1896 for the Black Monks, the Congregation of Discalced Clerks of the Most Holy Cross and Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, a building which for eighty-four years and two-hundred-and-eighty-one professions served as the Australasian Presentation Retreat. The purpose of the Marys Mount Presentation Retreat / Novitiate House was ‘to train priests by constant exercises of the spiritual life that they may be able to impart the light of truth, faith and hope to lost souls.’ A worthy intent if mocked and vitiated in these dark days, as adduced by Father Superior John of the Adelaide Passionists, who presents himself on the Monastery website (not as, say Brother Stan hails from Port Lincoln, has been stationed in Marrickville, St Ives, St Kilda, many years PNG) but rather ‘Good old Collingwood forever / We know how to play the game / Side by side we stick together / To uphold the Magpie name / Hear the barrackers a-shouting / As all barrackers should / Oh the premiership’s a cakewalk / For good old Collingwood’;