AceHistoryDesk – Sister Eileen Creagh can clearly remember the day she celebrated with the residents of Coonamble as the drought broke in the late 1940s.

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Oct.08: 2023: ABC History News: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

“ It was wonderful. The joy of the Coonamble people was really palpable. You could see it in their faces,” she said.

“ Even the nuns went out to enjoy the rain on their faces.”

It was this kind of community that drew six Irish nuns to the rural NSW town, located 500 kilometres north-west of Sydney, 140 years ago.

In 1883, the Brigidine Sisters were greeted by the town’s 800 residents after a two-month journey from Ireland. 

The sisters had been chosen from 17 volunteers at an Irish convent to set up a Catholic school in Coonamble.

A return to say thank you

This week saw the return of a number of Brigidine nuns to celebrate their 140-year contribution to the community, and to thank the town for its continued support.  

Among them was Sister Clare Keady, who attended the convent boarding school in the 1940s and later went on to join the order as a Brigidine.

She says the original Brigidines will always be remembered for their courage.

“They had something of the explorer about them, I think, that kind of, ‘Let’s go into the unknown’, a sense of adventure,” Sister Clare said.

Mother Mary John Synan was the congregation’s first leader.

The local priest had vacated his modest cottage, so the six sisters had somewhere to live.

“The people were very welcoming and very generous, and brought food and things like that,” Sister Clare said.

“The nuns had to learn to live on very little and had to use every resource they had, to try and set up schools from pretty much nothing.”

Classes began with 50 primary and 10 secondary students 17 days after the nuns arrived in the town. The first boarders took residence in February the following year.

A convent was built in 1909 and accommodated 15 nuns and up to 50 boarders.

By 1924 the school was teaching classes for the leaving certificate.

Sister Eileen Creagh, who recently celebrated her 100th birthday, boarded the SS Orion from England and headed to Coonamble in 1947.

She said her most memorable achievement as a Brigidine was transforming the library into something “beautiful, interesting and educational”.

“I’m proud of that because the children really took to reading while sitting on the floor,” Sister Eileen said.

“Before school started at 8 o’clock in the morning they would come in and say, ‘Sister, can I have something about horses or about cattle?’, and I said, ‘Go for your life and see what animal you want to take out’.”

Coonamble had only been proclaimed a town in 1861, 20 years before the first nuns arrived, and the intense heat and dust in their first summer was something the sisters had not experienced in Ireland.

“I can remember on hot summer days we’d be languishing in the heat, and my mother would say, ‘Those poor nuns in their habits, go over and take them some ice creams’,” Sister Maureen Keady said.

“So I’d have to walk over in the heat, get the ice creams in a little bowl from the shop, walk across to the convent, put them on the table in the kitchen and walk home.”

Versatile teachers

The nuns taught everything from music and literature to religion, elocution, cooking and sport.

Sister Sheelah Mary Mogan was teaching in Sydney before she arrived in Coonamble in 1971. She said one of her favourite memories was taking students to sporting carnivals on the weekends.

“We’d come out of mass on Saturday morning and Sister Mildred would pack us sandwiches and a thermos, and off we’d go on the bus,” she said.

“We’d go wherever the football was. Sometimes it was basketball as well, and we used to love it.”

Life in Coonamble changed over the years, especially for the nuns. The heavy habits disappeared, and from being teachers the sisters’ ministry moved to parish work, caring for the sick and housebound. 

By 1989 just four nuns remained in the town and they lived in rented premises.

In April 1990, advertisements called for bids to demolish and remove the disused convent, which had been costly to upkeep.

The building was purchased, dismantled and relocated 600km away in the Hunter Valley at Pokolbin, where it remains today as a boutique hotel and tourist attraction.

Origins of a wider community

Coonamble had been the origin for a wider community of Brigidines as they built on their success, establishing congregations in many other areas of Australia and New Zealand. 

But for Sister Clare Riley, who taught at the school for 36 years, Coonamble was a special place for her.

“It’s my second home really,” she said.

“There were moments in my life when I might have been a bit down and someone always came along and was cheerful and helped you and seemed to fill up the gap.

“The people in Coonamble quite often lifted me up and they didn’t know they were doing it.”

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