Sisters make a change
A GROUP of dedicated women have roamed the highways and byways of Australia for more than 75 years, providing support and counselling to those in some of our most remote communities as members of the Missionary Sisters of Service.
While time has made it more difficult to travel for the Sisters, the spirit of the group lives on to this day.
Among the 26 Missionary Sisters of Service who remain, seven live in Toowoomba, where their charitable works continue to this day in the form of Highways and Byways — a Community of Service, a charitable group determined to continue helping those in need in our regional areas.
Mary Cleary is one of those Sisters living in Toowoomba, who, nearing 80, still works to support people and projects in remote communities, reflecting the spirit of the original Order begun by Father John Wallis in 1944.
For decades Mary and her colleagues visited socially and geographically isolated communities from Tasmania’s Bruny Island, where the movement began, to Western NSW and Queensland, establishing in Toowoomba in 1964, and later in South Australia.
Originally from Warwick, Mary was 22 and working in Brisbane when in 1962 she met some of the original members of the Order, saw the work they were doing, and realised that was where she belonged.
“I think it was also very attractive because they got to drive cars,” Mary said with a laugh.
“Ours was a roving mission … we would go to these very isolated communities and gather the children to teach them about Jesus.
“I saw everything from Toowoomba to Birdsville (16 hours west on today’s roads).”
Staying with local families, on outback stations, in caravans or halls, the Sisters would go out in pairs or alone to visit as many residents as possible in an area, including Aboriginal communities, before moving on.
“Often people had no one they could share with outside the family because the neighbours were 60 miles away,” Mary said.
From 1999 until her retirement to Toowoomba in 2011, Mary was pastoral leader of the Jandowae Parish, 48km north of Dalby, and was referred to as “a friend to all” regardless of religion.
The Order only ever numbered about 50 at its height, and while age means members are no longer able to physically get out to bush families in need themselves, they have adapted to keep Fr John Wallis’s work alive.
The Fr John Wallis Foundation and Highways and Byways – A Community of Service was developed in 2010, and has since provided grants totalling about $330,000 to fund 173 projects involving more than 800 communities.
As part of the Order’s fundraising, they run a biennial Fr John Wallis lecture in Toowoomba.
It is a mark of their emphasis on God and good deeds over denomination that the Sisters this year invited Lindy Chamberlain to speak at the lecture on March 8, 40 years on from having lost daughter Azaria to a dingo at Uluru.
At the lecture, Bishop Bill Morris will launch Sr Bernadette Wallis’s book of her uncle Fr John Wallis’s letters, Dear Mother, Dear Father, with commentary by eminent Australians.
From his early days in the seminary until after ordination (1927–1949) the letters were kept by his mother and only discovered by his brother in an old biscuit tin decades later.
“It’s fascinating having known the older man to read these early letters … he never lost his passion and enthusiasm,” Mary said.