Mary McKillop’s link with Bondi

Bondi has an interesting connection to Australia’s first proclaimed saint, Mary McKillop.

Prior to a dinner to celebrate her canonisation held for parishioners of St Patrick’s church in Wellington Street, parish priest Father Tom Deveraux announced that in 1896 Mary McKillop had personally authorised the purchase of land for a small convent in Bondi.

The first Josephite sisters had arrived in Bondi in 1894 and opened a school in Penkivil Street. It was in a tiny two-room terrace.

Two years later, the St Joseph’s Order selected land at the corner of Bondi Road and Wellington Street using the existing house on the block to house the sisters, thus eliminating the need for them to commute from the city. On such matters as land purchases, the Order’s leader still held sway – and that was Mother Mary of the Cross, her title at that time.

The years ahead provided an unusual twist to the story. As the Bondi community grew beyond the next stage of housing both church and school in the one building, exchanges of land took place ,and in 1918 a foundation stone was laid for a new church on the very site that Mary McKillop had bought decades earlier.

This is the St Patrick’s church of today.

It is an unusual and ironic achievement for an order of sisters whose relative independence from the outset had stirred the ire of a few bishops who were accustomed to taking the lead in all ecclesiastical matters.

So St Patrick’s Church stands on land bought by an eventual saint who was a nun – a rare situation anywhere. That is a source of great pride for many locals, but none more than a group of semi-retired teachers in the Order of St Joseph who live in Bondi.

Acknowledgement to Mary McKillop by Paul Gardiner, SJ;  A History of St Patrick’s Parish, Bondi edited by Mary Prothero and to Bondi’s St Joseph’s community.