Convent Welcomes End Of “Black” Era

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32038, 12 July 1969, Page 5

Convent Welcomes End Of “Black” Era

(Specially written for "The

Press” by

FRANK SNOW)

“Thank God they’ve gone,” said this certain Hokitika resident a nun. Her words cut clean across the not inconsiderable lamentations, largely aesthetically based, voiced in some quarters over the demise of steam trains on the West Coast, their | last foothold in the Dominion. I The resident. Christchurch-j born sister in charge of the Convent of Mercy, Hokitika, spoke very incisively and very conclusively. She was speaking, not in depreciation of so many people’s sentimental values, but in realistic terms of the convent’s people having now no longer to endure and combat the dirty habits of steam locomotives.

For the 91-year-old convent, with its present-day spread of St Mary’s co-educational primary and secondary school buildings and its own chapel, is sited beside the Hokitika railway station and shunting yards. Hokitika, with its steady output of i timber, cattle and other farm produce. has a heavy goods-train traffic, and therefore a busy everyday shunting programme.

And the near-by convent establishment, with its quite vast surface of exterior walls and scores of windows, just happened to be literally in “the very thick” of all the grime and smut and polluted air which inevitably accompanied these activities.

Constant Hosing For many long-suffering years had the good sisters, with the supreme patience of their calling, to endure the general discomforts. Only by regularly hosing down its frontal aspect could they (never more than a comparative handful) keep the place always looking spic and span. As for the 300-feet-long, mostly two-storey back walls combining the convent itself and the secondary school, hosing was out of the question. Its length runs too close (within a few feet) of the rail tracks. But its 45 windows, “sitting targets” for the old steam - locomotives’ grimy wake, were ever a call on the sisters’ keep-clean chores. Topping it all, was the question of money—the extra cost over the years of an essentially above-normal programme for maintenance painting. Said the sister. Sister Cornelia: “One could almost say that a ‘black’ era for the convent has ended. But this must not be taken as casting any aspersion on railway staff. Indeed, they've always been most considerate —even to the point of, on a few occasions—as, say, when some visitor was delivering an important address to an assembly of pupils—deliberately trying to keep shunting activities as far as possible

away from the convent’s immediate neighourhood. “Perhaps the one factor delighting us is that we regard the disappearance of steam-traiqs as most opportune since in a few short years the convent will be celebrating its centenary." The Convent of Mercy’s place in Hokitika’s colourful history goes back just on 15 years earlier than that of the railway, dates of their respective establishments being October 15, 1878 and May 24, 1893. The town itself was founded in 1864.

This month (July 23) marks the 91st anniversary of the departure from Cork seaport, Ireland, of the small party of Sisters of Mercy who founded the Hokitika convent, which was not only the pioneer convent on the West Coast, but the order’s first house in the South Island. The order’s only other convent in New Zealand at the time had been established 18 years earlier in Auckland. The 10-member party of Irish sisters, eight professed nuns and two teenage postulants, belonged to St Xavier’s Convent of Mercy at Ennis, County Clare. They were Mother M. Clare (Superior), and Sisters Claver, Gabriel, Aloysius. Mechtildes, Cecelia, Angela and Juliana (who died shortly after arrival), while the two young postulants were later to become Sisters M. Patrick and M. Columba. Their passage to Hokitika entailed no fewer than four transhippings—at Plymouth, Melbourne and Wellington, and off-shore at Hokitika from the Tararua to a land-ing-tender (Waipara). Unfavourable river-bar

conditions kept the Tararua in the Hokitika roadstead for the best part of 13 hours. It was midnight on that 1878 October day before the tender could go out and bring the missionary party ashore, 12 weeks out from Ireland. Topically enough, the Irish sisters first Hokitika domicile, a historically known house named “Mulligan’s Cottage” in Stafford Street, is currently in . the process of demolition. Three months after their arrival the sisters moved to premises on the convent’s present site fronting Sewell Street. The convent was originally named St Columbkillie’s, but has long since become known as the Convent of Mercy, while its school establishment is known as St Mary’s, the name of the parish. The pioneer sisters were soon spreading their wings. In 1881, they established Greymouth’s Convent. Eight years later, they had branch convents at Ross and Kumara, both since closed. Soon after its West Coast spread, the order established its first convent in Canterbury at Lyttelton. St Mary’s High School, Hokitika, was the first Catholic secondary school in New Zealand to adopt co-educa-tion. Today it. has 120 pupils, while St Mary’s primary has a roll of 135. The Convent has a staff of 17 sisters. Attached to it is a girl’s boarding school which at present has in residence 32 girls whose homes are scattered about the West Coast from Westport (about 100 miles north) to Haast (more than 190 miles south). One girl, Dianne Phillips, has I

her home in Christchurch (“over the Hill,” in local parlance). I chatted with a boardingpupil, Margaret Eggeling, aged 16, of Haast, now in her fourth year as a boarder and set on becoming a nurse; and with Patricia Warren, aged 15, from Westport, and bent on being a primary schoolteacher. Both agreed that life at the Convent was “home away from home.” Sister Cornelia told me: “By city standards our boarding school is quite small. This in itself is something of a blessing, as the girls can live together more as a family. Being right in the town proper we can extend quite a I few little privileges to them,

and this helps to make the whole atmosphere of our house more that of homeliness than of strict discipline.” Currently, the whole St Mary’s pupil-population has a certain fellow-pupil “idol” in 14-year-old Steven Wright, of Harihari, who boards in the town. He made front-page local news recently when, at football practice on the school’s sports ground, which, like the convent, flanks the railway, he booted a high punt just as a goods-train was passing. The ball landed in an occupied cattle-truck. The school’s sportsmaster, Dr A. Daly, promptly leapt in his car and gave chase after the train, overtaking it at Arahura, six miles away.