AUSTRALIAN WILDS

Evening Star, Issue 20167, 6 May 1929, Page 2

AUSTRALIAN WILDS

MONASTERIES OF THE KOR'-WEST OLD SLLA.NJSH OH DLL. Standing in isolation at different points throughout .Nor’-west Australia the various mission stations which have been mentioned in connection with 11 to search tor the Southern Cross provide an interesting and little-known sidelight in the history of Australia. The missions belong to the New Nonea .Monastery.

There are lour Spanish monks there, out in the wilderness, where some rock pictures by the natives seem to indicate a visit made by Europeans in either the sixteen tit c seventeenth centuries. The fathers at the mission have many reproductions ol’ these pictures, showing a man wearing sabots and trousers, and crosses carved in the rocks have been discovered. The lathers keep a large llock ol goats as their main support.

' The Norica is one of the most pictuiesque religious establishments in the Commonwealth. .It was established more than eighty years ago in West Australia on the Moore liner. It is a quaint and interesting place about eighty miles from Perth. Karly in LS-10 two Spanish monks ol the, Benedictine order, Dora Salvaclo ami Dom Surra, who had been in a monastery in Italy (having been forced to leave Spain ou the suppression ol the religious houses), were accepted by Bishop Brady, of West Australia, lo work m the diocese of Perth. In the lollowing year they established a monastery at Now Norica as the centre ol a mission to the aborigines. An aboriginal colony grew up round the monastery, where tiie unlives were trained in farming, handicrafts. and even telegraphy. In 1567 Pope Pius IX. made the monastery an abbey, with Dom Salvado as abbot and bishop—he was the only mitred abbot in Australia. He visited Home in 1599 and secured as his successor Horn Fnlgentius Torres, and arranged the affiliation of the abbey to the Spanish Benedictine province. Dom Salvado died in Home in the following year. Dom Torres was elected abbot in 1902. and died in 1914. The present abbot of New Norica is Dom Anslem Catalan.

At first the mission comprised 20 acres only, but it now has 25,000 acres, (5,000 being under cultivation. The abbey, with fifty monks, has within its spiritual jurisdiction sixteen square miles of territory. It controls 10 churches, 19 religious and 2 secular priests, monastic students, and 2d nuns. The territory Us a Homan Catholic population ol' 2,000.