By Eric Martin
History is the recorded story of humanity and its accomplishments, the invaluable lessons of the past, passed down to us through the efforts of scholars, teachers, leaders and of course, through the dedicated and detailed work of the thousands of monks, friars, priests and bishops of the Catholic Church, who, throughout the centuries, have born witness to the many events that have shaped our modern world.
Indeed, even in Perth, or the Swan River Colony as it was originally known, Catholic clergy faithfully recorded both the exotic and the mundane experiences of life in the West, as the settlers struggled to find their way in a new land, unprepared for the exertion of life in the wild.
“Perth in 1846 was at the ends of the earth, on the very edge of civilisation, and at the New Norcia Monastery, another 140 kilometres further North, there was nothing: just endless vistas of woods and forests, undulating hills, scarce water resources, heat, flies, kangaroos, snakes and other dangerous wildlife,” historian and archivist for the New Norcia community, Peter Hocking, said in a lecture entitled Salvado’s Archives: A Unique Legacy.
Yet this was the site selected by a group of Spanish Benedictine monks, under the leadership of Bishops Rosendo Salvado and José Serra, as their new home; and for the next 50 years, under Bishop Salvado, the monks established a mission, set up a farm, educated the local indigenous population in agriculture and farming, and built a school for their children.
And the records and diaries kept by Bishop Serra, Bishop Salvado and the abbots of New Norcia during this time, provide a detailed and fascinating record of the state’s original settlement.
Salvado’s diaries, written in a miniscule hand in many tiny volumes, have been the subject of much research over the years.
“For one reason or another, every piece of paper is important because it is a witness to, or a record of, the great themes in Australian history,” Mr Hocking said.
“Australia was claimed by the British in 1788, the Swan River Colony (now the state of Western Australia) was founded 43 years later, in 1829, and the monastery only 18 years later than that, in 1847, so it can be seen that New Norcia was in existence almost from the start of the Swan River Colony and not really that long after Australia was claimed by Captain Cook.”
As a result, the great themes of West Australian history are to be found in the registers, diaries, letters and records of Bishop Salvado – themes that cover agriculture, immigration, settlement, education, religion and interaction between settlers and indigenous peoples.
“And, uniquely, importantly, this story is told from a European point of view, not from the traditional Anglo-Irish perspective,” Mr Hocking said.
Among the Registers found at the monastery are those which cover births, confirmations, marriages, deaths, and burials for New Norcia and its surrounding parishes.
“But the two areas which I consider to be the most important are the letters and the diaries. It is in these media that the real life of the mission and its interaction with the Swan River Colony can be experienced,” Mr Hocking explained.
“It is here that the hopes and fears of 19th-century Western Australia are acted out, together with all the mundane details of daily life, as well as the surprising twists of history, and the happy and the sad, and often tragic, moments.”
It is estimated that there are close to 20,000 items of correspondence in the New Norcia Archives – not all of this comes from the first 50 years of settlement, but there is a very significant body of work directly attributable to the Spanish Bishop.
“Among the correspondents are European royalty (particularly Queen Isabella II of Spain), Church and Vatican officials and the Colonial Office in London, while Western Australia correspondents included the explorer and Governor Sir John Forrest, as well as Governor Weld and well-known personalities such as Daisy Bates, who was a famous, often controversial but always eccentric Australian lady anthropologist of the late 19th century,” Mr Hocking said.
“The famous English nurse Florence Nightingale even sought advice from Bishop Salvado, so surprised and impressed was she at the extraordinary state of health to be found amongst the monks and the Aboriginal population.
Amongst the collection is also correspondence from ordinary people: shepherds, sawyers, shearers, neighbours, businessmen and workmen; with the details of their daily struggles filling in the myriad minutiae that formed the reality of life in the colony.
Additionally, there are important collections of letters, such as a 250-page body of correspondence from Canon Raffaele Martelli, the Italian priest who accompanied Bishop Salvado to WA in 1853 and who later became the parish priest at Toodyay and then Fremantle.
The French monk, Léandre Fonteinne, who, with Irishman John Gorman, accompanied Salvado on his very first expedition to the Moore River in 1846, has also contributed a large volume of correspondence to the collection, though the man’s sanity was clearly questionable near the end, after a harrowing rainy night, when he accidentally shot and killed Gorman while cleaning his gun.
There is also the European correspondence of Théophile Bérengier, the abbot of the Benedictine community in Marseille, which was discovered, along with Salvado’s letters back to Bérengier, at Ganagobie, France, in 2002.
“Indeed, the archives of New Norcia hold a uniquely valuable resource for those wishing to research the many and varied aspects of Western Australia’s admittedly short history,” Mr Hocking said.
“In fact, so all-embracing are these documents that Dr De Castro concluded a paper she wrote in 2005 by stating that: No history of Western Australia is complete if it avoids using New Norcia’s records […] and nobody wants to write a lame history of Western Australia, do they?”
From Rosendo Salvado and the Australian Aboriginal World: Salvado’s Archives a Unique Legacy, by Peter Hocking, Archivist for the New Norcia Community.
From pages 8 to 10 of Issue 22: ‘The Church in Perth’ of The Record Magazine