Record contributor Anna Krohn asks whether we really understand Mary MacKillop …
Over the past months, the Australian media has unwittingly aired what is a deep and complex conversation about the character of Australian women. There seem to be at least three broad and conflicting “cultures” evident in the mix – each with its own ideals, landmarks and leading lights.
The first idea of “womanhood” is associated with an admittedly glamorised and toned down version of secular ideological “feminism”. This is the feminism celebrated by the political factions associated with the old Women’s Electoral Lobby and today’s Emily’s List. It is avowedly ambitious, bluntly anti-religious (though probably open to the eclectically “spiritual”) and magnetised by the taking and holding onto of bureaucratic and political power. While many of the interests of this group involve a commendable concern for the education and just employment of women and girls, there is also the acceptance that the pragmatics of female progress depends upon gender homogenisation, the sacrifice of unborn lives and the rejection of traditional notions of spousal complementarity.
The second portrayal of Australian womanhood is in some ways a reaction to the first. It very consciously lays down its political concerns and yawns at the dogged seriousness of ideological “feminism”. This post-feminist ideal aims to appropriate the powder-puffs of nostalgic femininity along with the athletic and free morals of the “mythical” Aussie bloke. Models of this type of Australian female are, well, model material. They exchange the social revolution of the feminist agenda for retail therapy.
While they may be as intelligent and dedicated as their male colleagues, they wobble along on ankle-breaking heels as they swear and toss back the booze like waterside workers. They aim for an easy going alliance with men in the workplace, but dream and dress after male desire and approval.
They are stoical about their failed and abusive relationships and take the abortions, STDs and hang-overs as the necessary evils on the pilgrimage to happiness. What they cannot imagine is that the sexy, “sun-kissed”, bikini wearing, good time girls are not a goal but the vapid fantasies of male consumerism and lust.
The third type or even stereotype of Australian women has a long and revered heritage. It is exemplified in Henry Lawson’s story of The Drover’s Wife (remember the State School Reader?) It usually involves the bush, the battler and the eminently practical. The exemplars of these women are rich in character and courage. They are the women who inhabit Dorothy MacKellar’s landscape but far from being mythical, they are as real as our favorite aunt, Country Women’s Association president or school teacher.
Perhaps the most “stupendous” star of this beloved type of womanhood is the great La Stupenda herself: Dame Joan Sutherland. It certainly feels like a member of family has gone with her recent death. Dame Joan exemplified all that was great about the traditional Australian heroine. She was marvellously but humbly talented. She was dedicated and generous. She complemented her male mentor (husband Richard Bonynge) with love and ease. She broke the glass ceiling of our cultural cringe without losing what one famous conductor called her “awful Australian accent.” She wore her genius lightly and with humour, was self-effacing and magnanimous.
There are ways in which St Mary of the Cross also captures this third type of woman too. Many reporters and public figures have evoked her as a model of the heartwarming “Aussie battler” with an ample share of grit and commonsense and no-nonsense egalitarianism. While none of this is simply wrong, we cannot simply tame Mary by regarding her as a comfortable, though virtuous, Australian souvenir.
Social activists have sensed the “something greater” of St Mary but, in so doing, attempt to mould Mary after their own aspirations: either as radical feminist or humanitarian. They might imagine that she wore the traditional trappings of religious life and “the faith of her time” (as one person dismissed it) with tolerance but no real depth.
Some accounts of her life even vet out her own accounts of her dedication to the Cross of Christ or her love of the office of priesthood or her devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus because they are simply too embarrassing.
Mary was neither an appealing mascot of Australiana nor a proto-secular humanist. She was something much more consoling and shocking, something more than a local heroine and more universal than the humanist ideal: she was a saint.
As Parramatta’s retired Bishop Kevin Manning notes, St Mary is an exemplar for everyone, especially Christians, not “because she is a great horsewoman, or a rebel against the Bishops, but because of her holiness of life …”
Her letters and her life give us many illustrations not only of heroism but of the type of love that is a sign of the beatitudes, the foundation of holiness. Despite being shambolically (and invalidly) excommunicated by the weak-minded and ill Bishop Shiels, she remembers feeling an overwhelming love for the Church and for his office.
When Mother Mary realised the imprudence of Fr Julian Tenison-Woods’ idealism when he rejected her friendship and even her correspondence, she acted not only with determination but with overwhelming mercy and forgiveness. When her vision for education afforded her Sisters defamatory and abusive rejection in the streets of Adelaide, she not only suffered but joined her suffering to the Cross of Christ.
She was far from being the self-confident and defiant secular feminist. Writes Fr Paul Gardiner, there were times when she had to step out in faith to trust God’s providence: “Mary was clearly not bounding along confidently as the competent woman of affairs. Rather, she was hesitant and lonely, and it was only the conviction that God required it of her that gave her the courage to keep going in the most unpromising situations.”
Like all saints, it is what God achieves that interests her, not her own checklist of qualities and achievements.
This is her true genius and the light that she throws on our search for womanhood and Australian character today. It is what appears paradoxical that is what she offers us.
The great GK Chesterton made the same point in his biography of St Thomas Aquinas about the character of saints:
“[The Saint] will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age.
“Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he (or she) is not what the people want, but rather what the people need …
“Therefore, it is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.”