Mary MacKillop’s brother one of earliest missionaries

17 Feb 2010

By Dr Marco Ceccarelli

fr-mackillop.jpg
The first missionaries to Daly River were a group of 17 Jesuits, one of them the brother of Blessed Mary MacKillop (pictured above with students from Daly River). For 17 years they worked to evangelise and improve the lives of Aborigines. Forced to leave in 1899, their legacy was picked up and continued by Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in 1906.

Parish priest Fr Tom English’s work in the Daly River region continues a legacy of missionary enterprise about which history has been strangely silent; one hopes that the impending canonisation of Blessed Mary MacKillop will revive some historical research in this field.
Although most of a group of 19 Jesuit priests and brothers who arrived in the Northern Territory in 1882 to engage in missionary work over the next 17 years were Austro-Hungarian, one was an Australian – Fr Donald MacKillop SJ, the brother of Blessed Mary MacKillop.
In the Daly River region, he worked with the Aboriginal people and joined the Jesuits’ effort to preserve the local tribes and their languages. Before introducing Christianity into their lives, Fr MacKillop and the Jesuit missionaries concentrated on the development of indigenous society through agriculture, education of children and medical care.
The Jesuits vigorously pushed ahead with their work for almost two decades, focusing on schooling and the use of local language and music as a means of communication, yet their achievements never reached the stage of development obtained in the Paraguay missions of the 17th and 18th centuries and they were eventually forced to withdraw in 1899.
A number of factors led to the closing of the missions, including precarious economic conditions, excessive poverty, poor diet, disease and battles against crop-destroying floods.
The evangelising, agricultural and educational efforts of the Jesuits were remembered when Fr Tom dedicated the newly built shrine at Wooliana to the Jesuit missions. Although the Jesuits left, their work was not for nothing. In 1906, another missionary Order, the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, took over in Darwin.
In 1955, Bishop JP O’Loughlin MSC of Darwin established a school and clinic under the ministry of the Sisters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Daly River and appointed Fr John Leary MSC as resident priest. The building of the St Francis Xavier Church was completed in 1961 and opened by Bishop O’Loughlin the same year.
Due to the faith of men such as those first Jesuits and those who have come after them, the Church in Daly River is still present today and its aims are in many ways very similar to those of a century ago: offering educational, spiritual and moral values to the inhabitants of this enchanting and unspoiled Northern Territory region.