Mr KATTER (7:57 PM) —On indulgence: Patrick O’Sullivan, the head of the Jesuits for Australasia and whose father, Sir Neil O’Sullivan, was the leader of the Senate, addressed a large conference in Brisbane and said that Mount Carmel school was successfully getting the Christian message and achieving what we want to achieve in Catholic education in Australia. In discussing this recently with Tony Chappell, a long-serving Christian brother, I said that St Vincent de Paul at the University of Queensland was run by a Mount Carmel boy, the YCW was run by a Mount Carmel boy and the Newman Society was run by a Mount Carmel boy and his girlfriend, who later became his wife. I said that all of the organisations at this huge university were run by people from that small Mount Carmel school. Tony Chappell said, ‘They were not from Mount Carmel; they were from Cloncurry, and it was Sister Thomas.’ I thought about it afterwards and he was right. I have diligently watched the television coverage of Mary MacKillop’s canonisation and all I found out was that she had a lot of fights with bishops. I was deeply disappointed because I did not think it got any sort of message across at all. I watched three separate programs I was that interested in finding out about her.

I have never had any doubt in my mind since I first heard of Mary MacKillop 40 or 50 years ago that Sister Thomas was Mother Mary MacKillop revisited, and she is the lady I am talking about here. I tried to put my finger on her characteristics. I tried to remember what I could of Sister Thomas. I can remember my mother saying: ‘Oh, isn’t it wonderful that Sister Thomas is coming to Cloncurry. She’s a very famous lady. She’s a very famous educator.’ One of the things I remember is that if you went to mass every morning during Lent you got a holy card with lace edged on it, and I can tell you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that some of the roughest kids got that holy card because she had inculcated in them this great Christian faith, this great belief. She also told us that, if we were not able to get up early in the morning because it was too cold, we were sooks and that we should be wrapped in cotton wool. Cloncurry boys do not like to be told that they are sooks, which also helped us to get out of bed to go to mass during Lent.

She told us in very great detail about the miracles of many of the saints. She told us in such a way that you would never doubt for one moment that those miracles had taken place. She told us that God could do anything, that you could pray and God could do anything. She was a good example of God doing anything. She was the hand of God, looking back on it. Bobby Glass, who was just below me at the Cloncurry Convent School, topped the state in the scholarship exam, which was in the eighth grade. In those days in Queensland you had to pass the scholarship exam or you were not allowed to go on to secondary school. If you got a good pass you got a government scholarship which helped you to go away to boarding school, because we did not have any local high school in Cloncurry.

In all her years of teaching this remarkable lady had never had a single student fail scholarship. The failure rates were about 30 or 40 per cent, and we were kids from very rough backgrounds in Cloncurry. I think it was there that I learned to fight very young because I was the only kid sent to school wearing shoes. It was a fast way to learn how to fight. As to her characteristics, yes, she was very liberal with the cane, and I was most certainly on the receiving end of it on many occasions.

Honourable members interjecting—

Mr KATTER —Yes, I was waiting for you to say that it did not work. She forced all of us in the eighth grade to stay back studying until five o’clock in the afternoon. She stayed there with us, supervising. She had thousands of cards and she had very elementary ways of teaching mathematics. Even the greatest numbskull could understand mathematics with the little cards that she had been handing out for, I suppose, 15 or 20 years. During the athletics and football carnivals in which we played the state school, which was four times our size and which we would regularly beat, she would be in the sisters’ car with her rosary beads, praying throughout the football matches and athletics carnivals.

I think the thing I probably most remember was that she said in every religious speech she ever gave: ‘Now, Children, remember that he who laughs last laughs best. We’re all going to die and those that have gone to church and done the right thing in life will go to heaven.’ She also told us, which was rare in those days, ‘There are evil people in this world.’ She said: ‘There was a boy at my school in Winton and he skited after he left school that, within three years of leaving school, he had 15 notches on his gun.’ He had shot 15 Aboriginal people. She told us that there were evil people in the world.

I think this is where the Australian bit came in. I do not know of any other schools that did this. We sang God save the Queen, but she is an English person and I do not think that was very Australian, but with the St Joseph’s nuns we stood under the flag every morning of our school lives and we sang:

Every single kid who went through a St Joseph’s school was imbued with a deep love not of England but of Australia. We were brought up to be patriotic Australians.

My father said on many occasions, ‘Who are the happiest people that we know?’ We lived in Cloncurry and did not go much outside Cloncurry. I knew he was referring to the nuns, and the St Joseph’s nuns in Cloncurry were the happiest people that I knew of by a long way. Whatever they had, it made them very happy. At church on Sunday, Father Alan Sheldrick, a man very gifted with a deep Christian faith and Christian commitment—and I use the word ‘Christian’ rather than ‘Catholic’ not to denigrate in any way but to delineate to you the man he is—said: ‘After the war I used to have to go on my bike on Sunday. We had two meals that we prepared—one for our own family and one for the nuns.’ He said, ‘I used to peddle on my bike and take the meal down to the nuns on Sunday.’ He told us, ‘Many years later when I became a Catholic priest, one of the nuns told me that one week when they had received that meal it was the only hot meal and meal containing meat that they were able to purchase that week.’ They had virtually no food and they were very hungry, and she remembered how deeply she had appreciated Alan Sheldrick carrying that food to them. So these are people who actually went hungry to deliver us an education that ensured that every single one of us passed our scholarship exam and that every single one of us performed, if we had the abilities, to a point where we would all get Commonwealth scholarships and be able to go on to secondary school. Finally, I have written only a couple of poems in my life. I am not very good at writing poems but I wrote this little one, which is really about my own upbringing in Cloncurry:

and they have changed their habit from white, in those days, to brown—

That is my final tribute to the people who educated me.