Sharing life with the people - Edward Campion

Sister Peg Flynn

Two smiling nuns in full traditional habits walk under umbrellas through the rain on the cover of Mary Ryllis Clark’s acclaimed recent history of their order, Loreto in Australia.  Inside, the book gives their names and tells you that they were on holidays at the beach, in 1968.  The nun on the left is Sister Peg Flynn, who is pictured later in the book with the Loreto community at Claremont, WA, in the mid-1970s.  In this picture Sister Peg looks different because she was no longer wearing an identifiable habit.  By then, her life was changing.

The daughter of a doctor, Peg had been a boarder at Claremont school and then entered the Loreto order.  She became a primary school teacher, serving in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney before returning to Claremont as principal of the junior school.  She was an innovative, talented principal but increasingly she longed for more direct engagement with the problems facing Australian society.  She wanted to learn more about Aborigines.

Here she was responding to the special charism of the founder of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (IBVM—the Loreto sisters), Mary Ward.  As her Australian biographer Jennifer Cameron has shown, in the 17th century Mary Ward envisaged a new type of nun, one that stepped away from older models of religious life to work for God closer to the everyday lives of ordinary people.  So Peg Flynn felt drawn to the Nyungars of the south-east of Western Australia.  With full support of her IBVM superiors, she went to live in Gnowangerup, 350 kms from Perth.

Early on, she had glimpsed what she might be in for when she attended a meeting in the Swan valley with her chum, Sister Veronica Brady, the literary critic.  At issue was the recent arrival of Nyungar residents in town. British migrants thought the Aboriginal presence would depress property values.  They were very angry, hooting Veronica Brady down when she attempted to speak and bad-mouthing the Nyungars as ‘dirty, noisy’ folk given to ‘wild parties’.  The air was toxic with their anger.

In Gnowangerup, Peg found a friend in the local community nurse, Ruth Hicks, with whom she stayed.  This gave her a swift introduction to Aboriginal health problems.  Then her brother Mick, a farmer, bought her a house of her own where people could visit her.  (Mick was a sort of guardian angel in those Gnowangerup years.)  Life in a religious community had not taught her to cook so her meals were somewhat basic, often consisting of bread and cheese and an apple.  Later, for health reasons, she would stick to raw vegetables and fruit.

She found that there were some Aborigines in town but most Nyungars lived on a reserve out of town, where they had been placed by the state.  A contemporary government report ranked reserve houses as ‘lowest on the scale of desirable dwellings’—no water laid on, with communal toilets, showers and laundries.  Cats and dogs were everywhere and wet weather turned the reserve into mud that was tracked through the houses.  ‘A sad picture’, she wrote in her diary, ‘women saving and slaving;  men rotting away.’

Peg collected stuff in Perth—blankets, clothes, beds, washing machines—and held cut-price sales, knowing that Nyungars didn’t want to be given things, they wanted to own them.  Yet Aboriginal ‘sharing’ culture meant that often her cupboards were raided or her money borrowed.  She learned to accept poverty the hard way.  And she worked to persuade the government to move everyone off the reserve into town, with notable success.

She found plenty to do with the children.  As a teacher, she prized literacy and so she was soon teaching them reading and writing one-on-one with the cooperation of the local school principal.  She made friends easily with these Nyungar children, who treated her as an elder sister.  On bush walks with them she admired their knowledge of wildflowers and she praised their innate creativity.

For their part, Nyungars were awed by her religious dimension.  They observed her sitting in the church, so still that they thought she might be dumb.  When they asked her about prayer, she told them to listen to Jesus:  ‘It won’t be a voice … perhaps an idea or thought.’  She fed her spiritual life with scripture tapes, retreat notes and Madonna given to her by brother Mick.  ‘I often just sit and say nothing’, she said, ‘but God knows and he’s with me.’

Peg Flynn’s story was not a lengthy one—she died of cancer early in 1982.  More recently, however, Mary Ward has inspired other Loreto sisters to venture into similar innovative ways of serving God.  The charism continues.