briefly as a backpackers’ hostel for itinerant cherry-pickers. They thought for a time they’d sold it and broke out the Guinness but the cheque bounced. Mercy Sisters, six of whom sailed from Ireland in 1859 to take up initial residence in the stables of the Goulburn presbytery, ran St Michael’s Novitiate House until the year 2000. Built around a granite homestead dating from 1873, the complex today comprises three two-storey buildings holding a great many Spartan bedrooms (‘cells’) and some dormitories, all alas with shared facilities, a number of small caretaker-style cottages and stable-style outbuildings, generally weatherboard, a courtyard and a tennis court. The old milking shed with extensive acreage running down to a picturesque bend in the Wollondilly River, think Abbotsford Convent in Collingwood on a similar bend in the similar Yarra; memories of Clonmacnoise on the Shannon? Hardly: nuns had to live outside the wall there, was sold by the Church in 2000. No shortage of takers and today consists in a housing estate with a dedicated riparian park and a view of the Police Academy, where freshly-minted rozzers throw their caps in the air. The five remaining Goulburn Mercies live in a clutch of villa home units two blocks down Grafton Street from the Black Joeys’ Convent. They wear mufti. Not so much as a rosary, not so much as a badge to be seen, just the usual short, unveiled blueish hair and twin set. From 2000 to 2011 St Michael’s Convent, subject to heritage order, limped along in the usual style as the furthest thing from a luxury resort, conference centre cum retreat house in a city where the best restaurant in town remains the Thai in the Bowlo, till after ten years on the market, having been passed in at auction on numerous occasions, it sold in 2014 to the Antiochian Orthodox Church.
To my north across a lawn beam cemetery I see a water tank amid eucalypts and against the wire fencing, fluttering in the wind, scattering in the sleet, plastic floral tributes of mauve, yellow and blue that have blown away from their companion toy windmills. To my east I see on a hill our famous memorial lighthouse, of which we may boast there has never been a ship wrecked within purview of its rotating beam, while in the foreground is the Police Academy, indifferent in style as the rozzers it produces. To my west are the rolling hills of Middle Arm and the road to Roslyn, but to my south, beyond the electricity substation, over a myriad frames and trusses amid the bare, recently bulldozed earth of Merino Country Estate, with its blue portaloos and opalescent utes of the chippies and Colorbond roofing promptly affixed as soon as the frame and trusses are up, a few untidy conifers spring from a hillock like a gyre of hair on a wart and look down on the remnant of what in my youth was a fifty-acre garden, featuring vineyard and orchard, with a view I imagine pretty well unobstructed a century ago across the river to St Michael’s Convent. It was in that terraced garden between 1955 and 1974, in which year they were transferred to the grounds of St Michael’s Convent, stood the fourteen white Carrara marble Stations of the Cross, clinging to the Ninth of which I first saw Reverend Rocky Buzzacott. And behind the tatty conifers, Ravenswood, a hilltop mansion purchased in 1896 for the Black Monks, the Congregation of Discalced Clerks of the Most Holy Cross and Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, a building which for eighty-four years and two-hundred-and-eighty-one professions served as the Australasian Presentation Retreat. The purpose of the Marys Mount Presentation Retreat / Novitiate House was ‘to train priests by constant exercises of the spiritual life that they may be able to impart the light of truth, faith and hope to lost souls.’ A worthy intent if mocked and vitiated in these dark days, as adduced by Father Superior John of the Adelaide Passionists, who presents himself on the Monastery website (not as, say Brother Stan hails from Port Lincoln, has been stationed in Marrickville, St Ives, St Kilda, many years PNG) but rather ‘Good old Collingwood forever / We know how to play the game / Side by side we stick together / To uphold the Magpie name / Hear the barrackers a-shouting / As all barrackers should / Oh the premiership’s a cakewalk / For good old Collingwood’; and while it is true that in the nineteen-fifties religious vocation abounded on the NSW Southern Tableland, to the point it attained a level not seen since pre-Reformation Europe, and it wasn’t only Celts, bearing in mind that at the time of the Tudor Spoiling of the Monasteries by Thomas Cromwell, de facto founder of the Anglican Church, fully one Englishman in five was a celibate in holy orders, it shortly thereafter disappeared as quickly as a felon espying an empty wheelie bin by the main gate. For from 1969, or about the time the newly-developed contraceptive pill began widely to be prescribed by the medical profession to unmarried girls, until the building was sold by the Church in 1974, what had optimistically expanded to become a heritage-listed, forty-bedroom monastery housed four tenants, the platinum-blond Father Simon of Cyrene Reverend Rocky Buzzacott, his father superior, a novice master and a single novice who subsequently dropped out as most, unhappily, did.
I mean, would you be wearing sandals today? Try two a.m. on bare boards and lino.
I am happy to report that Ravenswood is now back on the market under instruction of the receivers as twenty-five very affordable strata home units, some with views, not to be sold in one line but fully compliant, Alhamdulillah, with existing fire regulations. The land on the slopes below was sold decades back to developers so that the monastery belltower, empty of bells, is now surrounded, as prophesied, with housing estates. Presciently, the last Father Superior, Gerard Mahoney CP, Congregatio Passionis, had the remains of twenty-two Passionist fathers and brothers exhumed from the monastery graveyard, under supervision of local police and health department officers, and reinterred in Rookwood. ‘They would not wish their graves to remain in the middle of a housing settlement,’ he said at the time.
Oh come on Gerry it could be worse! They could be in the shadow of a crematorium. And what could be more cheerful to the long-celibate soul than the peal of a child’s voice? Within earshot of the graveyard, now bulldozed beneath the AV Jennings Ravensworth Heights Estate, we have not one but two childcare centres disturbing, with their lurid billboards, an otherwise unbroken expanse of pristine private dwellings; Kids Choice Childcare Centre at the bottom of Ben Street and Starshine Childcare Centre on the Marys Mount Road end of Barry Crescent off Monastery Drive.
Want more pay to spend all day confined to an enclosure
Wiping bots of tiny tots made ill through their exposure
To mortgages worth half a mill a single wage could ne’er fulfil
Whose mothers say ‘Enjoy your day we can’t afford to knows ya’?
Wipe a riper bot my friend
I have a butt I’d recommend
Leave it at that
And it’s not just Marys Mount, but every hill around Goulburn is graced with a dilapidated mansion. They squat like flies preening their forelegs on cowpats. West of the northbound golden arches on the road to Grabby, past what was St Patrick’s College, we have Bishopthorpe, a tribute in bluestone gabled bays to the medieval English bishop’s palace, in recent years a luxury hotel that cost a motza to refit and left local tradies thousands out of pocket when it couldn’t pay its way; I mean, would you want a five-star holiday in Goulburn even with complimentary ghost tour? Now distinguished by a wholly superfluous ‘Keep Out’ sign at the entrance to the drive. Built as a residence for Mesac Thomas, first Anglican bishop of Goulburn, it housed briefly an Anglican order of monks. Between 1921 and 1941 the Anglican Community of the Ascension and the Roman Catholic Congregation of Discalced Clerks of the Most Holy Cross and Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, the last in their black woollen habits the first Roman cenobites to be sighted, post-Reformation, on the streets of London, this around 1840, could eye each other’s monasteries over the Chinamans Flat. Ascensionists, however, could scarce compete with the tubular bells of the Passionists, a full octave originally housed in the Sydney GPO but disposed of as insufficiently plangent for the din of Martin Place, so that Bishopthorpe the monastery, effectively deserted at the outbreak of World War Two, was dissolved in 1943. I don’t think it ever had many tenants but a father and a brother from the community were exhumed from the Bishopthorpe graveyard in 1996 and reinterred east of the tower in the south-eastern wall of St Saviour’s Anglican Cathedral.
Gabled bays bring to my mind Munster’s Mt Melleray Abbey, which fairly bristles in them, like a sink
