The Legacy Years

We brushed on the bifurcation within MSC between:

The Missionaries (Leary, Burke, Dodson et al) 

The Higher-ups, (Fyfe, O’Loughlin et al) 

This extract throws some light on that dynamic …

For the Love of God: Brother Burke recalls that he had more than one confrontation with the then-Principal of St John’s, Brother Paul Brooks on the subject of boarders.  Once the Boarding House complex was completed Brother Brooks was keen to fill it.  Brother Burke, on the other hand, maintained that simply to bring in the greatest number of Aboriginal boarders, without hand picking them, could be more of a disadvantage than an advantage.

Brother Burke  .. knew that randomly to dump a concentration of Aboriginal boys from a mixture of different ‘countries’, different languages and different skin groups together would be to ask for trouble. P330 

Yeah, that makes sense - if you have someone with understanding of the situation on the ground … listen them.

Especially when the other option, the chosen path by the Sacred Heart of Jesus’s higher-ups was:

open-slather with a ban on cultural awareness. 

Thinking being:  Aboriginal culture - it’s not real culture.  This is Big-picture assimilation stuff - we’re not here to tip-toe around. 

Between the above options, i wonder if common-sense prevailed …  ? 

For the Love of God:  And so, when he (Burke) was overruled, it turned out. Not only did the students often turn to fighting each other, but their presence in large numbers often deterred significant numbers of non-Indigenous Catholic students from choosing to go to St John’s. 

Brother Burke recalls that at one stage, in order to minimise the vandalism and destruction being caused to the school buildings (as opposed to the boarding houses) a metal fence was erected around the boarding house with spear tipped railings.

The students saw these as being ideal weapons and ripped them off the fence to use them as such.

Ok.  We’ve talked about the MSC culture running off the rails - this is ripping the rails off to be used as ideal weapons.  

It’s hard to imagine more damning evidence of the deleterious effects of MSC’s crusading social-experiment.  Effects that resulted from a deliberate course of action -  despite frank warnings not to do it that way.

It was fairly common during this period that the boarding houses themselves were routinely vandalised – and the turnover in boarding house supervisors was unsurprisingly high.

Others who have worked with Indigenous students have reinforced Brother Burke’s view that they should be handpicked to optimise the value of the education they receive both for their own sakes as individuals and for the sake of their home communities. P331

I’d like to know how handy that hand-picking process was, but Brother Burke was right in that it was a disaster waiting to happen … not waiting, actually

Also: Not to forget the sakes of those who inevitably ended up as collateral-damage-victims from these violent, out-of-control, laxly supervised social-experiment kids.  The ripple-out effect.  But we do forget them.

The professional historian who wrote For the Love of God, forgot.   It was probably not the right time to talk about it.  Either that or: we’ve all moved on … 

Those outcasts caught in this sleight-of-hand twilight-zone belong in a different book: the Not for the Love of God’s.  Good luck waiting for a Professional Historian to write that one …