New Norcia: A Town Like No Other

My work, included in "Girls on Film" is based on the Aboriginal Mission at the Spanish Benedictine Monastery at New Norcia. I have drawn from my own cultural experience, my Spanish Catholic heritage; and those experiences of people who were forcibly removed and placed in this mission as children. This has also been initiated by making several trips to New Norcia and researching the history of this area.

New Norcia was founded in 1846 by a Spanish monk, Don Rosendo Salvado. Exiled from his native Spain, he had found refuge at the Italian monastery of Cava, after the first Republic had dissolved all religious communities in Spain, in 1835. He, along with Don Joseph Serra, had a passion to devote his life to the work of the foreign missions and was eventually assigned to serve under the newly consecrated Bishop of Perth, Dr John Brady, who was shortly to set sail from Europe to Australia with a band of missionaries.

New Norcia was chosen as a suitable site where contact with natives may be made and a mission begun and was founded on the 1st of March 1846.(The Story of New Norcia, 1973) By the 1880's the mission controlled nearly a million grazing acres and ran a small town, with it's own post office and courthouse. Vatican funds, foreign monks and religious artworks poured in. (Laurie, 2000)

Salvado's policy was to train the Aborigine to be a peasant farmer working and living in a Spanish style farming community. The central monastery was to be surrounded by farming and pastoral land worked by Aboriginal families. Each family was also to have a house and a parcel of land.("New Norcia," 1990)

Recently, New Norcia has come into the limelight with the making of the documentary movie 'Habits of New Norcia' made by freelance filmmaker Frank Rijavec and recent articles such as 'Monks, Mammon and Mystery' which appeared in The Australian Magazine, June 3-4 2000.

For the making of the movie 'Habits of New Norcia' more than 50 people were interviewed about their childhood experiences in the mission. Growing up in the care of monks and nuns at here, was not, in the opinion of most interviewees, a good experience.

"An orphanage without orphans", Ivan Hayden observes wryly; "non of us were orphans."

He is standing outside St Mary's Boys Orphanage, beneath tall windows along a wall flanking the main road into New Norcia. "These windows had bars to hold the boys in the dormitories so they couldn't get out". Barry Winmar recalls.(Laurie, 2000)

In this documentary: 'Habits of New Norcia' a group of Aboriginal people return to New Norcia to recount their experiences which happened as recently as the 1950's, 60's and 70's.

"Olive-picking was a favoured pastime by all", visitors read in the text accompanying photographs of monks inspecting a bountiful harvest. Yet the Aboriginal interviewees remember long unpaid hours - often in school time - spent clearing stones from paddocks, picking the orange crop or harvesting olives. "If you didn't pick them all up," recalls Jim Drayton, "you got belted."(Laurie, 2000)

Olive Branch
It is this contradiction which inspired my first piece on this project. The olive branch is extended to the hand of an unidentified Aboriginal person. This offering well known in the Christian world as an offering of peace, is seen here as contradicting the motto of the Benedictine order, "Pax", peace in Latin. To the Aboriginal children of the mission, the olive branch was a symbol of enforced labour. Pax is embossed into the back of the image. This symbolizing the notion that the monks believed that they were doing the good deed, by taking away these peoples cultures and replacing them with a Christian way of life. Today when visiting New Norcia, "Pax" is written everywhere, from the entrance to the Monastery, to the emblem on the crockery you eat from in Salvado's Roadhouse. It has become a marketable symbol.

Mistaken Homage
It is still difficult to find Aboriginal acknowledgment when visiting New Norcia today, as suggested by Bernie Ryder: "But whenever I go back, my biggest disappointment is that there isn't an Aboriginal perspective there". (Laurie, 2000)

It is only since 2nd of October 2000 that a few small brass plaques have been deliberately placed, stating Aboriginal involvement. This may be too little too late and only prompted by recent media exposure, which tends to warrant the gesture vain.

This lack of acknowledgment has been the motivation for my next piece, which shows Salvado the explorer, with bible and crucifix in hand, off on his mission to 'Civilise and Christianise' the Aboriginal people of the Victorian Plains.

The map tends to ignore and give credit to the fact that 14 Aborigines cleared the track from the monastery to Bindoon, a distance of about 40 miles. Salvado relied not on his ornate compass, that is so proudly exhibited in the New Norcia museum, but on the Aborigines' keen sense of direction to survey the shortest route to Perth. (Russo, 1972)

Even the map is titled 'Salvado's Western Australia' and his road to Bindoon marked. The fact that Aboriginal people lived and knew this land for 60 000 years seems to go unrecognized. New histories and layers have been constructed over the true histories so they are no longer recognized or visible. Our written language and habitation, has promoted the genocide of the Aboriginal peoples' oral culture, our culture covering theirs over, so that it is no longer visible, recognizable nor respected.

The city of New Norcia, which is hidden in the background, was also built by the hard labour of the Aboriginal people.

Although Salvado was quite a forward thinker for this time and respected by many members of the Aboriginal community, his legacy seemed to be undermined after his death. His idea was to bring Christianity into the life of the Aboriginal, but his priority was to their welfare. His plan was to educate them and teach them agriculture and how farm the land. He allocated each family a plot of seeded land and a cottage to live in. His attitude and respect for the Aboriginal people was quite unique for this time. He also encouraged maintenance of family networks already established, which strongly contrasted with the happenings after his death of government intervention, breaking down, segregating and institutionalising Aboriginal people. He studied their customs and habits and encouraged them to keep their tribal names, made concessions for them to go walkabout and showed that Aboriginal children responded well to education. Salvado also paid them in money for their labour.

A Cross to Bear
My next work is about the Eurocentric ideas of conversion of Indigenous people. Salvado did show compassion toward his converts, and his mission to "Christianise and civilise" led him into conflict with colonial officials over their brutal tactics toward Aborigines, but his ideas, although compassionate, still promoted the ethnocide which took place.

In this image Salvado looks up in hope, bible in hand and his large crucifix boldly placed on his chest. In the top left hand corner are the small workers cottages built for the Aboriginal families, now long gone. Salvado had a vision, one which has faded with time and with his death, as he is fading in the image. In later years, New Norcia Mission co-operated with the state by taking in Aboriginal children and state wards and assuming total control over their lives.

The truer picture lay below where the man is hard at work, pushing a wheelbarrow, the children picking olives and another young man with weight to bear, as not only do they have the weight of their load, but the weight of the strict Catholic ethos to burden them. If they should try and move forward or backward, there is also something in their way. Their only choice is to carry their load to the future, which has been planned for them, New Norcia's active labour force.

Images of neat children and smiling nuns and monks appear on walls around the town. But the Aboriginal interviewees say no pictures show the impact of a strict Catholic ethos that separated sexes in compounds behind tin fences and kept siblings apart. (Laurie, 2000)

Now when you go to New Norcia, the bars have been pulled from the buildings which once housed the Aboriginal boys and girls and there is no sign of the hardship which occurred there. There is no sign of the boy chained to a tree for misbehaving, the sheep head soup which the Aboriginal children had for every meal, the scavenging in the bins for extra food, the sign of the cross shaven into the heads of those who tried to escape, or the forced labour and general lack of care and compassion they experienced. These images do not encourage tourists dollars.

Orphanage
My next piece shows what was once part of the orphanage with the faces of some of the children who resided there. The faces are fading into history, as are their stories, which are not being told, due to the fear of bad publicity. And the words, taken from the bible, emphasize the hypocrisy of the practices there.

After the filming of 'Habits of New Norcia', the Abbot of the monastery wrote a rebuking letter to SBS, saying the filmmakers had 'trespassed on our property and their actions would have a harmful effect on the reconciliation process'. He felt that the monks had been 'badly treated' and requested that any sections filmed on their premises be removed from the film. SBS wrote a response, backing the filmmakers, and refused 'to give any undertakings that we would limit or interfere with {their} editorial independence.' (Laurie, 2000)

But Rijavec would discover the monks still had the upper hand. Many of his interviewees had been photographed as children or young adults at New Norcia, and Rijavec routinely applied to the state library to buy print copies of nearly 100 images to put in the film. But the library informed him it couldn't issue copies without the monks permission; the answer was no.

The controversy has forced an admission by State Librarian Lynn Allen that it is 'not a situation we are happy with at all.' The New Norcia collection was lodged in the Battye Library without any formal preconditions, 'a historical error coming back to haunt us', she told The Australian Magazine. (Laurie, 2000)

I would like my images to appear as the archives which have not been opened. They are small glimpses of truth, told to me by the people who experienced these conditions first hand.

It is time for the archives to be opened and for all to be accepted and acknowledged. This is the only way that some kind of reconciliation process can be accomplished. In the words of one of the interviewees 'What sort of Reconciliation can there be without truth?'

'Girls on Film' includes the work of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and highlights new acquisitions to the collection of which this suite by Eva Fernandez, 'New Norcia - A Town Like no Other' now belongs.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Laurie, V. (2000). Monks, Mammon and Mystery. The Australian Magazine, June 3-4, 20-23.

New Norcia (B. Hodson, Director)(1990). Canberra: AFI Distributions Ltd.

Russo, G. (1972). Bishop Salvado's plan to civilize and Christianize Aborigines. Unpublished Master of Arts, University of Western Australia, Perth.

Russo, G. (1980). Lord Abbot of the Wilderness; The Life and Times of Bishop Salvado. Melbourne: The Polding Press.

The Story of New Norcia ( Revised Edition ed.)(1973). New Norcia: The Benedictine Community of New Norcia, WA.