8 June 2013 - Advent Park, Maida Vale, Perth, Western Australia

We were supposed to have travelled via New Norcia when we came down from Geraldton, however family matters took precedence and we came on down to Perth in greater haste than we might have otherwise done. We had instead reserved yesterday for returning to this interesting and tantalising place, but again fate decreed otherwise. But today we got there and were so very glad we did.

New Norcia is Australia’s only monastic town and it was the woman from Tamworth I chatted with while Chris and her husband teased the fresh water crocodile beside Victoria Creek who had alerted me to the existence of this fascinating place. It is featured in the brochure I have, titled “Experience the Avon Valley” although the settlement is not strictly in the Avon Valley. It is more correctly located on the Shire of Victoria Plains on the banks of the Moore River. There is not a lot of publicity about New Norcia unless you go looking for it.

That same brochure tells us that New Norcia lies a leisurely two hours north of Perth, our Tomtom said less than an hour and a half, however neither of these suggested travel times allow for escorted wide loads on a Saturday morning. We spent the first thirty or so kilometres past the vineyards of Swan Valley dawdling along behind two rigs of two truck units, one hitched to the other towing a trailer on which sat Komatsu machines eight and a half metres wide. As you can well imagine, passing was not really an option and it was not until we were well north of Perth that escort vehicles blocked a double south-bound passing lane and we were encouraged to proceed beyond this rather ponderous caravan.

The remaining ninety kilometres continued on up the Great Northern Highway, duplicated as far as Muchea where we had intersected this highway coming through on the Brand Highway all those weeks ago. The road from there was fresh and a delight to travel, climbing gradually and through beautiful undulating farmland, sheep, beef and grain growing lands so much more attractive to any of those so far seen in Western Australia. We passed through Bundeen where we saw a multitude of citrus orchards, none as extensive as those seen along the Murray River, but then these are not irrigated on the same scale, if at all. A few gate stalls advertised mandarins for sale; however we doubted they could match the taste sensation of the oranges purchased north of Mildura.

And then there we were in the middle of New Norcia. Many settlements in Australia are off on a D detour from the highway, but not New Norcia. The main road carrying more than two hundred and fifty road trains each day passes right through the middle of the monastery precinct. The good news is that a paper road bypass along the ridge to the east has been registered and given the go-ahead, but the actual construction start date is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, the racket distracts the tourist’s attention from the guide’s spiel and shakes the foundations of the already crumbling architecture.

We pulled in to the Museum and gallery area, once St Joseph’s Convent for aboriginal education and care, and registered for the guided tour, paying for the combined fee to include the museum. This is indeed a must-do for anyone bothering to pause here, even the tour without the museum. While the casual tourist is invited to wander about the ten acres and around twenty seven of the buildings, most well labelled with interpretative panels, there are still so many questions left unanswered. Today Katie gave us an excellent two hour tour through the monastery, the two colleges, the chapels and church and explained the history and the surrounds so well. Despite spending five hours there, we missed so much and perhaps we would have been better to have taken advantage of the camping facilities offered and stayed longer as had been our original plan. However this had not proved possible.

We had intended to retrace our footsteps taken with the guided tour, and to spend time in the cemetery, but by the time we finished with the museum and art gallery, it was well past 3 pm and time to head home.

The Benedictine monastery was set up in 1847 by two Spanish monks, one of whom hung about until 1900 to establish an educational establishment for the local aborigine people and set up a self-supporting community on what was then 9,000 acres of leased land. Dom Rosendo Salvado, together with his offsider, Dom Jose Serra, had left their homeland of Spain during the anti-clerical year of Spanish rule in 1838, headed for Rome and taken opportunity of a mission to the “wild bush country’ of Australia with Bishop Brady, Catholic Bishop of Perth. They were sent forth from the colony’s capital with a donkey, three pounds and little else. Their story is inspirational and far too involved to be told here.

A rather unusual Station of the Cross 

After Salvado died, he was succeeded by another Spanish monk, Fulgentius Torres, who took a fresh direction with the mission.  While still pursuing the self-sustenance and care of the aboriginal people, he embarked on educational and cultural aims. Two colleges were erected for the education of white children, St Ildephonsus’ College for boys and St Gertrude’s College for girls, complementing the existing convents of St Mary’s for aboriginal boys and St Joseph’s for aboriginal girls. These latter schools had been part orphanage, part school, set up before those to cater for the ‘stolen generations”, offering on-going connection to the parents but bypassing the grief in many cases of those that came after.

To assist with these projects, Torres imported the talents of artist monk Fr Lesmes Lopes, organist Dom Moreno and the lay woodworker Juan Casellas. It was thanks to the cheeky demands of Moreno that two Albert Mosser organs were purchased for a modest one thousand pounds in 1922 in Europe. Interestingly when the organ comprising 1,000 pipes arrived in Perth, the government would not initially release this strange cargo from a previously alien enemy. The twenty four zinc-lined cases appeared to have other purposes. The organ was so large that the church had to be extended specially to accommodate it.

The ornate work of the woodworker is evident in so much of the monastery today and paintings by the talented Lopes hang beside other European work accumulated during the depression years by an abbot who obviously considered such purchases more important than assisting the struggling masses. Much of this imported work dates from the 17^th and 18^th century. Lopes’ own talent extended to murals and ceiling art, to equal any of that in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel. Moreno’s name adorns much of the music played in Catholic churches today.  These are hidden treasures of Western Australia’s past.

New Norcia's own version of the Sistine Chapel

The schools were closed down in the early 1990s due to economic factors and today the last nine monks and about fifty employees survive on the tourism appeal of the place, school and other interest group camps and assistance from the generosity of the Western Australia Lottery Board. Land holdings have been diminished by one third of the original 9,000 acres, much sold off by Torres in pursuit of art and grandeur. One third is now covered in bush, one third cultivated in grain crops and the rest grazed by sheep. Wine, honey and bread, once manufactured from scratch to point of sale is now partly out sourced and the monks spend most of their time apart from administrative meetings and prayers, involved in research and writing.

The problems of salinity put an end to the vineyards the order had in Wyening, a property south east of New Norcia which had been purchased in 1877 and became the property well known for its quality wines. In its heyday the monks produced ten to twelve thousand gallons of wine per annum. The property was sold off in the 1970s.

I have provided a very rough overview gleaned from my brief impressions, probably skewed by my own prejudices. Go there yourself or check them out on the web. It is all very interesting for sure.

We enjoyed the return trip as much as the trip out, although this time we had to dodge the many flocks of galahs and ring necked green parrots that insisted upon playing chicken from the edge of the road. I am pretty sure there were no casualties. I should know; I was driving.