Anecdotes from the archives

Merry days at Maryknoll 

As the summer break approaches, I’m thinking about the holidays that the Hobart Presentation Sisters used to spend, from their early days, at various beach spots around Hobart.

From the memoirs of Mother Anthony Burke, we know that in the early years of the 20th century, kind people would welcome the Sisters to stay in family homes near the beach while the family was away. A home at Taroona was one such place, and occasionally a home at Brown’s River (now Kingston).

In May 1925, the Sisters purchased a property at Blackmans Bay, close to the beach, for 725 pounds, with the original idea of building a boarding school for girls on the site. One assumes they found this property during their holiday ramblings in the Brown’s River area.

The property was originally 11 acres, with two farmhouses. One of these the Sisters holidayed in, and it became Maryknoll, while the other was occupied by tenants. Market gardens were originally part of the property.

When houses began to appear in the area in the 1940s, many had old trams out the back for extra space, and at one time the Sisters followed suit, using an old tram as a dining room.

Many former students (myself included) will recall picnic days at Maryknoll at the end of the school year. We would pile into buses to travel to Maryknoll for a picnic lunch and then head down the hill to the beach. If it was a hot day, we played and swam in the water and became horribly sunburnt! This custom may have gone back a few decades, as I have photographic evidence of a day at Maryknoll (in full school uniform) from the mid-1930s.

Sister Barbara recalls that when she was a young Sister, there was a bathing hut placed in the grounds close to the beach, and the young ones were told that they had to dry off inside and wrap themselves modestly in a special neck-to-knee costume before walking up to Maryknoll in a decorous manner. In the exuberance of youth, however, the young Sisters would bypass the hut to race each other up the steep hill in their drying bathers. Space was always scarce at the Maryknoll house until the Sisters purchased the workers' sleeping quarters from a mining company when they were advertised for sale. This addition provided a meeting room, six bedrooms and a shower. Later, music rooms from St Mary's College were transformed into the chapel at Maryknoll.

This is the structure of Maryknoll that students would remember after the 1970s when the school retreat program was run at Maryknoll. In 1985, the Sisters moved into a newly built convent on the property, where holidays and respite for the Sisters would now be offered. The original Maryknoll buildings became a dedicated Prayer House in 1985.

Many happy memories were made at Maryknoll by classes from the College on retreat, which at various times offered fun and games, a walk along the beach to collect shells (“NO GIRLS, I said to stay OUT of the water!”), a shared lunch, and of course, spiritual time spent together.