Anecdotes from the Archives

Front garden of the convent 

Are you like me, totally impressed by our magnificent Henry Hunter designed sandstone convent building? It's even more impressive when you consider that it was constructed from slab to completion in just 14 months, from October 1866 to January 1868. That in itself was surely a feat of nineteenth-century engineering!

The earliest photos show the convent building before its first gable was added and prior to the construction of the bell tower. Today’s thick sandstone fence, which walls off the convent from the street, seems to have been a feature from earliest times.

And what about the front garden? For more details, I referred to my trusty Memoir by Mother Antony Burke. She came to work at the College in 1897 as a very young music teacher. She soon found her vocation as a Presentation Sister and spent most of her long life at St Mary’s.

Mother Antony recalls the fountain in pride of place in the front garden as she walked towards the convent for the first time in 1897. The fountain's location changed in 2018 to make way for the statue of Nano Nagle. 

When I came in 1897, there were two privet hedges in front of the convent and the garden was laid out round the fountain, each bed surrounded by the usual box hedge-these grew for years and became very thick and when eventually they were dug up for a resetting of the garden, they were found to have been a useful place for hiding broken crockery!

She also recalls the bottom playground, which was then just a rough grassy flat. Above it were trees and shrubs, including a Moreton Bay Fig and an elderberry tree. There was also a peppercorn tree, whose little red berries were dropped down the chimneys when birds nested there.

Immediately in front of the building were more flower beds – a white rose under the refectory {on ground floor at left of convent building} and a couple of lovely heliotrope bushes under the parlour windows {as above}…the perfume of the heliotrope was delicious, especially as evening fell it was wafted to our cells above  {bedrooms on first and second floors} and attracted many bees…

When Mother Antony first arrived, the school was divided into St Mary’s Presentation Convent and St Columba’s School for poor children. The St Columba’s students entered through their own gate on Brisbane Street – a gate the convent students would never use! This snobbery and lack of sensibility was accepted at the time. Instead, the convent students had the pleasure of passing through the iron gates on Harrington Street, up the steps and through the pleasant vista described by Mother Antony, to their classrooms in the convent building.