SA's little known great achiever
News
Julian Tenison Woods was an “incredibly complex man” and made an immense contribution to science, education and more, says Fr Roderick O’Brien in his new book about the legendary priest.
Fr O’Brien was teaching at a university in Hong Kong “a long time ago” when he last wrote a book.
“It was 1976 or ’77, it was a collection of articles on landlord and tenant law,” the retired Adelaide priest told The Southern Cross.
Fr Roderick completed his law degree at the University of Adelaide. “And I’m still on the roll of lawyers,” he said.
It is some achievement but is dwarfed by a career that has seen him spend seven years in Asia as a missionary, teach law and ethics and serve for 10 years as an adjunct Research Fellow of the University of South Australia.
His past 12 months, however, have been dedicated to spreading the word about a 19th century hero of his, which has resulted in the book Julian Tenison Woods – A Pioneering Journey in Science and Faith.
Fr O’Brien says Tenison Woods was an incredibly complex and puzzling man. He was also a “quite extraordinary achiever”.
An Englishman, he worked as a sub-editor on the UK Times newspaper when he was just
16 years old. Arriving in Australia in 1855 when he was 22, he was ordained as a diocesan priest two years later and took over the Penola parish.
There, he worked with, and later fell out with, St Mary MacKillop and together they founded the Congregation of Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart at Penola in 1866.
Beyond that, Tenison Woods was a prolific writer, producing more than 200 scientific and spiritual publications across his life.
It has been an ambition of Fr O’Brien’s in recent years to write a book about a man who died when he was just 56 years old but packed an awful lot into his time.
“The book is a collection of articles written about Tenison Woods over a long time, going back to the ‘80s,” Fr O’Brien says.
“There are 14 articles including two new articles, one on global geography (Tenison Woods wrote a textbook for primary school children on this theme) and another on his time in the Philippines.”
“I thought it would be nice to get the stories out. A lot of them started as talks.”
A loose listing of his accomplishments is startling and relevant to science and religion today, says Fr O’Brien.
As well as writing prolifically on science and education, Julian Tenison Woods had a lasting commitment to education for all and was the inaugural director of Catholic education in South Australia. For several years he was a missionary priest in Asia, an explorer, a botanist, a geologist, and shortly after he arrived in Adelaide in 1867, the founder of a small monthly magazine called The Southern Cross.
Perhaps more remarkably still, Tenison Woods achieved everything against a backdrop of ongoing poor health.
“He had been sick all his life. His character was so strong that he just battled his health all his life and tended to dismiss his ailments,” Fr O’Brien says.
“The Bishop of Adelaide offered him a priest’s job in the Northern Territory. He got halfway up the coast of Queensland and was too ill to continue and fled to Tasmania.”
Understandably, given everything he had to contend with, Tenison Woods was “an extremely complex person who could be genial and charming,” says Fr O’Brien.
“But sometimes he was not right. When he fell out with Mary MacKillop (for example), they parted company and she never spoke ill of him.”
There is a Tenison Woods College at Mount Gambier and a Tenison Woods School at Richmond but
Fr O’Brien says, attendees there aside, people might know his name and little beyond.
Getting the word out to as wide an audience as possible about one of the great contributors to South Australia, and beyond, is paramount.
“I am trying to reach people who never read about the Church,” Fr O’Brien says.
Julian Tenison Woods – A Pioneering Journey in Science and Faith is published by ATF Press and available from $30.
Jump to next article
