Centenary revives happy memories
People
Proudly displayed in Sr Marietta Green’s room at Calvary Oaklands is a black and white photo of the students of St Teresa’s School, Brighton, taken in the early 1940s.
Sr Marietta, known then as Madeline, was the youngest of 10 children and began her schooling at St Teresa’s as a six year old in kindergarten.
She and her brothers and sisters caught the train from Ascot Park to the school run by the Mercy Sisters of Wilcannia-Forbes.
The Sisters had come to the relatively new seaside suburb of Brighton in 1915 after purchasing a property in Cambridge Tce and establishing St Teresa’s Convent.
They then bought a house on Old Beach Road, which belonged to merchant seaman Commodore Munton and included a large house, stables, an orchard and conservatory.
Sr Marietta remembers the conservatory being used as both a church and school when she was there.
“During the week it was a school and on every Friday afternoon we used to have to go in, pack up our desks, push all the chairs around and turn it into a church,” she said.
“Monday mornings we’d unstack the chairs, get out all the desks and turn it back into a school.”
It was a small school with Sr Theophane responsible for kinder to Grade 3 and Sr Mary Barbara teaching the other four grades. Sr Theophane later became Sr Mary Barnett and was the last religious principal of the school.
“When I was in Grade 7 we reached 100 students,” said Sr Marietta, 89.
The Green children helped boost the numbers, all attending the school at various times.
“Each week we would take two shillings for four of us and if there were five or six of us the nuns would say just pay for the four,” Sr Marietta recalled.
Most of the other students lived a lot closer to the school than she did, which caused the spirited Madeline problems at times.
“We had to stay at school until the train came at 5 o’clock, and if you missed that train my word you were in trouble,” she said.
But it was a happy childhood. “We didn’t have material things but we had lots of love and each other.”
Sr Mariette also has wonderful school memories, such as playing hopscotch, red rover and ‘gig’ at lunch time and school basketball (now netball) on the weekends. A favourite pastime was polishing the chapel floor in the convent.
“When we’d finished we would only have our socks on so we’d skate around and hope no-one would catch us,” she laughed.
In the backdrop of World
War II, she remembered air raid shelter practices and “everyone running to the trenches under the pepper trees” when the sirens sounded.
She described the Mercy Sisters as “strong and kind women”. They clearly had a big influence on Madeline and her school friends, two of whom also entered religious life – Judy Gurry, who is a Josephite Sister, and Betty Shonfeldt, a Mercy Sister. Both live in Adelaide and for many years they would catch up regularly.
Another classmate and close friend, Carmel Norman (now Carmel Earl), is still a parishioner at St Joseph’s Church, Brighton. Before moving into the nursing home Sr Marietta lived next to St Joseph’s Church at Brighton.
“Carmel used to visit me every Sunday after Mass and bring me a posie on special occasions such as my feast day,” Sr Marietta said.
After attending St Aloysius College to Form 3 (Year 10) and then working for Singer sewing machines in the city for three years, she joined the convent at the age
of 19. Her mother died when she was 16 and her father passed away not long after. Her eldest sister was determined to see Madeline follow her into nursing but that wasn’t to be.
“Kath went ballistic, she wanted me to be a nurse because she was a nurse,” Sr Marietta said.
“It was all lined up, I had my uniform and was about to start at Calvary, and all of a sudden I dropped the bombshell that I wasn’t going to be a nurse, I was going to Parkes to the novitiate to be a nun!”
But before heading to Parkes she helped out “dear old Sr Patrick”, a 90-year-old nun with a class of about 70 at St Teresa’s. The young novice-in-waiting had no teaching credentials but it was the start of an impressive career that earned her an Order of Australia Medal for service to education, particularly through the provision of specialised educational programs for Aboriginal children.
While much of her religious life was spent at schools in the New South Wales towns of Broken Hill and Bourke, she spent seven years teaching at St Teresa’s in the 1960s and was living in the convent when the new St Joseph’s Church was opened in 1965. She was also parish sacristan then.
When she retired from teaching at the age of 70 in 2005 Sr Marietta returned to Brighton to do pastoral work. As she prepared the altar for the 50th anniversary Mass at
St Joseph’s in 2015, someone asked her what she was doing at that time 50 years ago.
“I told them ‘exactly what I’m doing now, getting ready for Mass’.”
