Called to be a missionary disciple
Local
As a young girl the idea of joining a religious order never crossed Yvonne Gleeson’s mind, despite her strong Catholic background and her much older cousin James being a priest – and later Archbishop of Adelaide.
Sr Yvonne Gleeson
The two cousins hailed from farms at Bowillia between Blyth and Balaklava. Sr Yvonne (pictured) remembers attending the then Father James Gleeson’s first Mass as a seven year old.
She and her younger sister attended the tiny Bowillia school, where enrolments peaked at 16. For her secondary education, she went to boarding school at St Scholastica’s in Mt Barker.
“I loved boarding school. It was where my life began – I made so many friends”, Sr Yvonne, now 86, said.
“Two Sisters of Mercy ran the whole secondary school, they taught everything – they were wonderful.”
When the young Yvonne decided she wanted to do nursing, Sr Scholastica taught her anatomy and physiology to help prepare her for her nursing training.
She was accepted into Calvary Hospital in1956, and after four years of “hard labour”, she passed general nursing and enrolled in midwifery.
“The only reason I wanted to do my mid was to have two certificates for when I travelled – we all wanted to go and do something somewhere else,” she explained.
On completing her training, Yvonne and a nursing friend enjoyed a four month trip to New Zealand, which included a month working at the Mercy Hospital in Auckland. After touring the north and south islands, they returned to Adelaide.
Yvonne’s plan was to finish midwifery and head to Europe but one day, early on in the course, as she was walking across from the hospital to her room she suddenly heard a “message” that her life needed to go in a different direction.
“It’s hard to explain but there was this message or something saying that this is not the way you’re to go. It was a calling to enter the convent,” she said.
“In a sort of vision I could see some nuns crossing over from a convent to a church and somehow I knew it was a message to go a different way.
“My reaction was to go across to the little Calvary chapel to work out whether God was calling me; it felt too mysterious.”
Sr Yvonne said she went to talk to a priest who used to come to the maternity ward to visit his parishioners, Fr Cuthbert Hoy, from Henley Beach parish.
She would ride her scooter to Henley Beach. On one occasion Fr Hoy had to take a phone call. He suggested she look at three books he had about different religious orders.
“I picked up the one with a picture of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart on the front, and I saw a photo of some nuns in Alice Springs whom I recognised from the Annals that we used to get at home,” she recalled.
“I liked that they were nurses, and I didn’t look at the other books after that.”
But Fr Hoy insisted she take all three books home as being a Missionary of the Sacred Heart priest, he didn’t want to be seen as “pushing” her into an order also founded by French priest Fr Jules Chevalier.
Surprised to learn that there were OLSH Sisters in Adelaide, Yvonne went to see Sr Florine at Kilburn.
“She was bright and jovial, a bit like the nuns who taught me, and straight away I thought she’s just great and it all sort of happened from there,” she said.
But first Yvonne wanted to complete midwifery, and by the time she finished that, she had to wait for the next intake at the novitiate. In the meantime, she went to live with her parents in Hamley Bridge, where they had retired, and worked for nine months at the local hospital.
Yvonne headed for Sydney in 1962 with another South Australian, Marilyn Knolder. She spent four years at the novitiate in Bowral.
Professed in 1965, Yvonne worked at the Sisters’ infirmary at the Kensington Convent in Sydney for 18 months, and then at their hospital in Randwick.
By then Sr Florine had become the Junior Mistress and knew that Yvonne wanted to go to the missions so she organised for her to talk to the Provincial about where she could serve.
Just shy of 30, in 1967 Sr Yvonne arrived in Port Keats mission, now Wadeye, about 400km southwest of Darwin, not knowing what to expect. Her predecessor had already left and she was thrown in the deep end.
Port Keats hospital staff July 1971
A new hospital had been built on the mission which included three camps comprising about 600 Indigenous men, women and children.
“The other Sister had been there for years and years, and had organised to get the hospital built; prior to that it was just a tin shed,” Sr Yvonne said.
“On arrival, I went straight to the clinic to meet the lay nurse, who was leaving the next morning. There were about 30 patients in the hospital so I had to learn on the run.”
A doctor from Darwin would fly in once every six weeks or so and the rest of the time it was Yvonne and locally trained Indigenous staff looking after the patients. The population swelled to 1000 in five years so there were plenty of babies being born.
“You didn’t stop; you just kept going while there was work to be done, even if you had been up all night.”
While it was “like another planet” in many ways, Sr Yvonne said the people were “incredible” and were the “best part” of her time there.
Not long after she arrived in Port Keats her father died. It took so long to get back to Hamley Bridge that she missed the funeral service but she stayed with her mother and sister for a while before going back. Her mother visited her on the mission and helped with sewing and other jobs.
“She was put to work quick smart,” Sr Yvonne said.
Port Keats health worker with a Sister supervising.
After her mother returned home, she would send books from her teaching days up to the mission. This was appreciated as Yvonne used them to help the orderlies and other staff learn English.
After five years on the mission, it was decided that Yvonne needed a break so she returned to Sydney where she supervised the Randwick Hospital student nurses. A three year term turned into six after which another year was spent working at the Sisters’ Aged Care Home in Kensington.
However, Sr Yvonne was keen to return to the Territory. She spent time at the East Arm Leprosarium Hospital in NT, which was run and managed by the OLSH Sisters. She then moved to Daly River which had much greater access to alcohol. “And because of this, we were always patching up people, a sad place, very different from Port Keats,” reflected Yvonne.
After a brief stint in Port Keats, she returned to Sydney to help at the nursing home again. A year’s sabbatical in Adelaide followed. She enjoyed living at the Enfield Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Convent while doing several refresher courses.
Port Keats was in need of a manager for the hospital and while Sr Yvonne didn’t think she was the right person for that job, she was happy to take on a dual role of working in alcohol awareness programs and aged care. That was in 1994 and she continued in this role until 2010.
Much of her work was in community-based alcohol prevent-ion programs. She completed a number of courses in this field over the years, including at the highly-regarded Holyoake in Western Australia. This enabled her to coordinate programs at Daly River and by the end of her ministry, the program was “all about training the trainers” and “working out ways to get them to run it”.
“We needed to get out of the way,” she added.
Since arriving back in Adelaide 15 years ago, Sr Yvonne has lived with the Kilburn Sisters where they are an integral part of the community.
She recalled Sr Pat Irvin saying to her when she walked into the house ‘what are you going to do?’
“I said, ‘well I thought I was going to retire’…I’ve got no idea.”
Sr Pat suggested she fill in at the Prospect Vinnies shop and before long a half day shift for a sick volunteer turned into a full day every Wednesday.
Taking Communion to the sick, visiting aged care homes and other pastoral work followed, and continues today.
While she might not have travelled the world, Sr Yvonne’s ministry took her far from home to a place where she could be a true missionary disciple of the ‘Heart of Christ’.
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