New Norcia calls itself “Australia’s only monastic town” and we had heard about it often enough for different reasons that a visit was on our wish-list. When we found that it was between Perth and Dalwallinu, our first flower-hunting district, New Norcia moved from the wish-list to the itinerary.
Its history falls into two major periods, defined by the first three abbots’ rule, followed by two shorter periods.
1 – Salvado
As we learned on the excellent guided tour, the story began with some Spanish Benedictine monks in Italy around 1840 wanting to make a new life for themselves. They took ship to the new colony on the Swan River, and walked north into new (to Europeans) country as soon as they arrived.
Led by Dom Rosendo Salvado, they established (and maintained) good relations with the local Aboriginal people, built a monastery, a church and a village, and became large-scale sheep farmers.
Phase 1 ended with the collapse of the wool market in the 1890s and the death of Salvado soon afterwards.
2 – The Stolen Generations
The new abbot, Torres, fresh out from Spain, undid all of Salvado’s good work with the Aboriginal community (he didn’t know the history and wasn’t interested) and sold off farming property to fund a grandiose building programme and establish boarding schools. Secondary boarding schools for the children of (white) country people opened around 1914.
At much the same time, the WA government introduced its ‘Protection Act’, and the abbot agreed to take in indigenous children and educate them in ‘mission’ schools, on government money. Torres passed away in 1914 but his successor, Catalan, didn’t change course so the arrangement remained in place for the whole of the ‘stolen generations’ period. The two ‘mission’ schools closed in 1974.
3 – Education and Hospitality
The two settlers’ boarding schools were successful for some decades but dwindled as state high schools opened, dwindled further as rural populations dropped because of farm mechanisation, and closed in 1991.
What were the (few) remaining monks going to do with all these huge, and now heritage-listed, buildings? Hospitality and tourism is the present answer, and they are doing it very well indeed.
The future
The place is looking good but its future is unclear. There are now only six monks rather than the seventy at the monastery’s peak in the nineteenth century, and the chance that their numbers will increase is slight.
Each Benedictine monastery is financially independent, according St Benedict’s rule.
The monastery of New Norcia, therefore, not the broader Benedictine Order or Catholic Church, has to provide for the upkeep of the buildings and for significant liabilities arising from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It’s hard to believe that the monks can keep going much longer without major changes.
Making sense of New Norcia
Our visit was rewarding, informative and enjoyable but still left me without a clear view of New Norcia.
That’s partly because it is unique. There really is no other place in Australia like it. New Norcia is not a ‘town’ in any conventional sense but a private estate. The monks are firmly in control, managing the property with the assistance of local employees and volunteers, full-time and part-time. There are no independent businesses in the town, no municipal centre, no permanent residents (as far as one can see) other than the monks and their employees.
It’s also because it is so anomalous. A grand European monastery in the wilds of Western Australia was odd even in the nineteenth century. To have it survive into the twenty-first without any significant organisational change makes it quite peculiar.
It’s also because its history is so mixed. What happened in the nineteenth century was mostly good, especially by the standards of the early colonial period. What happened in the first three quarters of the twentieth included much that was abhorrent even by the standards of the time and especially by the professed standards of the church. What has happened since then is a well-managed decline, and it is now an attractive historic tourist attraction with a shadowed past. From that point of view, it has similarities with Port Arthur and Sarah Island: beautiful but somewhat troubling.
More history – for the curious
New Norcia’s history has been systematically (and self-protectively) obscured by both the monastery and the state government. The monastery’s own website presents a well-written narrative which is accurate as far as it goes but has significant gaps, while tourist-oriented websites are even rosier. Wikipedia has a more detailed history which nevertheless blurs the Stolen Generations out of the picture.
Much of what has been hidden is quite challenging, so proceed with due caution. To locate it we need to dig into things like the Protection Act of 1905 (pdf here), “Benevolent Benedictines? Vulnerable missions and Aboriginal policy in the time of A.O. Neville,” a research article in Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 42 by Elicia Taylor, the ‘notes and references’ of the wikipedia history, or reconciliation-related sources like New Norcia Survivors Want the Truth to be Told.
Or we can explore sideways, looking (e.g.) at the Moore River Settlement
near New Norcia. It was the starting point of the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) by Doris Pilkington and its film adaptation (Rabbit-Proof Fence) which tells the story of three Aboriginal girls who ran away from the settlement in 1931. Moore River is near Mogumber, south-west of New Norcia, and the girls passed close to New Norcia and Dalwallinu in their way home.
Introduction and index to Western Australian blog posts September – October 2024.