Finding the Past, by Gillian Polack

 

I’m thinking about historical sources. Not just any historical sources, but ones that give us access to everyday lives. There are sources everywhere, but some sources are special. Let me start with the Middle Ages, and then end up in this precise moment in time. Before I can time-travel, however, I need to explain why the sets of sources I will introduce are so very special and why they’re amazingly useful to writers of historical fiction.

Writing is filtered. Every single type of writing we use to find out about the past has particular limits. Customs records tell us what was imported into, say, an English port in 1150, but not who sold it after that, what their lives were like, or what happened to the final imported good. It helps when we combine sources.

Let me begin with cinnamon, imported into that English port in 1150. It began its life in what is now Indonesia. It travelled as far as Egypt, where a Jewish merchant sold it to an English customer. The Egyptian woman who sold it had no idea that the customer was English. She called him a ‘Frankish knight’ (who I will henceforth refer to as ‘Frank’) and was really annoyed that he didn’t know old spice* from new. He overpaid and she didn’t respect him and life was normal. These things are recorded (though not the date, nor that the customer was English) in material from the Cairo Genizah.

A genizah is a safe storage place for documents that should not be destroyed, mostly religious, and mostly using Hebrew script. The Cairo Genizah is one of the most famous surviving, The holdings of the Cairo Genizah are amazing and strange and you can read about them in the famous many-volume study by S.D. Goitein (the easiest place for historical fiction writers to begin) or online (the best place for a quick overview). The 400,000 pages, with dates ranging over 1300 years are a marvellous selection of random documents. From them we know more about how the cinnamon was handled in Fustat (including that the sellers there had no respect for Europeans, who they called ‘Franks’) than we know about any other stage of its journey.

Customs and tariffs are another handy set of sources. They are consistent about imported spices that attract tariffs, but don’t tell us how fresh they are, nor what herbs and spices are grown locally. They contain much useful material, but it’s quite specific in nature.

Recipes tell us a little about what happened to that cinnamon, since it was bought by a knight and he would have lived among more literate people than, say, a peasant. Frank may have donated it to the Church, in which case we know how incense was used, through Church records and other sources. It may have been for gifts or for his own household. 1150 is at least within a generation of the first written cookbooks in Old French. We can see some of the uses of that cinnamon in cooking from the earliest twelfth century cookbooks. We’re reliant on random mentions in sermon literature and related materials for anything else.

Add all these sources together and we can trace that cinnamon.

Not everything is equally traceable. Cinnamon was a luxury spice, so it attracts more records than many other things. Wine also attracts records (including a poem in Old French), as does wool.

If we want detail and exciting information about the past, however, some sources are better than others. One of my favourite sources for England last century is that from the Mass Observation project. But that’s a story for another day. Let’s return to the Middle Ages.

One set of sources (also begun in the Middle Ages but not yet closed) has more information about the everyday than the Cairo Genizah: the records of the Inquisition.

The Inquisition’s archives start with the Albigensian Crusade, and their consistent use by historians begins with the French Annales school of history in the twentieth century. The work I always recommend to introduce the extent of material the Inquisition archive holds is E Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. Le Roy Ladurie used the work of the Inquisition to find out how people lived. That’s the good part. The bad part is that the reason we have such detailed information about lives is because the Church was trying to stamp out heresy: they’re archives resulting from persecution.

In the thirteenth century the heresy was that of the Cathars. After 1492, it was “New Christians:” converts who were still too Jewish. If someone was proven to be a heretic and unable to return to a fold or found to be ‘Judaicised’ beyond redemption, they were burned alive. The price paid for these records is awful. Two scholars re-created the food history of the once-Jews in Spain, and also told us the fate of the person whose food was documented by the Inquisition. Th Inquisition records are a major historical source, and also a terrible one. They record peoples’ lives, and also peoples’ deaths.

I promised we’d end in contemporary Australia, and there is a reason for this. Right now, Australia is creating an archive similar in levels of detail to that of the Inquisition (though covering a very short time) through its Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

An Australian Royal Commission is the highest level of inquiry, and it, like the Inquisition, asks many questions to find out what is happening in an area of immense importance and urgency. The trigger for this Royal Commission was the shootings at Bondi, although much of the work of the Royal Commission is on events and issues in the lead-up and after the shooting. Because of the broad focus and detailed question, the Royal Commission is developing deep documentation of the lives of Jewish Australia and their haters and the workings of government at all levels. It is unintentionally creating an immense archive of how Australians see themselves and others and what their lives are like.

Normally I see these things hundreds of years later, but in this case, I’m in the middle of it. I submitted material and every week of the hearings I learn about my own life. It’s quite intense.

This Royal Commission demonstrates just how much work and how many people it takes to create the Cairo Genizah, the Inquisition trial records, or Mass Observation. Even in the age of computers, 20,000 public submissions and week-long testimony into a given subject (all transcribed) is an immense amount of information that has the potential to create some amazing historical fiction… when it is in our own past. Right now, its creation allows us to peek into this kind of vast and detailed records, and helps us interpret them.

Let me give an example. I interpret police records quite differently to even two weeks ago. Before this week, I had to trust narratives about police work, often fictional. This week’s testimony by very senior officers (which is not fully webbed yet, so the link I gave you last paragraph leads you to another week, dealing with universities) showed me how they operate and what frustrates them and how they work alongside other public bodies. My greatest moment of insight was when they tried to explain that they wanted to deal with antisemitism. Their frustration was so clear.

My biggest reminder from these last few weeks, as an historian, is that the past always contains human beings. If we don’t see those humans and can’t hear at least a little of what they’re saying, we need to look further or more deeply.

*This is not a pun, but ought to be.

Paths of history: stories we choose to tell, by Gillian Polack

This July I'm considering the different ways we can research for our fiction. I know I've done this before and I know I will do this again. It's not my fiction-writing side that pushes me to find more explanations and better explanations. It's my academic side. I’ve been examining how Germans view their Jewish past pre-1700, and comparing that with the fiction we read and wondering how we can beat our own biases. I explored one approach in person, imagining a town as a museum and discovering the stories it told and what the stories missed.

The town is called Eden, and I’m writing from an apartment near Aslings Beach. Eden was named after the first Earl of Auckland. It has a twofold bay, where the waves argue with each other. One set of waves dominates and roars, the other growls. If you listen closely, the soundscape is as complex as the history the people remember and much simpler than Eden’s real history.

Eden almost became the capital of Australia. Before the Europeans arrived, it was the land of the Yuin people, who are still here. How do I know they are still here? A family of them caught the bus with me the day before yesterday. A young family, with possibly the cutest child in existence. I was going to the Killer Whale Museum. That bus trip and that museum reminded me that towns can be a lot more complicated and interesting than the books written about them. Whether this is a story of the family I saw on the bus, Old Tom, a killer whale who bossed a whaling fleet, a Jewish whaler, or the white Christian men the town celebrates (the Imlays, Mr Boyd, Mr Logan, the Davidsons) depends on how you walk down the street, how you interpret the museum, and whether our own biases can be used to redress those in the sources we use for our research.

The Yuin were in what is now Eden long before Cicero wrote about the Antipodes in the Somnium Scipionis. They’ve never left. The Yuin people have an excellent council, and I need to look at what that Council does and maybe ask some questions to delve further into their history before I can understand who they are and what they have done since the first arrival of Europeans here in the 19th century. Why do I say carefully "I need to delve"? Yuin folks are depicted in the Killer Whale Museum and in the street heritage notices as a secondary part of the town’s history. This is a shabby description of ancient history. If you walk the heritage trails, there is better treatment. It’s like Twofold Bay – stand in one place and you will hear something quite different to standing just a kilometre away.

This stranded history where the strands don’t always touch, it hides stuff. Only one man died from whaling in all the decades Eden was a whaling centre. The low death rate looks as if it may well be due to locals sharing their expertise with Imlays and the Davidsons. But was the expertise shared as between equals, or even willingly? This knowledge can’t be gleaned from looking at how history is presented publicly.

Except… when it is. The Yuin are in the museum in photographs of boats in Twofold Bay, but school history, food history, council affairs (except the specific council for Indigenous locals), the management of the town and the life of locals is depicted as white. Even the Jewish residents (not quite white, in Australian tradition) shadow white male history, which is curious, because there are Jewish graves in the local cemetery, an important early shop was set up by someone Jewish, and Solomon Solomons, of a particularly important regional family, was a Jewish whaler.
Now I wonder how many Jewish whalers there are, and whether it's simply that no-one talks about them. There were Jewish pirates and Jewish politicians – why should there be no Jewish whalers? And why do so many fiction writers assume we are all involved in matters financial? Mr Solomons was a vast local importance and his family was of regional importance, so his absence from the Killer Whale Museum is curious. More curious, however, is the absence of most Yuin people in the main history of the region. They have history, and it’s shown, but separately, as if the European-origin culture cannot talk to the Indigenous. The depiction of women in the museum too, makes them secondary to the Really Important People. This is modern Australia in miniature. We set up the history we want to live with and create a past that echoes ourselves. When historical fiction writers use this as a base for writing, the circle is complete.
How to move out of this closed circle? One of the bus drivers of Eden solved this as he explained what happened to the Greenseas Tuna Factory. “You need to ask the right people the right questions,” he said. Why is this not so easy in Eden? The current population of Eden is mostly older people who migrated from elsewhere. They wanted to retire to a lovely town on the coast and they have no knowledge of what came before. The desk person at the Killer Whale Museum demonstrated beautifully how new knowledge is acquired in the region: she is passionate about the Mr Logan who built Edrom Lodge. She is determined to make him visible, because she sees him as unseen. My clever bus driver and the schoolteacher on a stall at the community market both knew her and her passion. It’s a small town: everyone knows those with passion. And so the fascination with one person is reinforced and the wider story of the townsfolk says different things depending on where the story is focused. I have a list of names of people who will know more: I will return sometime and ask them my questions. Time and work break down that circle, and the clever asking of questions.
We seek stories of people like us, for the most part. When I asked about the local inhabitants and their work with killer whales, no-one I spoke to could answer my questions beyond the answers the museum gave. Each of them was focused on what they knew, and on people they thought were like themselves. Sometimes, however, the answers are in sight. I will need to speak to the local Land Council, for example, and the Jewish Historical Society.
I can (and did) also ask different questions. I can look for people who are not quite like others.
In the case of Eden, the most obvious person is Old Tom, a killer whale of great significance. The Killer Whale Museum chronicles his life and his personality and why he was named. His stories show that the real cultural force in the whole whaling industry was not those who sold whale products and made much money: it was the Indigenous whalers who worked alongside the Killer Whales. We know how Old Tom handled his team of orcas to bring whales in for the kill. We know how he let the whalers know they needed to get in their boats and do their bit. We know how he mocked whalers who would not do their share of the work or did not leave Tom and his folks their part of the kill. We even know how he was patted. We also know, mainly from the pictures at the museum, that it was not the white Australians who worked with Old Tom. They were exceptionally skilled people. There was a great deal that was different in Eden to whaling elsewhere, from the number of whales killed (maintaining a population) to the collaboration between human and killer whales and the number of people who died whaling. One. Just one human death. Over decades. Look at an exhibition from a different point of entry and it is as if the whole past shifts and changes and suddenly makes sense.
Whether a writer chooses one strand or two, whether they only see the official history and follow the path of the Imlay brothers down the main street (the Princes Highway, the #1 road in Australia, which becomes Imlay Street as it passes through Eden) or whether the writer challenges standard history and starts to think of the locals who never left ... this rests on the type of story the novelist wants to tell. Most will tell stories that link to known heroes and established figures and will echo the sound of the larger bay. Their research will echo the interests of the new locals, who retired to Eden and don't know its deep history. Their story will reinforce the standard one and will resound and be seen and valued because it echoes what we already know. Other writers will echo the smaller bay and query Old Tom. Rare writers will look at history from somewhere else entirely and will bring us something very special indeed.

Exploring a beautiful book (part one), by Gillian Polack

Right now, caught up in the rather interesting Australian elections, I feel as if we’re in the middle of history. Some years are more significant than others for story purposes and for interpreting people over time and this one is a good example. I’m not going to describe it today, however. Being in the middle of big events is not so comfortable. What I want today is safety.

I have a few volumes (not nearly enough volumes) of British Parliamentary Papers about Australia and they are what my history-soul craves. At times like this I find peace in enjoying the beauty of a book and then opening a page at random and reading the documents. I’ll enjoy the external beauty with you today and then do the internal exploration next month.

I only have a few volumes of this exceptionally large series and all the volumes I own are about Australia. The Irish University Press put them out about fifty years ago, and when many of my books were stolen, these beautiful green leatherbound books on archival quality paper were some of the first I looked for. I was so worried they had gone and so relieved when I found them.

The first volume to come to hand is from 1850.

Opening at random, let us explore. Or rather, let me explore and report the exploration as I go. So often readers see what fiction writers have done after the exploration, when we have caged and domesticated and reshaped what we find. It’s fun to see what happens on the job from time to time.

Before I can explore the content, you need to meet the book. Paper books each have their own personality, and volumes as exquisitely made as this are rare these days. It’s solidly and well-bound, with more leather than a good pair of shoes and with tooling to render a plain cover library-worthy.

One of the things I love about books is finding miscellaneous paper tucked away. The paper I found when I opened my 1850 volume is paper I’ve seen before, and each time I find it I stop and remind myself why it has to stay there. It’s not extraordinary, but it illuminates the volume’s reason for existing in an extraordinary way. Ephemera can give us critical historical data.

There are two different documents hiding in the front of the book. One is a reprinted page from The Times Literary Supplement, July 24 1969. It consists of two full newspaper-size pages explaining the Parliamentary Papers. 

It tells me that there are thirty-four volumes just for Australia: I only have six of them. The complete set of volumes for Australia cost $2,110 in 1969, which was enough to buy a small house in suburban Melbourne. This amounts to over 19,000 big pages of dense text. 

The content of the thirty-four volumes walks the reader through the colonisation of Australia and some papers about New Zealand (for New Zealand was governed from Australia back then, but there are another seventeen volumes just for New Zealand, enough to buy, I suspect a 2 bedroom flat). My life feels incomplete and my bookshelves bereft and I need a cup of tea.

The other sets of papers include ninety-four volumes on the Slave Trade (worth a much better house in 1969, which is sad and ironic) and three volumes of collected material from 1834-7 about Australian Aborigines. 

I need to read those fifteen hundred pages of those three volumes one day more than I need to read anything else in this vast series, but I don’t own any of them. Those early days set up a lot of problems for everyone who lived in Australia when colonisation began and I don’t understand them enough to write about them.

I suddenly need another cup of tea, because this is a reminder of how little I know about things I ought to know very well indeed. I encounter this often when I read the fiction of those who don’t quite do their research. We’re all influenced by what we were taught (all kinds of prejudgements flood our writing and the people left out of history seldom enter it) and unless we think ourselves past the problems given to us by our culture and our education, we carry those problems into our fiction. 

There’s a library only fifteen minutes away by bus where I can see those three volumes – it’s now on my ‘must do’ list.

The other two pieces of paper are an inspection slip and its duplicate. They tell me a lot about how much care was spent crafting these books. They’re some of the best quality volumes I’m ever likely to own. This particular volume was inspected by “H.J.W.” and the inspector had their own stamp to announce this on the dotted line. Filling in the form may have been a bit rushed, for in fact, the stamp is on a slope halfway to the next line and right near the wrong edge of the page. The date was 6 January 1970, and below the date is this wonderful announcement. “In the unlikely event of this volume being found faulty in any particular of manufacture, please send full details of the nature of the complaint and this Inspection Slip to THE PUBLISHER AT SHANNON IRELAND.” The duplicate means that no-one ever sent a complaint. I suspect that I’m the only owner, however, since I bought my volumes from a bookseller who’d bought them from someone who found hundreds of them in storage and who wanted to clear the space, so this is not useful knowledge. 

I love the way some tidbits are fascinating but not at all useful. It’s as easy to overinterpret ephemera as it is to underinterpret ephemera.

For me, this inspection slip (number C11203) brings the whole volume to life. The advertorial is informative and very useful, but the small piece of paper with it shows just how much the Irish University Press spent on the volume. The volume itself backs up the claim of perfection in publishing. You can see that from the pictures.

Now that you’ve met this marvellous volume… you have to wait a month to find out what’s in it.

Sister Mary John Baptist de Lacy: The Irish Sister and the English Bishop

Three of the five Sisters of Charity who arrived in Sydney in 1838: Sr Mary Xavier Williams, Mother Mary John Cahill,
and Sr Mary De Sales O’Brien. No images of Srs Mary Laurence Cator and Mary Baptist De Lacy are known...

On a gusty summer morning, 31 December 1838, five women dressed in the sombre robes of the Irish Sisters of Charity disembarked from the Francis Spaight after their six-month voyage from Dublin. Mother Mary John Cahill, Sister Mary John Baptist De Lacy, Sister Mary Lawrence Cater, Sister Mary Francis De Sales O’Brien, Sister Mary Xavier Williams (then a novice) were the first religious sisters to arrive in the penal colony of New South Wales.

The women had come at the specific request of the Bishop of Sydney, Bishop Polding, who had travelled to Ireland to share with Mother Mary Augustine Aikenhead, the founder of the Sisters of Charity order, his concerns about the spiritual wellbeing of the women convicts in the colony, especially the intractable women (primarily Irish) who had been sent to the Female Factory in Parramatta . He begged Mary Aikenhead to send a group of sisters to New South Wales to help these convict women and the colony generally. 

The Female Factory

In an address given in the Catholic Cathedral of Sydney on 6 January 1839, Polding described them as being ‘filled with courage not belonging to their sex’. It wasn’t long before he was to view these Irish nuns as a thorn in his English side and as intractable as the Irish convicts in the Female Factory in Parramatta. 

The Sisters of Charity had been founded in Dublin in 1815 by Mary Aikenhead with the special mission of serving the poor, but as the daughter of an apothecary Aikenhead gave special emphasis to the care of the sick poor. In 1834, she had opened St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, and it was soon recognised as the premier hospital in the city.

Mary Aikenhead had listened sympathetically to Bishop Polding’s request. She asked for volunteers to make the long journey, and five sisters agreed to go. They were all educated and cultured women and at least two - De Lacy and O'Brien - had formal nursing skills.

Alicia De Lacy, later Sister Mary John Baptist De Lacy, was born in Limerick, Ireland, on 1 July 1799 into a landed family that had fallen on hard times. In 1835, having heard that volunteers were sought to join a mission to New South Wales, she entered the Sisters of Charity as a novice and professed on 25 September 1837. She gained nursing experience at the newly opened St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin before her journey to Australia. 

When the five Sisters of Charity arrived, the Female Factory was severely overcrowded and had become famous for its riots. 
Even the attending Roman Catholic priest had given up calling there to celebrate mass on Sunday, because of the ‘blasphemy and general bad conduct of the inmates’. 

The women were willing to accept the Irish sisters, who visited twice a day, giving religious instruction, treating the sick and giving school lessons for the children. The sisters also lobbied the government successfully for improved conditions. 

But Archbishop Polding was an English Benedictine and he subjected the women to constant interference, trying to get them to accept the Benedictine Rule. More seriously, despite his assurances to Aikenhead that he would provide for the sisters, he kept them in severe and unrelenting poverty.

The sisters had no money of their own. Assuming that Polding would care for them, when they arrived in the colony they had refused a government offer to pay them a stipend directly, saying that under their rule any service given to the poor must be done without payment. This decision was to cause them great suffering.

Although Polding received a government stipend on behalf of the sisters, he withheld it from them. Nor did he give them the sum of £2,000 that had been sent out with them on the voyage to Sydney. Instead, he demanded that they write to Dublin and ask Aikenhead to send them the dowries they had paid when they entered the order. When the money arrived, the Bishop did not release it to the sisters. Their early years in the colony were haunted by desperate poverty and actual hunger.

By 1847, De Lacy was Superior of eight other sisters who had joined the order. She was the only one of the original five sisters still in New South Wales, as the others had moved to Tasmania (primarily to escape Polding). The dark-robed Sisters of Charity were often to be seen in the city, walking many miles each day to assist at the Sydney Infirmary and attend at the prisons. They became known for visiting and treating the sick poor in their homes, no matter whether the patient was Catholic or not. 


It had become clear to the people of Sydney (if not to Polding) that the Sisters of Charity needed a permanent residence. Also that Sydney needed a new hospital. What could be better, suggested the city’s luminaries, than to house the nuns in a free Catholic hospital, based on the model established at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin? And who could run it better than the redoubtable De Lacy, ‘who had devoted her whole life to the relief of the sick, and to the comfort of the poor’ and was surely ‘equally entitled to gratitude with Miss Nightingale'?

And so, at Tarmons, a substantial villa in Woolloomooloo Heights (now Potts Point) was purchased with the assistance of subscribers. In 1857 that the Sisters of Charity founded St Vincent’s Hospital there.

Tarmons

As the first Superioress of St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney De Lacy and used her skills to negotiate the financial and practical needs of the organisation. As reported in The Sydney Mail in 1866, she was creative in her efforts for the hospital:

The Sisters on entering into possession at once devoted the best apartments in the building to hospital purposes. But so much had to be done, and so much purchased, that it was not until August, 1857, that the hospital was thrown open to the public. At first the Sisters were only able to provide a single ward for female patients; and, but for the energy and influence of their Superioress, there would probably have been a still longer delay. This lady got together a number of such ladies as were liberally disposed and as possessed the means of indulging this disposition, and prevailed upon them to contribute each a bedstead, bed, and bedding.

By all accounts, Sister Mary De Lacy was an extremely hard worker, assisting at all levels of hospital management, including nursing and the dispensing of prescription medications and in the training of other nursing sisters. And she was scrupulous in implementing Mary Aikenhead’s policy: that the Sisters of Charity would help people of any race, colour or creed. She had a special alcove near the wards set aside for her, where she could catch some sleep when nursing a patient overnight.

Despite her dedication to her patients and the hospital, De Lacy faced a great deal of opposition from Archbishop Polding. He did not approve of St Vincent’s or De Lacy, and he especially did not approve of the ecumenical nature of the hospital. 

There is no known picture of De Lacy,
but this is a representation of her

Matters came to a head in 1859, when Polding’s zealous chaplain, Father Kenyon, removed a donation of Protestant Bibles that De Lacy had accepted for the use of Protestant patients. 

There was outrage in Sydney at this, and Polding was reminded that subscriptions for the hospital had been raised on the basis that St Vincent’s would welcome patients of all religions.

Polding backed down and the Bibles were returned. But his dislike of De Lacy, who had allowed the Bibles to be accepted and used in the hospital, increased. 

A short time later, when the hospital's supply of water ran short, Dr Robertson (the hospital's Protestant doctor), and De Lacy used a hand-pump to draw water from some tanks in the front of the convent without asking for the permission of the whole sisterhood to do so. This provided the excuse Polding needed. He demoted De Lacy from her position as mother rectoress of the hospital and and inexperienced woman of Polding’s choosing was given the position instead.

It was the last insult for De Lacy, who gave up the fight and asked for permission to return to Ireland. 

Still Polding's vendetta continued. Not only did he refuse De Lacy's request, he insisted that her vow of poverty meant she owned nothing except the clothes she was wearing. Thus she had no means to pay for the journey home to Ireland. 

Polding thought that was an end to it, but De Lacy was very much liked and admired in Sydney. Community outrage at her treatment led to public subscriptions that raised the funds for her voyage home.

The Freeman’s Journal of 8 June 1859 lamented the departure of ‘Australia's Florence Nightingale’ in fulsome prose:

"The tribute paid by her co-religionists to the lady who just left the colony will, no doubt, meet with general response. We hear, on every hand, testimonies to her amiable character and serene beneficence. She has been described to us as strongly realising the ideal of some of those characters of the Middle Ages delineated in the writings of Scott … We are not less strongly attached to the distinguishing principles of Protestantism, because we cherish towards these virtues a feeling of the highest veneration, whether in a Fry, a Nightingale, or a De Lacy."

On her return to Ireland, she was welcomed back by the Irish Sisters of Charity. Polding, however, would not let the matter rest. He wrote to Archbishop Cullen in Dublin, insisting that the archbishop order De Lacy to return to Sydney or excommunicate her for disobeying his orders. 

Archbishop Cullen's reply was firm but polite. He told Polding that Sister Mary was doing good work in Dublin and as she was rather advanced in age (she was 60) it would be best to let her remain in Ireland. 

Appalled by Polding's actions, De Lacy's supporters in Sydney  wrote to the Vatican, demanding an end to the Archbishop’s persecution of the nun and of the Australian Sisters of Charity generally. The Vatican undertook an investigation into the matter, and to Polding’s utter chagrin, he was called to account for his treatment of the Sisters. He no doubt considered himself to be the victim of an Irish conspiracy. 

Things settled down at St Vincent’s when Sister Veronica O’Brien assumed the hospital’s management. Educated in France and a first cousin of Sir Dominic Corrigan, an eminent Dublin physician, she was by all accounts an excellent superioress. 

Sister Mary John Baptist De Lacy died in Ireland on 12 December 1878 at the age of 79, and was buried near the grave of Mary Aikenhead at Donnybrook, near Dublin (right). 

In recognition of her contribution to health care in Australia, De Lacy Place in Canberra was named in her honour.