On a parched 35C day in October, we joined children in Years 3-6 at St Therese’s Community Parish School in Wilcannia in their recitation of the Angelus and prayer before lunch.
Lunch is cooked onsite at the school canteen in the tiny north-western NSW town and the children were abuzz – tacos were on the menu that afternoon.
Every school day, the students are also given breakfast, morning tea, and fruit for afternoon tea. Then they brush their teeth. The school’s mini-bus picks them up before school, drops them home after.
In this Jubilee Year of Hope, the Justice and Peace Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney decided to go on pilgrimage in our own land, to an official Jubilee pilgrimage site in the rural and outback Diocese of Wilcannia-Forbes.
Our pilgrimage included visiting Menindee, an even smaller town 150 kilometres southwest of Wilcannia, where recent years have seen a modern-day plague killing tens of millions of native fish in the Darling River.
In both towns, we pilgrims found communities where faith is a lived, everyday thing.
“It’s a privilege to be on Country, to see, to listen, and to learn,” said Cailey Sharp from the Justice and Peace Office. “But that privilege only means something if you arrive with an open mind and an open heart.”
In both Wilcannia and Menindee isolation, poverty, and entrenched disadvantages mark everything from the price of lettuce ($10 a head) to self-esteem. The local school staff, who want to be there, are responding to some of the challenges through building strong, positive relationships – and through their nurture and care.
At St Therese’s, former students who are now high-schoolers came by in the evening to a barbecue hosted on our behalf. The teens are confident, proud young people whose camaraderie with, and respect for, their former educators was clear.
“With my teaching, it’s about showing them that they’re not silly … or however they’ve been made to feel previously,” said Cassandra Auld, religious education teacher and all-rounder in the team at St Therese’s.
“I always find that little strength which makes them them, and get that to flourish.”
Cass was cautioned against moving her family to Wilcannia and warned that her children would “go backwards.”
Instead, she and her husband Jeremy – who is principal of the school – find their family is thriving: “Our youngest, our son, has actually said that Wilcannia is like home, and the first place he’s felt really accepted”.
Hope in the midst of need
‘If you’re passing Wilcannia, keep driving’, is the conventional wisdom drawn from a past fractured by colonisation and crime. Steadily, the town is clawing back hope and building its new reputation as a place of culture and art.
The community’s planned Baaka Cultural and Art Centre will help preserve and tell the story of the Barkandji people through their artefacts, history and language. Along tree-lined banks of the Darling River are signboards about community elders who have kept culture alive.
Some boarded-up shopfronts still dot the town, but so do spruced-up shops, a golf club that proclaims itself “Middle of nowhere but centre of everywhere!”, a cafe where guests can linger over breakfast, and much more.
When our group walked into the local CatholicCare one afternoon, the residents’ arts and crafts group worked in companionable silence, paintbrushes gliding across drawn outlines of lorikeets.
Sr Elizabeth Young RSM volunteers at the charity’s op shop, which doubles as the only clothing store in town. There meticulously arranged rows of clothes, books, toys, shoes, knick-knacks (and a sofa we sank into) share a place with a mini hair salon.
A hairdresser comes in on some days to tend to those who need a trim or a bit of a pampering manicure or pedicure. The space was a cool refuge on a hot day.
“Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground”, the sign on the door of the nearby St John the Apostle church quotes from Exodus 3:5. The parish is one of five official pilgrimage sites in the diocese this year.
The sign also invites visitors on pilgrimage to say a prayer, visit the Baaka (Darling) River, “the source of life for thousands of generations of human, animal and plant life”, and to reflect on creation and the need to preserve it for future generations.
And we did.
Sr Elizabeth, who is also the Parish Life Coordinator, led our group in a prayer and reflection session accompanied by meditative songs by Dolly McGaughey, a Torres Strait Islander Catholic hymn writer.
We prayed for good rains in the coming summer.
Human impact
During our week there, we visited the river. It ran the colour of weak milky coffee. House-sized trees clung onto eroding riverbanks, roots exposed and seemingly growing both upwards and sideways.
According to Owen Whyman, the Barkandji-Malyangapa man who showed us around, these show the impact of human activity along the Darling River.
“Uncle Owen explained to us that the river banks have been eroded by water held back and then released suddenly by big agrobusinesses upstream,” recounts Dr Michael Walker from the Justice and Peace Office, who participated in the pilgrimage.
“Throughout the week we saw firsthand the adverse impact humans have had on this environment: from treeless land – cleared for grazing – that stretched for hundreds of kilometres, to seemingly endless numbers of feral goats, outnumbering even kangaroos and emus, to the permanently muddy appearance of the Darling River caused by the proliferation of golden carp disturbing the silt at the bottom of the river.”
Lived faith
In Menindee, we saw the breadth of Catholic Social Teaching lived out in projects and initiatives that had been thought up by the community, for the community.
“You get more done with a smile and handshake than with fists and threats,” said Daniel Fusi, the Menindee Central School’s Senior Leader for Community Engagement, also a newly elected councillor at the Central Darling Shire Council and our guide in Menindee.
Since moving back to settle down in Menindee 20 years ago, Daniel has applied this thinking to achieve good for his community in dozens of areas, such as:
- scoring a good deal to build an aquaponics system that aids student learning while supplying fresh food to the town’s families;
- running a pre-school program teaching social skills and literacy to ages ranging from babies (accompanied by parents) to five year-olds, for better outcomes when they start primary schooling;
- mentoring and volunteering that builds a sense of connection, pride and ownership among the town’s young people.
At the Menindee Central School, children can pop into the hall for breakfast until the bell goes for class at 9am. Latecomers miss out: “If they can wander around at night, they can get themselves to school early if they want to eat,” Daniel said.
The menu varies – some days it’s toast and a box of Up&Go, other days there’s cooked breakfast and pancakes. You only know what you’re getting if you show up on time.
Fr Peter Smith, Justice and Peace Promoter for the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, observed that in both towns we visited “there is a definite undercurrent of poverty”.
“It’s not spoken about often, clearly because they’re proud of the progress they’ve made,” Fr Smith said.
“But when we hear that they’re growing vegetables to be able to distribute to families who don’t have any and when we hear that in Wilcannia they’ve had a number of break-ins, but the only thing ever taken was food from their tuck shop, you’re aware that there is a whole other story.
“It’s my belief that education is the way out of poverty,” he added.
“It is great to see that the schools have been a part of that by ensuring good education for the children.”
Food for thought
Our group visited the site of The Old Mission, where children from the Stolen Generations were once raised. Today, the site’s oval is used during NAIDOC weeks to teach the community’s children traditional fishing or hunting games, or skills passed down the generations.
Both communities welcomed us – complete strangers – with warmth, drawing us into belonging, where the non-indigenous were included in the embrace of customs and culture.
Arriving home, we pilgrims find ourselves bearing unquantifiable gifts and a debt of gratitude for a glimpse of the vastness of this place where God lives and moves among and through his people.
And now we ask ourselves: “What can we do with this?”
The Jubilee 2025 Pilgrimage was organised collaboratively with Catholic Schools NSW and included staff from the Justice and Peace Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney and the Justice, Peace and Ecology Team of the Diocese of Parramatta.
