I remember when I was leaving Monte Pio, the Sister in Charge said to me “When I told you to do this, or go do that, it wasn’t because I had a grudge against you; I did it because when I asked you to do something, it would be done properly and I could rely on you… Now go and I hope the rest of your life is very, very good and for goodness sake don’t marry the first bloke you see.” That was the last thing I thought about – marriage…. Anyway, I did say to her later when I went to live with this Aunty of mine “Sister, you threw me from the frying pan into the fire, because I would have been better off coming back to you.” That’s how badly I was treated in that house. I was used as unpaid help. I had to help raise four kids, take them to Mass every Sunday, and cook a baked dinner on Sunday as well; go to work on Monday and make sure I brought my pay home to her.
We were taught shorthand and typing and a little bit of business principles, in the back of the 6th class classroom, in the room behind the Motel’s reception area (the tower). There was nowhere else for us to go when we finished 6th class. We couldn’t go down to the Dominican convent. We weren’t allowed to. I think there was something in the rules of the school, that we could not leave the premises. I’m not too sure on that but think it could be. I remember that mum put us there either late 1939 or early 1940 and I left in December 1949; I was there for ten years. When my father found out that we were at Monte, he came up to get us and take us out. He said he was taking us and the Sister in charge told him “Mr X… you take those girls out that front gate and I will have the police to you before you even get to the station.” My parents were separated and that is why we were put into Monte.
We had baths not showers. When I was smaller growing up I can’t remember how often we had a bath, but we only had two pairs of panties, two singlets and we only changed them once a week. We put them into the wash to be done and they came back to you – you had your name on your clothes. After we came home from school we had to take our uniforms off and turn them inside out and wear them that way so that next day they wouldn’t be dirty going to school. The Sister in Charge did a LOT in her day, once she took over there wasn’t any of that, we had second hand clothes and everything.
There were three dormitories. When the boys came from Murray Dwyer they took the St Joseph’s dormitory. That left us with Our Lady’s dormitory and the Sacred Heart dormitory. We had a verandah off the Sacred Heart dormitory….
The classrooms were downstairs below the Sacred Heart dormitory – in the first room there was 5th & 6th class and the one right at the front was 1st & 2nd class, with 3rd and 4th class upstairs…. I remember on one occasion there were too many girls sitting on one end of the stool and the nun came up and smacked the girls on the back of the head and pushed them and said “Don’t be so stupid and get around there” and I looked at her and I thought “Oh my God!” We were just kids; we didn’t know what to think. Some of the nuns were really, really bad you know. Our teacher would come in and if you did your homework and it wasn’t right, she’d stand up (she was only a little tiny thing) she’d stand up and say “So and So, look at this!” and toss your book. We’d be ducking and pages from our book would be flying all over the place and you’d be rushing to pick them up. Oh, she would say some terrible things. Some of the things they said to us when we were young children, we didn’t know what they meant…..
When I first went to Monte the refectory was under the St Joseph’s dormitory near where the church is. When the boys came they took over all that area.
Where they do breakfasts now (at Monte Pio Motor Inn), that used to be just an open area with gravel, a small verandah and the kitchen was behind that. Then things were very tough in the kitchen, there wasn’t much room to move around in, and then around about 1947-48 they built another kitchen further over. I was 13½ when they put me up in the kitchen with another girl. We were cooking for 105 girls; we didn’t know anything about cooking. There was only one nun who worked in the kitchen.
The nuns lived upstairs that was their sleeping area and they had a big room downstairs at the end, where there has been a lot of talk about seeing a ghost. Apparently it was down the end towards the Church. But I don’t think it is a girl, I think it’s an old nun who used to live in a little room off the community room (that’s what they called the big room). This nun was very old, possibly into her 90’s and almost blind, I would make her cups of tea, she hardly ate. In the evening she would leave a lolly or chocolate for me in the community room.
They used to hold a lot of missions for the Church. Well, we used to go to Church every single morning. I could answer the Mass in Latin for you! If the altar boys didn’t turn up we would have to go down and would have to answer the priest in Latin at the communion rail, we weren’t allowed to go on the altar….. We used to have to scrub it and clean it and put all the flowers out and everything, but to answer the Mass we knelt at the communion rail…..
When I was in 6th class, we had to repeat 6th class, as there was no high school; we weren’t allowed to go out. We weren’t allowed to leave the premises. It was well known amongst us that you did not go past the fence or walk out that gate. There were big gates at the bottom and they used to be closed every night at 5 o’clock.
I remember when I was only little, in the early war years, we used to get these swaggies – men who had no jobs, no food, no nothing and they’d come and ask the nuns for something to eat. The nuns would get a loaf of bread out and make sandwiches and give to them.
Father Carey’s house was on the other side of the Church. It had to have been there for a long time, long before they even built the Church because really it was a very, very old sandstone building. When I was only 13½ I used to take meals to Father Carey. First of all after he said Mass during the week, I would take him round a cup of tea; he always had two wholemeal biscuits and a cup of tea after he said Mass. Then at a quarter to nine I would take him his breakfast. Father Carey was a very nice man, he did wonders for us. He is buried in the Campbell’s Hill Cemetery. All that time I had been bringing him his early morning cuppa at the Church, then breakfast in the morning and his dinner. At 5 o’clock in the afternoon I used to take him a bottle of water that had been in the refrigerator. He wasn’t a well man and they put him there as Chaplain because his heart wasn’t the best and he couldn’t do all of what the other priests were doing. I don’t know what year they put him there because I was 13 when I became involved with taking care of his meals, but he used to say Mass, except Sunday morning. One of the priests would come up from the Bishop’s house.
Father Carey had a Cocker Spaniel dog and its name was Popeye. There would be lots of afternoons when Father would come over and he would walk up and down the big paddock and we would all walk with him and the dog would be chasing around. Father’s funeral was at the Church and Popeye was under the hearse and started howling, I’d never heard anything like it.
As well as looking after Father Carey’s meals I still had to look after the girls. That started at 6 o’clock in the morning, we would go to the kitchen. There was a great big fuel stove, we had to stoke it up with sticks and paper. The nuns would be in their community room, we would have to go up there in the winter and they had a big fire heater and we would have to stoke it up too, so that when they came downstairs it was warm in the room.
In the kitchen we didn’t have small pots, we had massive pots and we had to put them up on that stove. We had to cook porridge for 105 girls. There were always two of us working in the kitchen at a time. I don’t know who the girls were before us. We used to have to hurry up and take out the meal and come back, we had to do everything. There were certain girls who would go down and prepare the vegetables – pumpkin, potato, carrots.
When I first went there, there was a man by the name of Mr Dumfrey and he was an Irishman and a very nice man too. He was the farmer there and every Sunday morning he used to go and buy a great big bag of boiled lollies and one of the bigger girls would share them out amongst everyone, we would all get about four lollies each. The new caretaker never did anything like that. We used to get his meals ready and he would eat in this little room that became our refectory when the boys took over the other refectory. That was under St Joseph’s dormitory. Then the caretaker would milk the cows and the milk would come up in great big containers. We would have to put the milk in the separator. It had to come over into the kitchen and into the refrigerator. When that cream was cool enough we used to make the butter in the dairy. It was so heavy to churn. We used the butter-milk to make the scones, nothing was ever wasted. The butter was better than anything you’d buy today. I suppose by the time we turned that churn about three quarters of an hour (there was two of us), you’d feel as though your arms were going to drop off. We did this every couple of days, depending on how much cream they had. Sometimes you might not get as much cream coming through from the cows. There were about four cows. There was always enough milk for us.
The stipulation was that we would have porridge for breakfast and bread and butter and a cup of tea. At lunch-time we had meat of some description and we had to have three vegetables and one had to be green, and then we had a milk pudding, that’s what we used to have. We would make different puddings. In the war years we didn’t have proper rice, we only had the husk. The rice was going to the army. At teatime we would have bread and milk, or we might have had a sandwich. I don’t ever remember anybody saying “I want more” or “I’m still hungry.” I never heard that said. For morning and afternoon tea we had a slice of bread with honey, jam, syrup or treacle. We didn’t get any junk food. Occasionally we would get a piece of cake, we thought that was wonderful. We didn’t know what it was like to have a biscuit.
Mostly the food that we were receiving when I was there had been benefactored. We would go around to the Church every night at 6 o’clock and say the Rosary and the Sister in Charge would say “I want you to say the Rosary tonight because we need money,” or “we need food because I don’t know what I’m going to feed you tomorrow”, that’s how bad things were. But if there were a glut of oranges in the area they would bring them in by the bagful and leave them, or watermelon we would get them. At times we would get grapes; it depended on what there was a glut of in the area.
We did all the cleaning, washing and ironing. There was one nun in the laundry, but the girls were there. The Sister in Charge would say “Get yourself to the laundry and help them down there because they are flat out.” How on earth we weren’t scalded I don’t know, we used to have these big broom handles and used them to get the sheets out of the copper and put them in these wooden cases with holes drilled in the bottom that had rope for handles. I really and truly believe today that my strength goes back to what we did back then. We used to put the sheets through the great big mangle (clothes wringer).
The boiler was down at the back of the old refectory. It had to be stoked with coke, but that wasn’t our job to do that, it was the caretaker’s job.
Sometimes we were made to feel very, very bad. You see there were a lot of girls whose parents weren’t paying anything and we were made to feel that what we were doing was paying for our keep. They didn’t come out and say it, but that was the inference. The Sister in Charge would have us over in the recreation room and we would be on our knees on that floor for an hour while she would lay the laws down to us of what we would do and what we wouldn’t do.
Sometimes another girl would help herself to your clothing, they would take your socks, we only had one pair of socks each. I remember one girl came to Mass with one sock and shoe on (she couldn’t find the other one). Well Sister got hold of her by the back of the neck and she ran her out the back door.
About the first year I went there, there wasn’t much food. In the war years we didn’t get any eggs, we used to get an egg pulp. It came in very big drums and we used that if we were making cakes. They were always making cakes for the nuns and anybody coming to the parlor and all that kind of thing. Like when I was up in the kitchen the Sister would come out and say “I want a tray for so many people.” I’d get the silver tray out, put the doily on it and do it all up with cakes and whatever else. Another thing too, when my Father came to see us, which wasn’t a lot because he lived in Sydney. But when he came up Sister would say “Come here, straighten yourself up, and don’t suck your thumb. Don’t say one word about anything to your Father.”
I never knew what it was like to go on holidays till I was about 14 and then my father would come up and get us and take us to family for a couple of weeks at Christmas. Some girls there had nobody ever coming to see them. Those girls would be allotted to go to people arranged by the nuns, but I was never allowed to go out with anyone because my father wouldn’t allow it.
Occasionally we went to the Maitland picture theatre. We would all go together, but it was very embarrassing when I got older. The nuns would send us down, but when we got there we would be asked what we were doing there and they would say that they didn’t know anything about it. And they would leave you standing there, it was very embarrassing. Anyway we would eventually be let in. The same thing happened with the Maitland show and the buses. We were told to say that we were from Monte Pio, it was so very embarrassing. If I was going down the street I would walk. Actually, we had a bike and we could ride the bike down when we had to do messages. Only one person could go if you took the bike.
I remember the Sister in Charge putting me on the train to Newcastle one time, I would have only been about 13, she gave me this little port. Apparently it was full of money! I forget the name of the place I had to go to now, it was in the heart of Newcastle to a big building, it could have been a bank. I think the port had money in it. Anyway, she said don’t let this out of your hands. I was on my own.
Another thing, when I think of the things we were told to do and with the world the way it is today, it’s a wonder we weren’t raped or hurt or something. They would send us out with these tickets to sell. We would walk down to High Street and catch the bus to Millers Forest and get the punt to Raymond Terrace and walk up to these farms to sell the tickets. Sometimes there would be a man living there alone. We would have another girl with us. But we were just kids. We knew nothing about sex. They didn’t tell us anything about sex.
The nuns got me a job when I left at 17½. I did 18 months training as a Radiologist and if I had decided to stay I would have had the opportunity to earn big money. But I couldn’t stay because I wasn’t getting enough money to keep myself at the time. I stayed with an Aunty of mine in Newcastle. I didn’t have any money left because she took my wages. Coming out of Monte Pio you are a little bit timid, you wouldn’t say “boo” and people took advantage of you. When you’re a young age, you don’t think of the future, just the present. A large number of the Monte Pio girls took up positions on properties or worked in presbyteries after they left Monte.
I was thinking about people connected to Monte Pio – there was Mr Dumfrey who used to give us the lollies. Then there was an old Miss Cavanagh who used to come into 9 o’clock Mass every Sunday, she was so lovely. She used to tie her horse and sulky up to one of the trees – the tree with the low branch, (the one that all Monte Pio girls remember). Anyway this Sunday morning the heat was terrible, and there were bushfires in the area, when she went close to the bushfire the horse shied and threw her out of the sulky and apparently she must have become unconscious because she died in the bushfire. I remember that very very much, very distinctly….
There are more memories but I think I’ll leave it here.