Mary Help of Christians - May 24
Mary in Australia
 The excellent T.V. series Against the Wind reminded us of the dignity and strength of many early penal-settlers in the face of inhuman treatment. This was particularly true of rnany Irish Catholics.
The Marian quality stamped on the early Australian church by the Irish seems very appropriate.
The broad outline of our Marian story has often been told but it merits a brief retelling here, before passing on to its less well known connection with Mary specifically as 'Help of Christians'.
Briefly we can recall a few items: De Quiros and the Spanish Conquistadores' vow to build first in the South Land a chapel to Our Lady the earliest known catholic grave, Bridget Egan's at Parramatta in 1800, with its engraved rosary beads entwined on the headstone cross the transport ships with catholic convicts (as a Royal Navy surgeon testified) huddled together counting their beads in prayer the two convicts taking the lash or the stocks rather than having their beads laughed at.
Among free or emancipated settlers the identical theme continued: the laypersons' Marian chapel in Sydney Town as crowds spilt over onto the footpath from the David's home, Sunday after Sunday, reciting Mary's Rosary and Litany, praying to her to send a priest Father Therry, on arrival, dedicating the first church in the colony to Our Lady Help of Christians the patriarchal Dr. Polding intervening dramatically in Rome to have Mary's Immaculate Conception defined without further debate and the hundred ounces of gold from Ballarat diggers used by Pius IX to strike Mary's commemorative medals at the Definition celebrations.
From the above memory-snippets, the episode of the two convicts deserves fuller treatment. The first convict John McCernan, refused to attend Protestant services at Castlereagh. He protested to the overseer, Eris O'Brien records, I at being compelled against his conscience to attend a service where (in his own words)'they would make a laughing stock of him and his beads' He was then put in the stocks for some hours.
The second convict, simply designated as Old Carey, was a carpenter in the road gang on the Cowpastures near Liverpool. In 1824 he refused to attend an Anglican service, and received one hundred lashes. Later he had Father Therry present his case to the Governor, an eye-witness recalled in the Australian Chronicle of 1841 after which Catholics were excused attendance, and were marched instead to the barracks where Mr. Dwyer led the Rosary for us We often reflected, Well, we are indebted for this favour to poor Carey - the man who was flogged
This same epic quality in our early Marian story can be discerned in the settlement of the separate colonies. A repeated pattern can be traced. While waiting for priests and hierarchy to come, a group of ordinary people would gather for readings, hymns and Mary's rosary pleading for help, as the Macedonians once appealed to Paul, Come over to us and save us.
And so the Dempsey, Bodecin, Mooney and Phillip households in Sydney Town, Port Phillip, Swan River and Wakefield Settlements became, respectively, isolated centres of Marian devotion in what are now our capital cities.
In Around The Boree Log' John O'Brien depicts the later Marian tradition among pioneer families of the outback, I can see that little mother still and hear her as she pleads 'Now it's getting on to bed time all you children, get your beads'. There were no steel-bound conventions in that old slab dwelling only this - each night she lined us up to say the Rosary.
There is a biblical echo of the remnant here, the Poor Ones of the Lord, in their intuitive Catholic sense. At their humble beginnings they turned instinctively to Mary's help as the early church had done: the Marian thread that runs through all history, discerned by our country's simple pioneers.
Later there would be three impressive Marian Congresses in Melbourne (1904), Adelaide (1 937) and Sydney (1976), and a wide range of Marian groups and movements.
Still one wonders whether we have ever quite recaptured the charism of Australia's pioneer lay-community, so close to the very heart of the Mary-Church mystery.
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