Wonderful Wednesday

Houses with wrought iron balconies in Paddington

Vanessa was free on Wednesday so she took us into Sydney for an exploration. We began with Mary MacKillop Place. Mary was Australia’s first Saint who was beatified in 1995 by Pope John Paul II. In her lifetime she was regarded as a troublemaker and an agitator but she contributed enormously to the status of poor people in Australia and their education in her lifetime in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition was wonderful. It had lots of interactive scenes and foci. The house has the biggest Aboriginal painting in Australia on one of the ceilings which demonstrates a remarkable fusion between aboriginal beliefs and catholic teaching. The room where Mary died is still part of that house and the sense of her spirit and its concern for poor and underprivileged people is very palpable in the place.

After visiting here, we moved on to a gallery selling Aboriginal Art. The gallery specialises in paintings from an area near Alice Springs and shows a rich diversity of styles in its paintings. Stephen bought me a small painting from an area right in the centre of Australia called St Theresa. It reminded me of the ceiling painting in Mary MacKillop House. It transpired that aboriginal people in this area have been influenced by the Catholic faith and their art reflects this inculturation. There is much more blue in the picture, alongside the more familiar earthy tones and black and white. After lunch in Paddington we admired the many lacework balconies on the houses in that area. The houses were originally built for workers in the 19th century but they have now been restored and their wrought iron balconies, freshly painted to become much sought after properties in a fashionable, leafy suburb. Then Vanessa took us for a drive around Centennial Park which was created in 1888, from land used for grazing, to commemorate the first 100 years of Australia. There are avenues of large, well established trees, many of which look over 100 years old. Ruth does her personal fitness training at 6.30am one morning every week here and I must say it’s a beautiful place to work.