NEVER TOO OLD

Last year Sister Anne Gardiner was given the “Senior Australian of 2017 Award” for her years of service to the nation's remote Tiwi indigenous community.  

 Her testimony was so inspiring that a number of different organizations pitched in to help fly her to the women's day event in Rome. Now 86, sister was asked to be the guest speaker at the Australian Embassy to the Holy See's celebration of International Women's Day, which took place March 8.

In her speech, sister said the biggest lesson she learned was simply how to listen, which meant getting to know and accept the Tiwi ways and working with their cultural traditions rather than speaking as someone from the outside and expecting them to completely adapt to western models.

“The biggest gift you can bring to indigenous people is to listen to what they are saying,”  explaining that by listening, one is able “to communicate back with them so that you know you are really understanding what they are saying.”

Though most of the Tiwi people are bicultural and are able to engage with the larger Australian population, they still maintain strong roots in their own heritage, particularly when it comes to leadership and the family structures.

Sister Anne was born in Gundagai in New South Wales in 1931. From a farming family, she went to school at the Mercy School of St Stanislaus, completing her education at St Joseph's Boarding College in Albury.

She entered the Order of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart on 31 May 1949, attracted by the opportunity to work with Aboriginal people.

Sister Anne vividly recalls the day she flew to the Tiwi Islands to start her missionary work in 1953 at the age of 22. “That was a moment of joy when I landed. I got out of the plane and the children all ran up to me, pinching my skin and saying ‘you look so young.”

The year was 1953. Sr Anne was just 22 years old and, as a member of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, she had been asked to move to Bathurst Island, the smaller of the two Tiwi Islands, 80km north of Darwin, to live among the Tiwi Aboriginal people.

“I didn’t know very much about indigenous people at all. I was enthusiastic, I was full of life, I wanted to change the world, but to go to Bathurst Island I think the people there changed me,” she said.

 She recalls she didn’t know exactly what her mission would be, but she was well guided by the man who had founded the Tiwi Catholic mission in 1911, Bishop Francis Xavier Gsell, who she met in Sydney on her way to her new posting.

Receiving  Senior Award

“And I asked him ‘What will I do? I’m going to Bathurst Island.’ And he looked down through his beard and looked deep into me and said two words, ‘Love them’.”

“And that's what I've tried to do all through my life, is to love them,” she said. “It was the best advice ever.”

When Sister Anne first arrived on the island, she joined three other sisters from the order, three religious brothers, one priest and one lay missionary who were living there at the time. They were the only white people the Tiwi had really ever seen and encountered.

A number of years after arriving, the sisters launched a bilingual school and Gardiner was made principal. She was put in charge of a leadership team that was tasked with helping her run the school.

Currently, Sister Anne is the only sister left working at the mission on Bathurst Island, with one priest who offers the sacraments.

A beloved figure in the community, she still teaches religious education classes and drives around town on an electric scooter with a banner that says “share a prayer.” Being well known throughout the island, she said people will either stop her with a request or she will approach them and ask for prayer requests, “and in that way let them know I care about them.”

Photo Monica Napper

Sister says it is the Tiwi women who form the backbone of Church life on the island. “If we look back over the years, it is religious and laywomen who have worked in these outback places that have nurtured and kept the faith together. When they didn't have a priest it was the women who were there”.

She urged both women and men in the Church to be involved in its ministries, saying that Pope Francis “asked us to get out there and get the smell of the sheep, to work with the people and hand over to the people as much as we can of what we've been doing.”