The Benedictine Dream and the Swan River Colony

Between 1833 and 1843, the First Carlist War in Spain saw Catholic defenders of feudalism confront modernizing liberal and republican governments. In 1835, the modernizing government in Madrid issued a decree suppressing monasteries and seizing their property, leading to the expulsion of Catholic religious orders from the country. Among them were the Benedictines.

Two exiled Benedictine monks, Dom Rosendo Salvado and Dom Joseph Serra, met in their order’s monastery in Cava, Italy, established by Cluniac monks in 1011. Here, they discovered their shared zeal to impose a rapidly crumbling European monasticism on new, colonial populations. The dream of New Norcia was born.

In 1844, Salvado and Serra applied to the Vatican for permission to found a foreign mission. Pope Gregory XVI approved their application and assigned them to the newly consecrated Bishop of Perth, Dr John Brady. In June 1845, the Pope farewelled the exiled Benedictines. In January 1846, they arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia.

The British established the Swan River Colony — now Western Australia — in 1829 with the intention of seizing Aboriginal land for agriculture geared toward export and profit. However, the aspiring pastoralists soon encountered labor shortages as free settlers chose to enrich themselves and not the colonial capitalist class. Exporting capitalist social relations wasn’t as easy as it had presumed. This problem earned the Swan River Colony a mention in Capital. As Karl Marx wrote, referring to a contemporary author’s account of the plight of a wealthy British colonist, Mr Peel:

Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!

Upon encountering these conditions, the Benedictines proposed a unique, albeit not particularly successful, solution to the problem of exploiting free labor. Although the progressive political compulsions of the bourgeoise may have pushed them out of Spain, Salvado and Serra saw hope they might reestablish their antiquation once more in the expansive, new British colony. Instead of paying wages and treating labor power as a commodity, they simply proposed to reestablish feudal social relations. The British Protestant colonists, by the grace of God, put aside their suspicions about the Pope and agreed to let them have a go.

Sustained by the Grace of a Protestant Empire

The Benedictine order was one of the most archaic sections of the Catholic Church. Pushed out of Europe, it sought to reimpose a way of life that had been lost as modern, capitalist social relations became hegemonic. As Marx explains in Capital, one of the defining features of capitalism is that it treats labor power as a commodity, which means paying wages. The Benedictines who founded New Norcia had every intention of utilizing indigenous labor but no intention of purchasing it. Perhaps this is why the Swan River Colonial Administration sympathized with their project and sold them upward of 7,975 hectares of land — forcibly stolen from the Yued people — at bargain prices.

Even before the Benedictine exiles made it to the site of their monastery, they ran into financial trouble, forcing Rosendo Salvado to travel to Perth to ask Bishop Brady for funds. The church’s coffers were empty, however, so a desperate Rosendo put on a concert to raise cash. He was aided in his efforts by a number of the colony’s owners of capital. As Salvado recounts:

Governor Clark graciously granted the use of the courthouse; the local printer brought out the programme at his own expense. Without being asked, the Anglican minister sent along carpets from his church for the improvised hall, and his sexton attended to the lighting. A Jew, Mr. Samson, forwarded invitations to prominent citizens and collected tickets at the entrance.

The Story of New Norcia, later published by the Benedictine settlers, describes the event as “a great success — musically and financially.” The upper echelons of colonial society had rallied across ecumenical divides to support the mission.

In part, this was born of mutual solidarity between colonists committed to exploitation, albeit of different varieties. However, as Marx pointed out in Capital, once capitalism became hegemonic, the owners of capital became much more magnanimous toward their one-time adversaries. The spread of market relations made it possible, he wrote, to control “those strata of society which, though belonging to the antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay.”

Genocidal Salvation

On March 1, 1847, the exiled Benedictines laid the foundation stone of the New Norcia monastery in a place originally named Maura-Maura by the Yued people. By April 26, the monastery was complete. In 1868, Rosendo’s brother, Santos Salvado, also joined New Norcia after a band of radicals threw him out of Spain’s royal monastery, San Lorenzo de El Escorial.

The Benedictine dream was one in which Aboriginal people would play the role of peasants. So, the Benedictines gave the Aboriginal people small plots of the land they had lived upon for millennia with which to grow crops to feed themselves and their family, on the condition that they’d sell the surplus back to the church. They also mandated monogamy and banned Aboriginal people from attending corroborees and dances, while demanding they remain in European clothing while in the mission. The Benedictines also forced Aboriginal people to attend church every Sunday, for Mass in the morning and rosary in the evening. They expected men to agree to these conditions of behalf of women and children.

Salvado justified this on the basis that Catholicism was incompatible with the way of life that the Yued people led. As he explained, nomadic life

is by no means conducive to the maintenance of the necessary physical strength required of a European missionary. The time for religious instruction to be given to such roaming savages is reduced to the few hours of rest, when the natives attend to the repair of their weapons and the preparation of their primitive meals.

Salvado also asserted that religious instruction would be of “very little profit” if the “catechumens” remained in contact with other Yued families. Instead, he explained, because “theoretical instruction cannot work on the unfortunate Aborigines,” it would be necessary that they “become attached to the soil whence they got their food, and at last they would abandon forever their savage life to lead to a new one both Christian and stable.”

The Benedictine project was to destroy the Yued people’s culture and connection to the land, to disrupt their families, and to impose a feudalistic, theocratic social system in its place. In one regard, this was a different approach to colonization than that favored by the Anglo-British settlers. While the British colonists carried out massacres on a holocaustic scale across the breadth of Australia, the Benedictines favored coerced, comprehensive assimilation. The two strategies were not, however, incompatible. Some Aboriginal people fled to the Benedictines for protection, choosing theocratic servitude over death.

“Peace and Harmony”

If it was initially difficult to impose capitalist social relations in Western Australia, it proved impossible to impose feudalistic ones. Despite the friendship between WA’s capitalist class and the Benedictines, as soon as the monastery was established, European pastoralists attempted to break indigenous people away so as to force them to work on their farms. Bishop Brady traveled to New Norcia from Perth to try and ward off “narrow minded outside influence.” He was unsuccessful, however. By the early 1900s, much of New Norcia’s population had left to find work elsewhere. This forced the new Abbot Torres to reorient the Benedictine mission toward education.

The missionaries reorganized New Norcia in the shape of a four-armed Patriarchal cross, eventually founding four schools, one for each arm. These were segregated on the basis of gender and race. The Benedictines segregated young women from young men and Aboriginal people from Europeans. Consequently, Saint Gertrude’s school was for European girls, and Saint Joseph’s was for Aboriginal girls. European boys attended Saint Ildephonsus’s, while Aboriginal boys went to Saint Mary’s.

The prior of the Abbey — revealing deep-seated prejudices — penned a description of the chapels in both Saint Gertrude’s and Saint Ildephonsus’s that remains today:

In the girls’ college, the impression was one of devotion, of humble adoration. Here [in St. Ildephonsus’s], it is one of exultant magnificence, of super-abundant joy. The appropriate word to define the former was refinement: here it is grandiosity. St. Gertrude’s chapel harmonizes better with the delicate taste of young ladies; St. Ildephonsus’s answers rather to the more brilliant vision of the future that kindles to glowing enthusiasm the souls of young boys.

Within these institutions, countless students have endured assault, physical, sexual, and psychological. Indeed, New Norcia has one of the highest rates of abuse of any Catholic institution in the country. Across Australia, 7 percent of ministers in Catholic institutions between 1950 and 2010 stand accused of committing assault. In New Norcia, a staggering 21.5 percent of ministers stand accused.

In an ABC article, indigenous man Kevin Barron, who went to school in New Norcia in the 1950s, recounts that “we were treated just like animals in this place.” Mr Barron mentions suffering abuse, including rape, at the hands of one monk in particular, Father Justin. Father Justin ensured Mr Barron stayed silent by threatening to deal the same abuse to his sisters, who were at the girls’ orphanage a stone’s throw away.

Abuse was not the exception but the rule. This was because a remote community built around monastic secrecy created the perfect hunting ground for predators. It also dovetailed with the harsh labor imposed upon students and wards at New Norcia. Yued woman Beverley Port-Louis was a pupil at Saint Joseph’s. In addition to suffering abuse at the hands of nuns who described indigenous women as “mad black bitches,” Port-Louis recalls how students were forced to perform tasks including “polishing the chapel floors with old stockings and candle wax and stripping the hair from bullock legs to make into broth.”

The official histories of the New Norcia Abbey, written by the Benedictines, describe it as a place of “harmony and peace.” For its captives, it was anything but.

Resistance and Sovereignty

Aboriginal people resisted their dispossession at the hands of the Spanish Benedictines and the British colonialists alike. The differing projects conditioned the forms that resistance took. In the British colony, especially in the twentieth century, resistance often took the form of prolonged strikes. A good example is the Gurindji strike, whose story was communicated to the world by communist author Frank Hardy. While resistance to New Norcia took different forms, the history of struggle against the Benedictine colony is rich, albeit often obfuscated and hidden.

Indeed, before the missionaries laid the monastery’s foundation stone, the Yued people began to resist the colonization of their land. In 1846, when Serra and Salvado returned to Perth for provisions, Yued fighters looted their camp, killed the hired hand left in charge, and let kangaroos destroy the monks’ crop.

Then, in 1847, a Yued man named Munanga lit a fire with the intention of destroying the monastery. According to Benedictine superstition, a painting of the Virgin Mary turned the fire away from the monastery, toward the already burned fields. However, even the official history of the mission written by the prior of the Abbey, Roman Rios, admits that the monastery was repeatedly threatened by fire.

Far from eradicating indigenous claims to their country, in a number of cases, the experience at New Norcia pushed the Yued people to articulate it more clearly. An early example can be found in the story of two young Yued men, John Baptist Dirimera and Francis Xavier Conaci. Salvado took them to Europe in 1848 hoping to initiate them as Benedictine novices at the Cava Monastery in Southern Italy. Arriving in Paris in June 1849, in the aftermath of a wave of democratic revolutions, the group found itself caught up in a confrontation between republicans protesting France’s military intervention in Rome and soldiers defending the counterrevolutionary regime.

Dirimera and Conaci asked Salvado what was going on. He insisted that that the Montagnards — republicans and democrats — were “men who had been raised from the dregs of society.” When Salvado’s students insisted that he intervene to stop the fighting, he replied that “this is not my country, and I don’t know anyone here.” According to Salvado’s own 1851 memoir, Dirimera and Conaci replied,

That doesn’t matter. You don’t belong to my country either, and you didn’t know the natives, but when they were getting ready to fight or had started, you went in among them, took their gidjis [Salvado’s word for Aboriginal weapons], shut them up in the mission house, and it was all over. Why don’t you do the same here?

By his own admission, Salvado was unable to answer the question. What matters, however, is Dirimera and Conaci’s clear articulation of their ongoing sovereignty within their own country. They understood that the land upon which New Norcia stood was their own.

While Dirimera and Conaci were able to appropriate Salvado’s language to articulate their own claims, it was more common for indigenous men and women to flee the oppressive conditions of New Norcia. Santos Salvado’s own letters, written between 1869 and 1879, contain countless examples of this.

Resistance continued well into the twentieth century and evolved with the times. For example, when New Norcia’s indigenous schools were established, Aboriginal parents were forbidden from seeing their children. In 1907, in defiance of this, thirty-two Aboriginal fathers stormed the school to visit their children.

New Norcia Today

Mining magnate Andrew Forrest is Australia’s richest man, and he comes from a line of colonists. His great-granduncle Sir John Forrest was one such colonist and wrote approvingly of the Benedictines in 1913 that

the Benedictines true to the spirit of their founder, have a rule prescribing manual labour as well as prayer — not only to make the wilderness blossom and fructify. Their motto is to work, not to beg. This magnificent structure has been designed . . . to teach the young the idea of the sacredness of hard persevering work.

It wasn’t the Benedictines’ work that made “the wilderness blossom and fructify” but that of the Yued people whose land they seized. As Ballardong-Noongar woman Dallas Phillips explains, “It was blackfellas that did all the clearing of that land. It was our mob that did all that work. It was unpaid labour. They were used . . . to make that land prime today.”

Today, a small community of monks remains at New Norcia. Last year, they decided to sell 7,975 hectares of the land granted to their antecedents in 1847 by the colony of Swan River. Although the land is valued at $40 million, Andrew Forrest has agreed to purchase it for just $17 million. The church claims this is necessary to meet the compensation costs of the historic sexual abuse claims leveled against it by Aboriginal victims of the mission’s orphanages. The Catholic Church, however, is one of the biggest employers in the country and could easily afford to pay its victims. The decision to sell has more to do with fact there are only six monks left in New Norcia, making it impractical to hold onto the farmland anymore.

In an ABC interview following the announcement of the sale, Yued man Elvis Moody said he was disappointed that the land hasn’t been returned to the Yued people, who could put it to use “for preservation and protection of natural species” rather than agriculture, as well as grant access to Yued people for ceremonies.

Yued sovereignty was ignored in 1847, and Australian capitalism continues to ignore it today. The “hard persevering work” of New Norcia’s Aboriginal farmers may well have added value to the land that was stolen from them by the Benedictine monks. Now that Salvado’s experiment in founding a Catholic feudal utopia has finally run its course, it’s Andrew Forrest who will profit.

We can, however, find a solution to this ongoing injustice in the tradition of resistance, not only of the Yued people but of Aboriginal peoples across the continent. In the capitalists, the Benedictines have a powerful ally. And in the class with interests opposed to capital — the working class — the struggle for indigenous liberation has a powerful ally also.

As Marx wrote on the eve of the revolutions witnessed by John Baptist Dirimera and Francis Xavier Conaci, under the rule of the bourgeoisie, “All that is holy is profaned.” In the end, it wasn’t a shared love of God or zeal for the betterment of humanity that united the exiled Spanish Benedictines with the Anglo-Protestant settler colonists of Western Australia but a cold cash nexus. When Dirimera and Conaci instinctively sided with French republican revolutionaries against soldiers, however, they revealed a greater and more inspired power — solidarity.