New Norcia is Australia’s only monastic town. Situated 125 kilometers northeast of Perth in Yued Country by the banks of the Moore River, it is a place like no other. In the middle of the Western Australian bush, you find old schools, a functioning church, and a monastery that would look more at home in the dry north of the Iberian Peninsula. Imposing Byzantine and Gothic structures rise from the red earth as crossed steeples pierce the blue skies against the backdrop of native gums with white bark and dusty green leaves. In the center of the town is a statue of its founder, Rosendo Salvado. He is in a frozen, evangelizing pose holding a cross toward the church and monastery.

While the rest of Australia is marked by British colonization, Benedictine monks driven out of Spain in the mid-nineteenth century established New Norcia. Like the Protestant British Empire, they sought to impose an exploitative social order on the indigenous population. However, they did not intend to establish capitalism. Instead, their God-given mission was to establish an economically independent feudal, Catholic community, a replica of a type of society that had, by then, been destroyed in most of Europe.

The history of New Norcia is one of colonization, assimilation, and genocide, but of a distinctly Benedictine variety. At the same time, New Norcia’s fate demonstrates capitalism’s power to assimilate antiquated modes of production — as well as the determination of indigenous resistance and solidarity.