Joanna Barr Smith and Mary MacKillop's long friendship reflects 19th Century South Australia liberal Protestantism
Wealthy Adelaide Presybterian hostess Joanna Barr Smith (right) was among those supporting her friend Mary MacKillop's Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart while they were shut out of the Roman Catholic church during MacKillop's excommunication in the 1870s.
South Australia in the 19th Century nurtured a remarkable 40-plus years friendship between Joanna Barr Smith (nee Elder): a Presbyterian and hostess in Adelaide’s wealthy social circles, and Mary Mackillop, Australia’s first Roman Catholic saint and founder of an order devoted to the welfare of the poor.
Joanna Lang Elder was born in 1835 in Fife, Scotland, to a family that became wealthy pastoralists and public benefactors in South Australia. Joanna married Robert Barr Smith, son of another Scot-emigrant wealthy pastoralist in South Yarra, Melbourne, in 1856.
The Barr Smiths first met Mackillop in the 1860s, when Sister Mary (as she was then called) first arrived in Adelaide. A former governess, MacKillop and priest/geologist Julian Tenison Woods, in 1866 in South Australia’s southeast, founded the first Australian religious order: the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, dedicated to educating poor children.
By 1871, with an issue of sexual abuse by a priest in the background, Adelaide bishop Laurence Sheil challenged MacKillop over complaints about her St Joseph order members living in the community and begging for money to fund their work. After MacKillop argued against each convent being under a priest’s authority, she was excommunicated. Fifty other nuns had to leave the order and its Franklin Street, Adelaide city, convent was transferred to the Dominican sisters.
MacKillop's nuns were supported by Joanna Barr Smith and by other non Catholics such as Jewish businessman Emanuel Solomon. While shut out of the church, MacKillop was sheltered at Sevenhill near South Australia’s Clare Valley by members of the Jesuit order who had paved the way for many of her schools. The Sevenhill Jesuits had also started their own boys’ school and seminary where Tenison Woods had been ordained.
Officially having no convicts, with their sizeable Irish proportion, 19th Century Protestant South Australia didn’t expect Roman Catholicism to be an issue in its society. But the Jesuits and MacKillops’s Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart Roman Catholicism make two significant early Roman Catholic inroads in the province. But these religious orders were not directly under Rome’s control and they also benefited from the liberal element, represented by Joanna Barr Smith, among South Australia’s Protestantism.
From the late 19th Century, more Catholic religious orders of priests were given charge of parishes in and near Adelaide: Benedictines (1875), Carmelites (1881), Passionists (1896), Dominicans (1898), Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (1913). Other orders arrived in the 1940s and 1950s.. By the 1960s the archdiocese of Adelaide had more clergy from orders than diocesan clergy. This reversed later.
Barr Smith’s friendship with McKillop lasted until the saint died in 1909. At 78 and a widow, Barr Smith paid for MacKillop’s remains to be transferred from Sydney’s Gore Hill Cemetery, in 1914, to the chapel of the Mount Street Convent.
