Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I was waiting for you to say that it did not work. She forced all of us in the eighth grade to stay back studying until five o’clock in the afternoon. She stayed there with us, supervising. She had thousands of cards and she had very elementary ways of teaching mathematics. Even the greatest numbskull could understand mathematics with the little cards that she had been handing out for, I suppose, 15 or 20 years. During the athletics and football carnivals in which we played the state school, which was four times our size and which we would regularly beat, she would be in the sisters’ car with her rosary beads, praying throughout the football matches and athletics carnivals.

I think the thing I probably most remember was that she said in every religious speech she ever gave: ‘Now, Children, remember that he who laughs last laughs best. We’re all going to die and those that have gone to church and done the right thing in life will go to heaven.’ She also told us, which was rare in those days, ‘There are evil people in this world.’ She said: ‘There was a boy at my school in Winton and he skited after he left school that, within three years of leaving school, he had 15 notches on his gun.’ He had shot 15 Aboriginal people. She told us that there were evil people in the world.

I think this is where the Australian bit came in. I do not know of any other schools that did this. We sang God save the Queen, but she is an English person and I do not think that was very Australian, but with the St Joseph’s nuns we stood under the flag every morning of our school lives and we sang:

God bless our lovely morning land. God keep her with his enfolding hand, Australia. Whilst distant booms the battle’s roar from out some rude, barbaric shore, on earth there is no other land like our own shining southern land, our own dear home, our motherland, Australia.

Every single kid who went through a St Joseph’s school was imbued with a deep love not of England but of Australia. We were brought up to be patriotic Australians.

My father said on many occasions, ‘Who are the happiest people that we know?’ We lived in Cloncurry and did not go much outside Cloncurry. I knew he was referring to the nuns, and the St Joseph’s nuns in Cloncurry were the happiest people that I knew of by a long way. Whatever they had, it made them very happy. At church on Sunday, Father Alan Sheldrick, a man very gifted with a deep Christian faith and Christian commitment—and I use the word ‘Christian’ rather than ‘Catholic’ not to denigrate in any way but to delineate to you the man he is—said: ‘After the war I used to have to go on my bike on Sunday. We had two meals that we prepared—one for our own family and one for the nuns.’ He said, ‘I used to peddle on my bike and take the meal down to the nuns on Sunday.’ He told us, ‘Many years later when I became a Catholic priest, one of the nuns told me that one week when they had received that meal it was the only hot meal and meal containing meat that they were able to purchase that week.’ They had virtually no food and they were very hungry, and she remembered how deeply she had appreciated Alan Sheldrick carrying that food to them. So these are people who actually went hungry to deliver us an education that ensured that every single one of us passed our scholarship exam and that every single one of us performed, if we had the abilities, to a point where we would all get Commonwealth scholarships and be able to go on to secondary school. Finally, I have written only a couple of poems in my life. I am not very good at writing poems but I wrote this little one, which is really about my own upbringing in Cloncurry:

Bury me please beside Uncle Bert

back in the ‘Curry

the place that I love

I will not be far from an old dusty grandstand

that I once made ring with the shouts for the Tigers with my mates and my team

though I remember the dust and flies

most of all I remember a kid who was bullied by boys who were shoeless and tough

and of the mates who stuck by him till he was as tough as the rest

the tough little kid of the west

most of all I remember the little white nuns—

and they have changed their habit from white, in those days, to brown—

who gave me my god.

That is my final tribute to the people who educated me.

See this speech in context