The First Five
After a journey of four and a half months, the barque Francis Spaight dropped anchor in Farm Cove, Sydney Town, a British colony in New South Wales on Monday 31 December 1838. According to a diary kept by one of the passengers, it was a very hot humid day, and the air was filled with the sound of strange noisy insects. Amongst the group of religious clerics on board who were accompanied by the Vicar General of the Diocese of New Holland, Dr Ullathorne, was a group of five women Religious from Dublin, Ireland who had volunteered to work with the convict women in the Female Factory at Parramatta.
These women belonged to the first group of Apostolic Women Religious in the Catholic Church, the Sisters of Charity founded in Dublin in 1815 by Mary Aikenhead. These original pioneers were the first nuns to set foot in Australia, and paved the way for other women Religious to come to Australia and to Oceania.
The First Five Sisters, by Dr Hazel Cope
These five sisters, Margaret John Cahill, Catherine De Sales O’Brien, Alicia Baptist de Lacy, Julia Lawrence Cater and a novice, Eliza Xavier Williams became the first woman religious to pronounce her vows in Australia. Their story is one of courage, resilience, foresight, tenacity, endurance. At times, the sisters experienced conflict with the episcopal hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Each of these women was impelled by the love of Christ to serve the poor and to see Christ in everyone they met.