The Southern Cross | June 2024

The skills, courage and resourcefulness of a small group of Dominican nuns who arrived in Australia from England in 1883 will be honoured when St Dominic’s Priory College holds its 140th anniversary dinner this month.

The founding Sisters came to Adelaide to nurse at the North Adelaide Private Hospital but their Rule did not permit them to care for men and they had to find another way to make a living.

They put an advertisement in the paper offering their services as teachers and within a few weeks they had opened a school in Strangways Terrace, North Adelaide.

The Sisters were also highly accomplished needlewomen and illuminators (decorative writing) and they received commissions to provide liturgical vestments as well as more humble garments.  Their illuminated manuscripts were considered amongst the best of their kind and were presented to bishops, mayors, popes and even to Queen Victoria ‘from the Women of South Australia on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee’.

The school began with just a few students, but recognising the quality of the education they offered, more and more families began sending their children to the ‘North Adelaide Convent’.

Boys too were educated in the lower years, until they were old enough to attend the boys’ colleges.

The Dominican Sisters of North Adelaide was established and began to grow as did the school which had boarders from the beginning, including ‘parlour boarders’ – girls continuing their education post-school in the city.

By 1951 there were 260 pupils, including 55 who were boarders. There were boys enrolled in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 until 2006.

Today the college educates 670 girls from Reception to Year 12.

Sr Jill Havey has been involved with the school for 70 of its 140 years, first as a student, then as principal for nearly 50 years and now as convenor of the Convent Archives.

“I started coming to kindergarten here when I was only four,” Sr Jill said.

“We lived in Childers Street just down the road and I could walk. It was small but we thought it was big, like you do when you’re little. It was a beautiful world, especially the kindergarten classroom. They were into drawing and painting in a big way so there were nursery rhymes on every wall so it was a lovely place to walk into.”

Her favourite recollections are not of individual moments but the people.

“Especially now looking after the Convent Archives I feel very connected to these women of the beginning…and I feel very connected to families, to mums and to dads,” she said.

“I look at the sports fields now and I can see two dads Michael and Paul on the lawnmower changing the garden that the Sisters had created to the oval that we desperately needed.”

“It’s a story about strong women but we owe so much to the dads of this school and their voluntary service.”

Her other recollections revolve around the waves of migration that impacted enrolments, from post-war WWII migration to the arrival of Vietnamese refugees, including Sister Cecelia, who serves in parish ministry but has been involved with the college in various ways for 41 years.

The location of the school, close to the city and a meeting point for the transport system, attracted migrant families to the college.

Sr Jill said St Dominic’s was most likely the only constant community remaining in North Adelaide.

“We’ve had 140 years of uninterrupted history,” she said.

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