Queensland Foundations

The Presentation Sisters look back to their foundress, Nano Nagle, who gathered their first small community in Cork, Ireland, in 1775. The Sisters devoted themselves to the education of the very deprived poor children of the Ireland of that time. Communities of the Sisters spread in time in the movement of Irish migration around the world - a migration undertaken by so many in poverty and desperation.

In 1874 a community of Sisters came from Kildare in Ireland to the inland town of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. They were soon known as excellent educators, not only in primary schools as in Ireland but in the convent high schools they were asked to establish. In 1899 Bishop Higgins, newly appointed to the Rockhampton diocese in Central Queensland, asked the Wagga Sisters to staff a parish school and open a high, as well as boarding, school in Longreach. This small town, as it then was, situated 700 kms inland, was not marked on any map available to the Wagga community. It was, however, the centre of a very large grazing district at a time when wool was Australia's chief export. Longreach was developing as a local capital and this new Presentation foundation, independent of its founding house in Wagga, was seen as a Catholic venture both needed and appropriate on the pioneering frontier.

Mother Ursula Kennedy

Early progress was slow and there were daunting hardships for the five Sisters who volunteered to come: Mother Mary Angela Collins (in charge of the community) and Sisters M Francis Hayes, Alphonsus Burke, Patrick Madden and Ursula Kennedy. Three were Irish women and two were Australians, including Sr M Ursula Kennedy who before many years had passed became the loved leader of the community and, until her death in 1960, its centre of unity and tower of strength. She was supported by many generous and gifted women as these made the journey to Longreach over the years to enter the Presentation novitiate there. These entrants, joined from the early 1920s by a succession of young women from Ireland, enabled the spread of the Congregation as illustrated in the map above.

The Sisters were ready to adapt and change with changing conditions in Queensland and the Church. In 1953 their novitiate was transferred to Manly in Brisbane and, in 1960, the centre of administration was also transferred from Longreach to Brisbane. From the 1960s on, as new schools were opened, some older ones began to be closed because of population changes. The 1960s also brought the Second Vatican Council (1962-5) which challenged all religious institutes to renew and adapt in response to new needs of a rapidly changing world.

This the Queensland Presentation Sisters did with careful preparation and then the needed initiative. There were changes in dress, in long-standing practices such as adopting religious names, and in practical areas of service. From being teachers, many of the Sisters undertook new ministries in new areas of need. Despite the rapidity of change, however, the spirit and the ideals of Nano Nagle, devoted so relevantly to urgent needs of her day, continue to inspire her Sisters in Queensland and to pervade the schools where the Sisters have served. A number of Queensland Sisters over the years have volunteered for the Presentation Papua New Guinea mission, begun in 1966 as a combined commitment of the various independent Presentation congregations in Australia. In this commitment, they join the many Presentation Sisters around the world who, sponsored by their congregations, work in areas of great poverty and need. The Presentation Sisters, with their International Presentation Association, have actively adopted the contemporary motto to "act locally, but think globally". In this, they echo telling words of Nano herself: "If I could be of service ... in any part of the globe, I would willingly do all in my power."

Click here to see where Queensland Presentation Sisters
are located as at January 2010.