A Life of Inclusion: Joan Healy

Dorothy Scott, Victoria Regional Meeting

As a Quaker, my understanding of how the Testimony of Community can be made manifest in one’s life has been immeasurably deepened by witnessing the work of Friends and people from other faith traditions. Here I describe a visit to Sister Joan Healy AM, who belongs to the Order founded by Mary MacKillop, the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart: www.sosj.org.au/our-story/our-history/.

Sister Joan’s work in the field of child welfare inspired me as a young social worker over half a century earlier, and she continues to inspire me today.

We sit in the kitchen on a cold winter’s day, nourished by soup Joan has made. We gaze through the small window and see children tending their vegetable beds. They are from St John’s Catholic School in Footscray in the inner western suburbs of Melbourne. From over 22 different countries their families have come, in hope and sometimes in grief, to begin a new life in this land. Joan tells me that some of the children had never touched soil with their bare hands. We see joy and wonder on their faces. Our spirits soar as we hear the chorus of their excited voices.

I am visiting Sister Joan Healy to interview her about one aspect of her long life dedicated to the inclusion of the excluded. She is living on her own in a large house that was once filled with young novices from her order, the Sisters of St Joseph. Turning 90 this year, Joan welcomes people from many nations as they come together in what was once the chapel, to discern how to serve the excluded members of this community. Joan loves this community with a passion.

It is nearly fifteen years since I joined Joan and a small group of Sisters of St Joseph and senior Aboriginal women to travel to the lands of the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Anangu (people). As we approached the land on which she was born, our Aboriginal leader shared a traditional story. We were blessed by her act of inclusion, allowing us, non-Aboriginal people coming on to Anangu land, to hear this story of ancient wisdom. Given the brutal history of dispossession and exclusion of Aboriginal people by European settlers, this act of inclusion is a gift of grace.

In the days that followed we listened to grandmothers share their pain about the removal of their grandchildren, and about the plight of infants suffering from malnutrition. In response to this, one Sister lived in a caravan on the site of a newly established Homemaker Centre, to support an Aboriginal health worker as she cared for young mothers and their children. Instead of treating the young women as “clients” of a service for neglectful mothers, she loved them as an Aboriginal grandmother would, creating opportunities for the young women to contribute to their community. She drew on the healing power of “ngaparti ngaparti”, a reciprocal kindness connecting us all to one another. The young women grew in stature in the eyes of their community, and their young children began to thrive.

I have read Joan’s extraordinary book, Writing for Raksmey, which was shortlisted for the 2018 National Biography Award. It tells the story of the years she spent in a camp on the Thai border to which Cambodian refugees fled from the genocide sweeping their blood-soaked nation. I was moved by the humility with which Joan described how she had learned from a group of Cambodian people who, at grave risk to themselves, are committed to peacefully rebuilding communities that have suffered appalling violence and loss. After lunch, Joan recounted one experience.

One of my huge moments in Cambodia was when we were with a bunch of village leaders …. At…the biggest reception room that was still standing in Phnom Penh … all of the UN people were there in their suits…They said  ‘any questions?’  and one village leader put up his hand.  He has rope tied around his waist, holding up his trousers, and he’s got his flip flops on. He stands up and he says ‘you wrote about our village, that we are running a duck project and a rice barn. Yes, we run a duck project and a rice barn but that’s not what we actually do. We develop people, that’s what we do’. He sat down and they took no notice whatsoever and I’m like – ‘yes, that was it, so whatever else you’re doing, whatever other thing you are doing, the fundamental thing is, you are watching people develop’.

But today I am not here to talk with Joan about walking beside and bearing witness to inspiring Aboriginal people and courageous Cambodians. I am here to learn more about her pioneering child welfare reform in the 1970s. Joan and her fellow Sisters were deeply committed to closing their large institutions and finding new ways to support fragile families so that children would not be taken into State care, as so many of their parents had experienced. Our wider society saw such parents as social outcasts, as modern day lepers, and as beneath contempt, for neglecting their children. This was not how Joan saw them:

I was seeing strength in the families.  I was seeing a hidden strength … every one of those families, all they wanted was what was best for their children.  Their instinct was that they could be good for their children themselves.

Joan recounted how she listened and learned.

One young mother said to me ‘I haven’t got a mum, that’s what’s missing. I haven’t got a mum’.  I’d say, ‘I can’t give you a mum, but if you had a mum what would you imagine your mum would be doing now?’ She would say ‘she’d know, I’ve got this crying kid and I’ve got this husband who drinks, and I’ve got this and this, and she’d know what to do’.  I said, ‘I don’t know but if I could find just a woman who was around here, some kind of neighbour who could be like a mum to you, as much as she could, would you be interested in meeting her?’  Then I had to find the person who could be like her mum….

And that is just what Joan did.  She led a team of Sisters and social workers to show that ‘child protection’ could be done in a radically different way. Working with ‘excluded families’ as they described them, this team created bridges of social inclusion, painstakingly and sensitively weaving a web of relationships in the local community. Vital to their pioneering approach was to find and support ‘ordinary people’ to do something extraordinary – to befriend and nurture parents who had received little love as children, so they might nurture their own children. Some of those relationships, patiently and tenderly forged between families, have grown into strong bonds, flourishing for over forty years. The lives of children have been transformed, and a cycle of inter-generational neglect and exclusion has ended.

What began here in Footscray, all those years ago, speaks to our condition as a nation today. The number of children being brought into State care in Australia is rising, year after year, dramatically and tragically so for Aboriginal children and their families. We must heed the prophets in our own land who have paved a different path. They are the harbingers of hope for the excluded children and families of this nation.

As I farewell Joan, I reflect on the profound principles exemplified by her life’s work  – learning from the excluded, seeing their strengths rather than their deficits, and honouring their humanity. It is the Testimony of Community made manifest.

Landscapes of the Soul- A Book Review by Dorothy Scott, Victoria Regional Meeting

Clemence Overall, Down to the Bone, a jail, a journey, four women. Mud Brick Press. 2024

ISBN 978-0-6456684-3-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-6456684-2-1 (epub)

Zar & Kasim, A Journey from Afghanistan, a story of survival and hope

(editing by Jeremy Irwin and Robert J.Moriarty)

ISBN 9798312707465

The Irish novelist Colm Toibin once wrote ‘All of us have a landscape of the soul, places whose contours and resonances are etched into us and haunt us.’ Both these books reveal the landscape of the souls of their authors.

In the evocatively written book Down to the Bone, our Friend Clemmie Overall, takes us to a tumultuous time when she was a young woman warrior, fired with passion for social justice, and living in parts of the world where people struggle to survive.

Through her eyes we enter the lives of Larian in Haiti, Teresa in Guatemala and Jayla in the United States. The poverty and violence which permeate the lives of these women is graphically captured, as is their resourcefulness, determination and courage.  Drawing on very detailed journal entries she made at the time, the American-born and raised Clemmie Overall illuminates the inner world and the outer world of these three women, and at the same time, allows us to gaze into her inner world. The book opens with Clemmie being thrown into a filthy prison in Guatemala during a break from her studies in archaeology. We know then that we are in for a wild journey.

With deep compassion, acute observation and empathic insight, she shows us the reality of Larian’s life amidst the violence of Haitian society, in the long shadow of the history of slavery and structural racism. In Guatemala the reader is exposed to the hardship in the bare existence of Teresa, hardship compounded by the legacy of colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous people.  While extreme poverty is less evident in relation to Jayla in Washington, this was the story which I found most heartbreaking. The emotional impoverishment in the life of Jayla, an African-American single mother who grew up in State care and who is imprisoned for the harm she inflicts on her own children, painfully reminded me of my work in the field of child protection.

Despite the intense suffering of these women, this is not a book of despair. Each woman’s individuality and spirit shines through the darkness, as does the tenacity that comes from being a mother. Clemmie has obviously carried her friendships with these women in her heart for all these years. Her experiences with them helped determine the path she took in life, for example, in working with undocumented immigrants in the US.  This book is a gift to us all.

Our Journey from Afghanistan, a story of survival and hope is written from the inside. The authors’ full names are not given due to fears of retribution by the Taliban on their families still in Afghanistan. Zar gives a harrowing account of her childhood in a rural village in which all the men and boys were murdered, with the exception of her brother who is disguised as a girl by their desperate mother. This massacre is one of countless atrocities in the genocide of the Hazara people, an ethnic and religious minority in Afghanistan.

Zar’s widowed mother raises her six children in great hardship, and despite the judgement of others in the village, she supports Zar in her determination to go to school. Zar later becomes the first girl in her village to go to university. In Kabul the world opens to her, and she becomes involved with an inspiring group of idealistic young peace activists, about whom the Australian author Mark Isaacs has written in his book The Kabul Peace House. When the Taliban return to power in 2021, Kabul descends into chaos and terror. Zar and her young husband, Kasim, like many thousands of others, flee to Pakistan. It is a perilous journey, described in vivid detail.

With the support of Permaculture for Refugees, an organisation co-founded by our Friend Rosemary Morrow, and an international group of humanitarians led by the eminent US peace activist Kathy Kelly, Zar and Kasim are part of a small group of the former Afghan peace workers that reach Portugal. There they become involved in a permaculture project and a creative refugee resettlement program in a depopulating area undergoing desertification. Many Australian Friends will know of this resettlement project, and of subsequent resettlement projects for the Afghan former peace activists.

What Zar has written is a memoir filled with intense and raw emotions. To a western reader the degree of patriarchal oppression is overwhelming, and I am in awe at the courage of Zar’s generation of Afghan women who fought for their freedom, often at immense personal cost. Zar’s husband Kasim also writes a short, final section of the book. It gives us a fascinating insight into how Afghan society was changing in the first two decades of the century, and what it was like to witness this falling apart.

There is no “happy ever after ending” to this story. The struggle of the former peace activists to adjust to a new life in Europe while their families still suffer in Afghanistan, renders that impossible.

The landscapes of their souls and what has been etched into them is laid bare, but hope endures.