The Contemptuary. David Foster

NSW Southern Tableland, to the point it attained a level not seen since pre-Reformation Europe, and it wasn’t only Celts, bearing in mind that at the time of the Tudor Spoiling of the Monasteries by Thomas Cromwell, de facto founder of the Anglican Church, fully one Englishman in five was a celibate in holy orders, it shortly thereafter disappeared as quickly as a felon espying an empty wheelie bin by the main gate. For from 1969, or about the time the newly-developed contraceptive pill began widely to be prescribed by the medical profession to unmarried girls, until the building was sold by the Church in 1974, what had optimistically expanded to become a heritage-listed, forty-bedroom monastery housed four tenants, the platinum-blond Father Simon of Cyrene Reverend Rocky Buzzacott, his father superior, a novice master and a single novice who subsequently dropped out as most, unhappily, did.

      I mean, would you be wearing sandals today? Try two a.m. on bare boards and lino.

      I am happy to report that Ravenswood is now back on the market under instruction of the receivers as twenty-five very affordable strata home units, some with views, not to be sold in one line but fully compliant, Alhamdulillah, with existing fire regulations. The land on the slopes below was sold decades back to developers so that the monastery belltower, empty of bells, is now surrounded, as prophesied, with housing estates. Presciently, the last Father Superior, Gerard Mahoney CP, Congregatio Passionis, had the remains of twenty-two Passionist fathers and brothers exhumed from the monastery graveyard, under supervision of local police and health department officers, and reinterred in Rookwood. ‘They would not wish their graves to remain in the middle of a housing settlement,’ he said at the time.

      Oh come on Gerry it could be worse! They could be in the shadow of a crematorium. And what could be more cheerful to the long-celibate soul than the peal of a child’s voice? Within earshot of the graveyard, now bulldozed beneath the AV Jennings Ravensworth Heights Estate, we have not one but two childcare centres disturbing, with their lurid billboards, an otherwise unbroken expanse of pristine private dwellings; Kids Choice Childcare Centre at the bottom of Ben Street and Starshine Childcare Centre on the Marys Mount Road end of Barry Crescent off Monastery Drive.

      Want more pay to spend all day confined to an enclosure

      Wiping bots of tiny tots made ill through their exposure

      To mortgages worth half a mill a single wage could ne’er fulfil

      Whose mothers say ‘Enjoy your day we can’t afford to knows ya’?

      Wipe a riper bot my friend

      I have a butt I’d recommend

      Leave it at that

      And it’s not just Marys Mount, but every hill around Goulburn is graced with a dilapidated mansion. They squat like flies preening their forelegs on cowpats. West of the northbound golden arches on the road to Grabby, past what was St Patrick’s College, we have Bishopthorpe, a tribute in bluestone gabled bays to the medieval English bishop’s palace, in recent years a luxury hotel that cost a motza to refit and left local tradies thousands out of pocket when it couldn’t pay its way; I mean, would you want a five-star holiday in Goulburn even with complimentary ghost tour? Now distinguished by a wholly superfluous ‘Keep Out’ sign at the entrance to the drive. Built as a residence for Mesac Thomas, first Anglican bishop of Goulburn, it housed briefly an Anglican order of monks. Between 1921 and 1941 the Anglican Community of the Ascension and the Roman Catholic Congregation of Discalced Clerks of the Most Holy Cross and Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, the last in their black woollen habits the first Roman cenobites to be sighted, post-Reformation, on the streets of London, this around 1840, could eye each other’s monasteries over the Chinamans Flat. Ascensionists, however, could scarce compete with the tubular bells of the Passionists, a full octave originally housed in the Sydney GPO but disposed of as insufficiently plangent for the din of Martin Place, so that Bishopthorpe the monastery, effectively deserted at the outbreak of World War Two, was dissolved in 1943. I don’t think it ever had many tenants but a father and a brother from the community were exhumed from the Bishopthorpe graveyard in 1996 and reinterred east of the tower in the south-eastern wall of St Saviour’s Anglican Cathedral.

      Gabled bays bring to my mind Munster’s Mt Melleray Abbey, which fairly bristles in them, like a sink overfull of detergent, and the Mt Melleray Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, OCR, Ordo Cisterciensium Reformatorum, was bequeathed eight-hundred acres of Goulburn land in 1888, a tidy parcel, later relinquished through perceived dearth of a local postulancy for the Trappist lifestyle.

      And the donor was a cousin of mine.

      Could they have civilized us, the White Monks? They’d have had a crack. Giraldus Cambrensis writing at the turn of the twelfth century, the golden age of the Cistercians, the age of the Abbot of Clairvaux, of whom it was said that mothers hid their sons and wives their husbands when he was about, though he cautioned he would have all men accepting his Benedictine rule leave their bodies at his gate, says of their impact on the rude Welsh: ‘Give them a wilderness or forest and in a few years you will find a dignified abbey in the midst of smiling plenty.’ Plus a few men who despite a pabulum of beech leaves and beer are literate in Latin. Perhaps the problem was not so much the delectable beers they brew (viz Chimay, ‘look dear I’m only having one’, stocked at Jim Murphy’s Airport Cellars, afizz with abbey well water and Father Theodore’s yeast) as the Strict Observance: nothing to smile over there when breasting a bar. A pocket of silence hereabout would be quickly dealt with. No silence in Grabben Gullen. No silence at the Albion, which is pretty much all that remains of old Grabby. Breast the bar as a thoughtful silent man at the Albion, you’ll hear the words in no time, ‘Ya got a name?’ Whilst outside the pub the grapevine has withered. I didn’t know my grandfather had died till a week after the funeral. Inside the pub, as you’d expect, it’s yap yap yap, they never let up. Christ, how I hate the sound of the human voice! Talk is the human spirit, according to Samuel Beckett, but we need to overcome it or risk ending up, as Samuel Beckett did, a gibbering head in a bin. Silence is the means. I am wholly in favour of penitential silence as practiced at Port Arthur’s Benthamite Prison, which warders patrolled in felt slippers communicating through sign language. Port Arthur’s Separate penitents were kept strict one-out in total silence. Even at compulsory attendance in chapel they were kept isolated in separate stalls, one-out in their own personal exercise yards. Goulburn was built in the style of The Joy in Dublin to accommodate the Crofton system in which the felon did solitary for the first nine months of his sentence and untoward speech earned him a hardwood gag; but those days, sadly, are over. To cite St Isaac of Nineveh: Above all love abstinence in speech for it brings you nearer the fruit. The tongue cannot express it. First of all let us force ourselves to abstain from speech; then from this abstinence will be born in us something which leads to silence itself. When you put on one side of the scales all the works of this life of a monk and on the other silence you will find the latter outweighs the former.

      Bentham’s original categories of 1791 still appertain: daring raw offenders, quiet raw offenders, decent females, dissolute females, daring old offenders, quiet old offenders and thoroughbred offenders.

      We are not, thankfully, wholly devoid of holy men in Mulwaree, for we have our Orthodox Antiochians, and the Holy Cross Seminary of the schismatic Society of Saint Pious the Tenth (SSPX), just a few klicks down the Braidwood Road from Wakefield Park where you get your backside trackside, is very much in business in this Year of Our Lord 2015 as it dates from post-Vatican Two. Housed since 1988 at Inveralochy, the usual dog’s breakfast of incongruent structures sprawled around a hilltop homestead built in 1833 that became St Michael’s Agricultural and Trades College, run by the Christian Brothers, who siphoned off most of the orphans from St John’s Boys’ Orphanage, run by the Mercy Sisters; thereafter a WHO drug rehab; if you took a mass there Sunday morning the priest would both turn his back to you and speak in Latin. The liturgy is deemed to be between the priest and the Lord and I am there to eavesdrop. A layman is but an intruder. The purport of the SSPX, according to its website, is ‘the priesthood and all that pertains to the priesthood and nothing but what concerns it’.

      But the most prominent hilltop building you will see as you whiz down the Hume, watching out for rozzers who hide beneath Windellama Road, is the nursing home used to be Gill Memorial Home for Boys, operated by the Sallies