Mother Hilda Scott (third from the left) with the formation team and sisters (from left): Sr Mary Bernadette, Sr Julian, Sr Teresia Benedicta, Sr Marie Grace, Sr Therese. Photos: Supplied.
Twenty Benedictine Sisters have been overwhelmed by support following a rare public callout to save Jamberoo Abbey, after mounting costs from deterioration of the 40-year-old building have become unmanageable.
Mother Hilda Scott said cement tiles on the roof had disintegrated, becoming like sand, and had meant replacing the roof was a matter of urgency.
Mother Hilda said the other major challenge was soil levels changing on the property, directing water to flow into the building rather than away from it, and resulting in the degradation of its slate flooring.
While she jokes that she “knows this stuff off by heart”, having been under the weight of the maintenance issues for a while, the $1 million repair bill for the roof alone has hit hard.
And it doesn’t end there.
“The more water the tiles absorb, the heavier they become, which puts more pressure on the beams underneath,” she said.
This has resulted in rotting beams, mould, broken plaster and stained paintwork.
She said long term they also needed to fix the adjoining guest cottages to not only allow the nuns to stay on the property, but also to welcome guests for retreats.
While she recognised they were more fortunate than many, the fundraising task ahead felt huge and had come with some hesitancy in asking for the public’s support, which had never been done in the Abbey’s 175-year history.
“We’ve never been flush with money, but who cares? I mean, that’s not our objective in life,” she said.
“We’ve got a roof over our heads and we’re lucky enough to have something to eat and enough money to get our young nuns educated for the future, because we’ve got people joining us – we’re not short on people.
“However, costs have gone up, and because we look after ourselves, generating income has not been easy.”
She said they were evacuated three times during the 2019/20 summer bushfires, which resulted in the closure of their cottages and the nuns unable to complete candle and craft work to help generate income.
“We got back on track, and then COVID hit. Well, once COVID hit, that was it, no-one could come to our cottages, and everything was shut down,” she said.
“That affected us big time and, in truth, we haven’t recovered from that big blow and now you’ve got the normal economic things that have happened.
“In order to fix a building this size, it needs money we didn’t have.”
She said the nuns belonged to a group of Benedictines based in England, led by the Abbott President.
“We had advice from him, and he said, ‘You’ve got to set up a fundraising committee,'” she said.
“We fought against it because we didn’t want to ask anybody for help. We wanted to do what we always do, which is fix it ourselves.
“We’ve been in dire straits before. Hello, we can do this. He said, ‘Actually, no, you can’t.'”
She said they reached out to the Diocese of Wollongong with the bishop putting people at their disposal and then community members offering to join a committee, with donations now having reached more than $260,000 and groups offering to do labour.
“I’m being moved even as I say this,” she said, her voice lowering.
“What the support has done, it’s given the nuns a real shot in the arm.
“Not only that, we’ve got screeds of paper listing everybody who’s given us stuff, and the nuns make sure there’s a column beside it so that each of those people get a personal letter from one of the nuns to say thank you.
“It’s done something else for us too, because when people send us money or even if they just send us an email that says ‘Look, we’d like to help, but we really can’t’, by in large, they’re saying things like, ‘We need you to keep going’.
“It’s really reinforced our purpose. Not that we needed it, because we’ve given our lives to it anyway … but people have actually said to us, ‘We want you to keep going.’”
She said during two of their daily prayers, the nuns spoke out to who or what they were praying for, such as peace in Gaza and the Ukraine.
“And also now the nuns will always say, ‘And we pray with thanksgiving for all those people who have been so very good to us. May they know a joy and a reward in their life.'”
She said Jamberoo’s Benedictine Sisters began in 1848 when two Benedictine nuns from England were brought to Australia to start a monastery in Parramatta, where it remained until 1957.
“Not to say anything of Rosehill Racecourse, but the nuns, as they were sending off to prayer, could hear the fifth race as the last leg of the daily double was called,” she said.
She said the nuns then moved to West Pennant Hills, before housing development in 1988 prompted the move to Jamberoo.
“In coming here, our hope was that if people were looking for peace, quiet, solitude and for all those things that make life liveable, then we could provide it,” she said.
“We did wonder how the heck that was ever going to happen because we aren’t exactly on the beaten track, but we’ve been blown away that people come.”
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