Mother Suzanne Aubert 1883 - 1899

In 1879 Father Christophe Soulas had arrived as a new Marist priest for Maori. He quickly appreciated the knowledge and opportunities that Suzanne’s experience provided for him. When in 1883 the decision was taken to concentrate his efforts on the isolated Whanganui River area further inland to the west, Suzanne went with him initially to advise and guide two young religious sisters, newly-arrived from Australia, who would be living there at Hiruharama (Jerusalem) and staffing the mission school. They belonged to the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Nazareth who had recently been established in the town of Wanganui.

In the event, Suzanne herself stayed on in Hiruharama and her bonds with the Marists were further strengthened by the creation there in 1885 of a New Zealand community of the Sisters of the Third Order Regular of Mary. This was the Marist missionary women’s congregation in the Pacific Islands, now formalised from the semi-lay tertiary communities of the earlier pioneer sisters. Suzanne now was once more a religious sister, leading the New Zealand branch. Her first three companion sisters were given the religious names of Anne, Bridget and Carmel and they have affectionately become known as the ABC of the later New Zealand congregation.

The beautiful Hiruharama Church of St Joseph, built in 1885, burnt down only three years later, and Suzanne and Sister Magdalen spent the whole of 1889 on what has become renowned as the ‘collecting tour’, when they walked through Hawke’s Bay, the West Coast of the South Island, Wellington and Nelson provinces to raise funds to replace the church. A new church at Hiruharama and the sisters’ convent nearby were built by 1893 and remain iconic features of New Zealand’s landscape today, featuring in most guidebooks.

The active development of the 1870s, fuelled by the government public work schemes, fell away in the severe 1880s depression, which brought hardship into the lives of many New Zealand people, young and old. In her journeying in 1889 Suzanne had met people from all walks of life and had noted the problems they were facing in a young country with as yet the bare minimum of social welfare infrastructure. There was no provision for assisting people with disabilities, for instance.

Of immediate concern to her were the young women, daughters of the population explosion of the early 1870s, some now giving birth to babies outside marriage, where the stigma attached to this would label the mother immediately and lose her any current employment or socially respectable opportunities in the future. Very soon, the sisters’ convent expanded into a packed-full home of babies and children to whom Suzanne as ‘Grandma’ and the sisters as ‘Aunties’ provided another family.

To fund the mission, Suzanne and Father Soulas set up a large fruit and nut orchard on a steep bush sheep farm on the heights behind Hiruharama. This property became the focus for another innovative venture: the making of bicultural herbal remedies, called by their Maori name ‘rongoa’. Suzanne had been working on these for many years already but they were now commercialised to boost the community’s meagre allocation of the diocese’s fund from the Lyon-based Propagation of the Faith. For a few years these medicines were extremely successful and ‘Mother Aubert’ soon became a nationally recognised name and face. However, the scale of the enterprise quickly surpassed the capacities of the pharmaceutical firm that handled the bottling and distributing, as well as the ability of the sisters and any helpers to meet the demand, both in sourcing the plants and preparing the concentrates. Suzanne, mindful also not to contravene Maori values, withdrew from any commercial ventures and from then on said she would depend on Providence as her bank.

It was becoming clear to the Society of Mary that their New Zealand community on the river was diverging from the norm of French-speaking Third Order Regular of Mary communities active in small indigenous tropical island societies very different from the westernising, anglicising yet developing bicultural nation state of New Zealand. The New Zealand sisters were now addressing general social welfare needs along with their Catholic Maori mission goals. So in 1892 they were detached from the Marists to become the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion – more commonly known as the Sisters of Compassion, a diocesan congregation under Archbishop Francis Redwood. He understood Suzanne’s spiritual, intellectual and practical energies and allowed them to be applied actively in an ever-widening sphere.

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