Sisters of Compassion

This article was published in Archifacts, the journal of the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand, April 1999. It is reproduced with permission.

I remember years ago going with my sister-in-law, who lives on a farm near Waitomo, to a neighbour’s farm, to see a cave. He took us to a small patch of gorse and blackberry which was fenced off. We swung over the fence which was protecting sheep from the hole. We knelt down and looked over the edge. There were tiny wee ferns clearly visible on what I thought was a wide cave floor about twelve feet down. ‘No,’ said the neighbour, relishing his usual punchline. ‘That’s an illusion. Those aren’t little ferns; they are great big ferns down there. You’re looking straight down three hundred feet into the Lost World Cave!’ Now my sister-in-law thinks there would not be enough light for those ferns to be at the bottom – they might be on the side, but I stay with my memory for the moment.

I’ve known all along what I wanted to write about in this paper. Only I didn’t know quite why. Then I realised it has to do with historical speleology, hidden stories, whole lost worlds still half-glimpsed. It’s about the part of archivists in lending ropes and lamps, and helping locate the shafts for me to explore. And it has to do with seemingly tiny things which turned out to be big things when I got down among them. It has to do with scale and relevance, details passed over as insignificant in others’ accounts which I came to see as essential ingredients of narrative and theme in Suzanne Aubert’s story.

When The Story of Suzanne Aubert [1] is talked about, the detail is mentioned quite often. A semi-apologetic tone comes into my voice. I explain how, as Barbara Anderson has said, some books have to be read word by word and this story is one of them, how it is not a speed read, but how you can walk through it chapter by chapter the way you might walk around the Bayeux tapestry, pausing in front of the detail of each panel, the way you might look around the wharepuni taking in the meanings woven into the different tukutuku panels. I explain how you can take years to read it if you like; how it was designed to be accessible in its parts as well as its whole. I am aware that people have less time and patience for reading detail nowadays.

Archivists will know how bulky and voluminous archival raw material can be and therefore how essential it is for the writer to analyse, refine and reduce in their interpretation. Well, I did do that. I sifted and discarded tons of material. But the detail that finally went into this story, I am stubbornly convinced, was important to its wider understanding. I wrote in the Author’s Note that ‘to have a narrower focus … would be untrue to the very person the book was portraying.’

And yet, because Suzanne Aubert lived such a rich life for so long, some significant sub-stories could only be dealt with quickly in a paragraph or so, even though I might have panned carefully in several archives and accumulated a wealth of material on each. I would like here to share with you some of the research process for two stories which could only go into the book in their distilled essence. Both stories tell us a lot about faith, dedication and dislocation. My main reason for telling them is that they provide good case studies of how rewarding it is for the researcher when archivists contribute their initiative and experience, when they go the extra mile, especially for someone stranded in another country. I’m not leaning on archivists to do this. So many have other busy portfolios. I’m only saying what magic it was for me when it happened.

Because this paper is basically about the dynamics of researcher and archivist, I am offering it in honour of Ruth Ross. Before I embark on the two stories, I would like to explain why. I never knew Ruth Ross personally, but from all accounts and all evidence she was a very outspoken historian, respected for her work on Historic Places and Waitangi issues. She was an altruistic, inquisitive, brilliant, maybe trenchantly critical yet warmheartedly honest, experienced researcher. Her willingness to fossick for others undoubtedly kept her from her own historical writing. I found many examples of this when following up all the names mentioned in ‘The Reminiscences of Mother Mary Joseph Aubert’, the unpublished account of Suzanne Aubert’s life written by Sister Angela Moller.[2] Take Eugène Cafler, for instance. I went to the Auckland Museum and Institute and found Cafler’s entry in the old Cyclopedia, but I also found a folder on Cafler among Ruth Ross’s papers, which are held there. It starts, if I recall rightly, with an enquiry from France from a Cafler descendant. Ruth Ross did some research. She went to Whangarei survey maps, newspapers, everywhere she could. She wrote; they wrote from France; they visited New Zealand as her guests. I think a park became named the Cafler park and so on. It’s a heartwarming human story of research and contact.

The richness of the documents stored at the Auckland Catholic Diocesan Archives was quickly recognised by Ruth Ross. In partnership with Father Ernest Simmons, she devised the current, intelligently straightforward system to access them, coded under bishops and each interregnum. Listen to Ruth in 1976 writing to Sister Gregory, a Benedictine nun in Sydney: ‘Of course, one can never really guard against turfers-outer after one’s decease, but our whole system was planned with that end chiefly in view. We [Father Simmons and I] used to call it “putting bishops in boxes” … There is nothing like a solid array of cardboard boxes, shelf upon shelf upon shelf of them, all the same size and pattern, all numbered and labelled, to inhibit the tidier-upper. After all, what could be tidier?’[3]

Ruth Ross had criticised earlier research into Suzanne Aubert. In 1972 she wrote to the Superior General of the time, Sister Philippine Dunne: ‘I seem born to be a catalyst or something, the person who says uncomfortable things out loud which others have been merely thinking.’[4] She saw herself as a person who ‘called a spade a spade’, and who was fated to ‘ask around’. She was very sceptical of anything people said Suzanne Aubert had said. There were too many ‘saids’ for her liking, and she considered most had been bromided in piety rather than history. In 1970, she wrote to a teacher, who had sent her a young woman’s essay for comment, that she thought ‘Mother Aubert’s true greatness is not enhanced by the rubbish that is written about her. To me it seems she is diminished by it.’ She went on: ‘I’m sorry, I find this neither moving, nor convincing, just utterly depressing. I’ve read it all before, several times, by half a dozen different hands, but always told with the same unthinking uncritical acceptance that this is the true tale of Mother Mary Joseph Aubert. Everyone just keeps on repeating, each with their own embellishments, the same old yarns as though they were revealed truth.’[5]

But the Sisters of Compassion did not take umbrage at similar comments to them. They came back and surprised her by asking her for a frank critique of the ‘Reminiscences’. There is a very large fund of documents with the Sisters and in the Auckland Museum and Institute which charts her subsequent ‘no-holds-barred’ review of the ‘Reminiscences’, and the amazing breadth and richness of the research she carried out to find the documented, historical data. Out she went with her research expertise, trawling through National Archives, Lands and Deeds, Auckland Catholic Diocesan Archives files, shipping registers, the Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives, the newspapers and so on. It was she who got Father Jean Coste to carry out the initial civic archive research on Suzanne Aubert in France which gave me a good springboard later on.

Sister Philippine’s unfazed reception of the initial Ross criticism led to a friendly and frank correspondence over the years. Suzanne Aubert would have approved. She believed that mission carries on when you engage in open dialogue with the sceptical secular. In fact, by 1975, Ruth had also been donating to the sisters for a while. She wrote to the secretary, Sister Thomas, in December: ‘Thank you for your offer to pay for the xeroxing … However I feel I have a personal interest in the history of your Order. I usually send a small cheque at Christmas time, so this year, would you please accept the xerox copies in lieu of a cheque, with my best wishes.’

Ruth Ross had also formed a good relationship with Archbishop Liston over the years. In May 1971 she was looking for the Aubert-Outhwaite correspondence from the Cleary years in order to classify them. She knew Liston had lent them to Sister Philippine just before he left Bishop’s House to be admitted to the Mater Hospital, and that she had returned them to him there. Ruth was chasing them up and wrote to Philippine: ‘I drop in to see the Archb. every so often, and he is wonderfully well and bright, but after all, he is almost 90 and quite obviously his memory isn’t what it was. I can all too clearly visualise him tucking a bundle of letters away in a drawer under his socks, quite safe there, and saying to himself as he did it: “I must tell our Bishop about these.” And with that, the matter going completely out of his head.’ Philippine had obviously talked to Liston about Ruth Ross’s research input and analysis and in July she wrote back to Ruth: ‘Don’t forget that Archbishop Liston told me to have no hesitation in trusting your discretion regarding archives material!!! From one who himself has sat (figuratively speaking, of course) on closed archives for so long, I consider this no small praise.’ Both women are among the people The Story of Suzanne Aubert is dedicated to.

To a great extent, with this project, I inherited Ruth Ross’s standard of rigorous, no-stone-unturned, nothing-unquestioned research, and I also inherited the Sisters’ expectation that this would happen. Sister Philippine in a sense passed on the baton, when she wrote in 1990 that another essay I had done on Mother Aubert was ‘no-nonsense history’. As I worked on the book, I unconsciously tried to meet Ruth Ross’s research standard, but only once or twice was I able to be as up-front and outspoken as she was!

In terms of Catholic archives, my home-base, of course, was the Home of Compassion Archives, with Sister Bernadette Mary Wrack, who was open to all my questions. Then there was the Marist Archives, with Brother Gerard Hogg and also Father Michael O’Meeghan continually helping me to widen the research base. I can’t speak highly enough of all three. But I received valuable generous help from many others. The names are in the Acknowledgements of the book. I hope I didn’t omit people. So I could choose many instances of archival help – tracking the votive painting at Fourvière; accessing useful theses through the Sisters of Saint Charles; Father Rozier from the Lyon Marists volunteering to transcribe for me from civil records the text of Suzanne’s mother’s dowry list, and her grandfather’s will. But the two examples chosen are for their story-within-a-story nature. First, there is the actual experience of each person. Then there is my experience of asking the questions, assembling the missing pieces, working across a network of several archives. In fact, there are about five reasons for selecting these two.

The first is because the people played a significant role in Suzanne’s life. The two people were Jean-Marie Grange and Antoinette Deloncle. They were with Suzanne on the crowded whaler in 1860. They both came from her general area of France, around Lyon. She already knew Antoinette before she left, that’s fairly certain, even though Antoinette was only nineteen years old, six years younger than Suzanne. They would have both run away, not just Suzanne, because if it was known that Antoinette was leaving from Le Havre with Pompallier, Suzanne’s family would have quickly suspected she was there too. Suzanne probably did not know Jean-Marie Grange before the trip. He was a competent, intelligent teaching brother of the Clercs de Saint Viateur, the Viatorians. This congregation, however, had had its roots in her own parish of Saint Nizier, their founder had had a close friendship with Pompallier in former times and the simplicity of their spirit tied in with the Marist climate of Suzanne’s milieu. She might have ‘clicked’ with Grange from the beginning, but probably did not know him at all well until the late 1860s.

Both Deloncle and Grange lived through traumatic experiences, some of which went into the book. I told how Antoinette tried to commit suicide on board ship. Suzanne had recorded this with a simple Soeur Marie tombe dans la mer (Sister Mary falls into the sea) in her little Aide-Mémoire. Other historians have told me how suicides were not uncommon on the long journeys. Suzanne herself remembered the trip in nightmare terms. Because of the scepticism surrounding Suzanne’s reminiscences, I wanted to find out as much as I could.

Antoinette could not settle in Auckland. Into the book went one incident of hysteric reaction recorded by the Franciscans, which explains why she went to Wellington with Mother Mary Bernard Dixon in 1861. There are letters from Bishop Viard in Wellington recording her stoic attempt to teach sewing and French, and analysing sensitively her frailness and sadness. She wanted to go back to Auckland when the Congregation of the Holy Family was set up in 1862. But the ship taking her north, the Lord Worsley, was shipwrecked and she was rescued once more, this time by Taranaki Maori fighting against the government. In one of the wonderful link-ups of history, it was Te Whiti, later so famous for peaceful resistance at Parihaka, who gave the passengers safe escort back to New Plymouth. Antoinette is singled out in the newspaper article, teaching Maori women to sew but also significantly quarrelling with one woman in a frantic tug-of-war over ownership of a piece of material. The impression is that truth may not have been on Antoinette’s side.[6]

Back in Auckland, she remained less than two months with Lucie and Suzanne and Péroline Droguet in the little congregation. By early November, she had gone, according to Suzanne’s Aide-Mémoire. Bishop Viard wrote her a reference for life as a lay person. How did she survive as a woman on her own? What happened to her? Did she come back and forth again to Mount St Mary, only not documented? Did she sew or give lessons through the Sisters of Mercy contacts, even as a laywoman? Perhaps by scouring through newspapers, I might find out more. Three years later, in October 1865, she was noted in the newspaper advertising evening French lessons. By 1868, she was in Sydney, trying, I believe, to go home like so many others, and the story spirals down into tragedy. She never went back to France but lived over thirty years in Sydney asylums.

Her medical file is long and closely written in some places. I found it touchingly, surprisingly compassionate overall. The incidents leading to her committal in 1869, at age 28, make for very sad reading. On admission, she is described as ‘a delicate-looking woman with fine, dark eyes … she speaks English grammatically but with a marked foreign accent’. She ‘has always been extremely imaginative’; in New Zealand ‘she was somewhat overworked as a teacher’. It traces her hallucinations and paranoia, her swings to cooperativeness, depressiveness, irritability; it mentions her patient sewing. In 1876, she is aged 35: ‘She has been impulsive, talkative & peculiar in her actions, very disconnected in her talk & quite unable to make herself understood even to those who speak her native language.’ In 1886, at age 45: ‘She is a dark-eyed, dark-complexioned woman whose mental condition is of secondary dementia. She mutters to herself in a hoarse whisper… she suffers from a chronic cough and is extremely emaciated.… is useful at mending.’ And so on across several asylums until her death in 1904.

As for Grange, he came to my attention originally within the context of the role that in 1872 Kereopa Te Rau played in Suzanne Aubert’s story. It was from Grange that Suzanne had the impression that Kereopa was not directly responsible for the death in 1865 of the missionary Völkner; and that Grange himself had narrowly missed the same cannibalist fate as Völkner. One trauma already for Grange. But what was a teaching brother of the Clercs de Saint Viateur doing as missioner in the Whakatane–Opotoki area? Another trauma lay behind this: he had been separated from his companion, Archirel who succeeded, after a dogged struggle with Bishop Pompallier, in being recalled to France. Grange, however, had been encouraged to hasty ordination as a priest and a misunderstanding (to cut a long story short) made his congregation think he had chosen diocesanship. He had not. Back in Auckland after Pompallier’s departure, Grange, Boibieux and Suzanne formed a French trio of survivors carrying on through the turmoil of Bishop Goold’s and government investigation into the state of the diocese. Grange, in fact, was on the Diocesan Commission appointed by Goold.

When Bishop Croke arrived in Auckland in 1870, Grange requested to go back to his congregation in France. Croke refused. There is a letter from Croke to Kirby, the head of the Irish College in Rome, showing Croke overriding Grange summarily, claiming he was purely diocesan. Grange was despatched to Tauranga. He went south on the same ship as Suzanne when she left Auckland for Napier. Over the next few years, Suzanne’s letters show her growing concern for him. He died, depressed, alcoholic and incapacitated, in 1879.

My second reason for placing importance on the stories of these two people is because Suzanne Aubert cared about them. In 1910, Wellington gave Suzanne a big jubilee for her fifty years in New Zealand. The newspaper recorded her at the opening of the Jubilee Ward talking about her original companions: ‘ “We were just four girls,” she said simply, “and I am the only one alive.”… It was a party of twenty-seven, including the clergy, and Mother Aubert, still working vigorously, is the only survivor. One, two, three … up to twenty-six, she has sadly had the messages of her pioneer associates’ deaths, but her courage for her work never falters.’[7]

Yes, Antoinette did die in Sydney, in 1904. And the message had obviously got through to Suzanne. But how? Father Poupinel who was there in Sydney in 1868, involved with Antoinette’s committal, was no longer alive to tell her. Suzanne’s mother was dead; her right-hand man in France, her brother, was also dead. Does this mean that she had been in correspondence with the asylums? Antoinette had been shifted around several of them. Had Suzanne left word with the French consulate in Sydney to keep her informed of Antoinette’s welfare? Did the Marists from Villa Maria let her know if they had been involved with a funeral or had seen a death notice? Had she been in contact with Antoinette’s brother? Or was he dead too? These are some of the questions that may belong to the papers Suzanne burnt in 1913.

What we can safely surmise is that she cared. When frail Sister Marcelle was the first Sister of Compassion to die in 1912, partly perhaps through Suzanne’s own misdiagnosis of appropriate treatment, Suzanne stood at the window and cried openly. She said she had not wept like this since the death of her father in 1874. Who knows but that there were not other layers of grief and responsibility welling up. Who back in 1859 or 1860 had enthusiastically suggested going to New Zealand in the first place? Suzanne or Antoinette? Who, as a young energetic woman, might have been a bit impatient with the hypersensitivity of a psychologically or chemically incapacitated teenage girl? Suzanne? We don’t know.

All there is to go by is the one and only remaining torn scrap of letter from Suzanne’s mother, written probably in the late 1860s. Suzanne must have been anxiously enquiring back home what had happened to Antoinette because Clarice Aubert seems to be replying to a question: ‘I do not know what has become of Antoinette. Her mother was counting very much on her return when we left Lyon.’ Suzanne’s mother had obviously been in contact with Antoinette’s. Imagine that mother waiting and then finding out her daughter had been committed to a mental asylum on the other side of the world.

Suzanne also cared about Father Grange. He had given her intelligent and human support at a time of great trial for her. Suzanne bonded strongly to people. In several letters she wrote to Marie Louise Outhwaite, Suzanne is expressing her concern for Grange in Tauranga. One that has not in the Auckland Catholic Diocesan Archives collection until recently, has been sent to me by Jill Williamson who has the Outhwaite papers. Its date is 22 December 1874. ‘My very dear Mrs Outhwaite and dear mother’ writes Suzanne as usual, and goes on with her news and views. She ends: ‘Poor Father Grange still seems sad and suffering. He has told me of Father Boibieux’s departure, and he still doesn’t know the reason for it. If you do know, please tell me. It gives me a lot of grief to see the situation our poor French fathers are in.’ Notice how she doesn’t leave it. She says ‘please tell me…’. She is following up. Perhaps she wrote similar letters to Sydney: ‘Please tell me…’.

In fact nearly a year earlier she had already asked her brother in France to contact Grange’s congregation directly. His letter of 22 April 1874 is on file at the archives of the Clercs de Saint Viateur. It is black-edged because 1874 is the year Suzanne’s father died. He writes:

I do not have the honour to be acquainted with you, but I have been asked to pass on to you the following communication.
My sister is a religious sister in Oceania at Napier in the diocese of Wellington, New Zealand. She is in quite frequent contact with Father Grange, a missionary whose sisters you know in Lyon, and it is about this good father that I have been asked to write to you. Here is the actual text of my sister’s words:
Could you find out from the Father Superior of the Brothers of Saint Viateur where Father Grange’s sisters are? He has two who are married in Lyon or nearby. He hasn’t heard from them for six years. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to let them know the wretched situation their brother is in, and his poverty, so that they can give him some help. He left to them his share of the inheritance when he came here, and they are not in want.
That is what she asked me to pass on. Now, Reverend Father, I leave it to your wisdom to decide if you will be able to see Father Grange’s sisters yourself, or if you believe that it would be more appropriate if I were to visit them. So could you give me their address? I will do this willingly, because Father Grange has always been very good to my sister; but I won’t hide from you my strong preference, in the interests of this worthy missionary, that you do this yourself. I will follow entirely your good judgement.’

She kept on asking in various quarters, and on the files there is also an 1880 letter from Grange’s original companion, Archirel, who had safely made the break back to France very early on. He has copied out a letter from Marist Father Poupinel. Poupinel had asked Redwood on the latter’s visit to France, for news of Grange. Redwood had told Poupinel:

By now you can tell that I also care about them, which is my third reason. In short, Antoinette Deloncle and Jean-Marie Grange have got to me. They embody the personal and cultural stresses of our history so often overlooked by people who think we are bland and boring. James Belich has made the point very strongly that, in fact, our history has the dramatic power of compressed, fast events. Their experiences show some of the fracturing that results when tectonic plates grind against each other. Grange has that representative persona of the frontier man, the marooned, marginalised dépaysé out on the littoral of colonisation, succumbing to melancholy and drink. Both were dislocated literally and figuratively. Grange had seemed a well-balanced, competent person; Antoinette was the opposite from the very outset – recorded as vulnerable every time and everywhere she surfaced in documented history. Yet they both died in tragic circumstances far from home. They were not as strong as Suzanne.

The fourth reason their stories are so important is because they led me to give more credence to Suzanne’s oral history record. In December 1993, I received a bulky parcel of documents from Brother Robert Bonnafous, the archivist of the Clercs de Saint Viateur in Rome. It was a revelation. In the book, none of my intense excitement is conveyed. I say simply: Grange’s and Archirel’s letters ‘document very vividly and fully the events of the trip to New Zealand. As chroniclers, they become significant in Suzanne’s story because, in this discrete segment of her life, her oral account passed down the years has been corroborated by their contemporary record. Many details of her ‘Reminiscences’ might be wrong, but in the essentials they probably contain more that is ‘true’ than is historically provable.’[8] The Franciscan record also backs up her version of the trip, as do records from the archives of Propaganda Fide and the Propagation of the Faith.

I had already been following up as many ‘what ifs’ of the oral record as I could, drawing blanks on some, such as the claimed Crimean War story, the Sisters of Charity work. I had already also been contacting Australia to see ‘what if’ Antoinette didn’t go back to France, as is recorded in some books. Maybe she did die in Sydney as Suzanne had told the Sisters. Again, Suzanne was right, as my research discovered. Oral history and historical documents must go hand in hand in a cross-checking partnership, as Anne Salmond has shown in Two Worlds, and Judith Binney in Redemption Songs. I found time and time again that documents must be checked also against other possible sources of similar documentation. (Antoinette’s family name, for instance, was not Debucle, the initial wrong spelling of the embarkation list, passed down the years.)

When I came to write Chapter 3, where I tried to sieve the record of the Reminiscences through the mesh of women’s general experience in nineteenth-century France, I was acknowledging the stranglehold the legend had had on Suzanne’s story over the years. Lessons with Liszt, a cousinly connection with a prime minister, nursing with Florence Nightingale, were being recycled like on-hold music. I haven’t got space here to share Ruth Ross’s sarcasm on this score. I examined the possible origins of the legend and discussed them. But I then wrote:

Much was undoubtedly true. Everything that Suzanne Aubert did in her long years in New Zealand points to her potential to move through many challenging situations with energy and aplomb. What the roll-call of the true-or-not legend does is reinforce the importance her religious vocation held for her. All the names she kept producing represent some actual mentors and other, more distant role models for an active young woman with a streak of drama and plenty of faith in her make-up.[9]

Finding that the documentation on Grange and Deloncle supported Suzanne’s version was an important breakthrough here. Ruth Ross was perceptive enough herself to discuss this pendulum balance. She wrote to the Sisters: ‘One thing about the “Reminiscences” which bothered me a good deal: once one’s doubts are roused, one suspects everything. And having proved some improbable-sounding stories to be in error, I have assumed that other improbable-sounding stories are also in error. Inevitably I will sometimes be the one who has erred. But I think it is always apparent when I have supporting evidence and when I’m just guessing.’[10]

And now the final, fifth reason. Tracking down these stories became a sort of pilgrim quest, collecting documentary relics from several archival ‘shrines’. The process somehow seemed to reflect the values Suzanne tried to live out. She went widecasting, networking, following up, sometimes literally chasing people to give them the chance to help other people in need. Christ was in every one. Gradually Antoinette Deloncle was emerging because of the collaborative effort of people in several archives. Let’s go back to Ruth Ross again. She wouldn’t just write Antoinette out. In 1973, Father Collins of the Franciscans had sent her the Daily Southern Cross snippet where Antoinette was advertising lessons in October 1865. Ruth wrote back: ‘What happened to her after that I have no idea apart from the mention in the Reminiscences that she died “some years later” in a mental hospital in Sydney. Do you know if her history has been followed up at all?’[11]. Well, it has been, with the help of several archivists. More can probably be done one day. There may be documents in French consulate records in Sydney that I haven’t accessed so far.

In mid-1993 I wrote to the Mitchell Library trying to track down early asylums in Sydney. I also wrote to the Archives of St Mary’s Cathedral, in case there were private Catholic asylums in the 1860s. I received very helpful letters from the Mitchell, from New South Wales Archives, but the breakthrough came from St Mary’s archivist. Brother Hall was going the extra mile. No, he wrote, there was no knowledge of Catholic asylums in the 1860s. But:

He continued with more detail on how to obtain a copy of the certificate, what it would cost, how much if I wanted it urgently. He said that no parents’ names had been given, but there was no other Deloncle so it must be her. He had gone yet another mile because his letter continues:

Some benefit! It was wonderful. Brother Hall wears a halo, as far as I am concerned. I carried on to follow up her medical record and Sister Bernadette Mary agreed with me that the fee was well worth it to have Antoinette somehow ‘repatriated’.

What about Grange? How did I follow his trail? Again, there were bits coming from Auckland Catholic Diocesan Archives, from the Marists, from the Irish College in Rome, from Propagation of the Faith, from the Sisters of Compassion, from the lay world of the Völkner record. I was tracking Archirel and Grange in case they had written letters describing the voyage. The Franciscans and the Clercs de Saint Viateur were my main hopes here, because they were members of congregations who might have archived letters. The other travellers would be diocesan. Their letters were less likely to have survived, and might have passed through Pompallier’s censorship as bishop.

I asked Father Wysocki at the Nunciature in Wellington for the address of the Viatorians in Rome, and I wrote. Another magic breakthrough! I have a file of my correspondence with them as well as the bigger file of documentation I’ve already referred to. (Like Ruth Ross, I have donated photocopies of the latter to the ACDA.) Not only did Brother Bonnafous copy and send a neatly ordered file, but when I was in Rome for a few tightly-timetabled days, he did not let me struggle by bus into the outer suburbs. He collected me by car, had me work all day in their archives, photocopying as we went, bringing to my attention valuable documents on the parish of Saint Nizier, answering a long list of questions, pointing me to important theses and published research. He then volunteered to do precious follow-up research in the Franciscan archives for me when my time in Rome ran out. It was like striking gold.

Well, I have just changed the early caving metaphor to a goldmining one, and that is a good note on which to end this paper. Archivists and librarians are often seen as guardians, collectively holding in trust the keys to the treasures of our stories. They hold the precious nuggets of big themes or little jewels of incidents and anecdotes. But they probably won’t have the whole treasure chest. A sword will be in one store, the scabbard somewhere else; half a coin here and its missing twin across the world; pearls scattered from the thread of someone’s life. More than anyone else probably – except archaeologists – archivists and librarians know how much researchers and writers have to struggle to locate the right wreck, island, hidden passage (or whatever metaphor suits the search), how many maps must be studied, how much sand or silt sifted before even one of these gems will be found. Then the process is repeated again and again, sometimes across the other side of the world, before the pearls are found and restrung.

‘Guardian’, of course, isn’t the only role of an archivist. In the epilogue to the book I discussed the three tellers of the story: me, Suzanne and the reader. The triangle of authorship is in constant flux as the reader is always changing. In historical work, non-fiction, and especially biography, the archivist is also there. The dynamic, supportive rapport I had with the Clercs de Saint Viateur, the way things were followed up in a networking, facilitating, open way that had echoes of Suzanne Aubert, somehow ‘told’ me their story had to go in. I wanted it to. It was ‘meant to be’. In like way, the story of the Marists which runs parallel to Suzanne’s through the book became more real with their open, intelligent archival contribution. Archivists are not passive custodians of documents, as you know. To borrow the Marist motto, they may be ignoti, quasi occulti, but they are agents of understanding, channels of communication from one era to another.

[1] Jessie Munro, The Story of Suzanne Aubert, Auckland University Press / Bridget Williams Books, Auckland 1996. This book was commissioned by the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion (The Sisters of Compassion).

[2] Sister Angela Moller, ‘Reminiscences of Mother Mary Joseph Aubert, Foundress of the Sisters of Compassion’, seven typescript volumes (a combination of biography and reminiscences), 1945, Home of Compassion Archives

[3] 9 Sept. 1976, AMI MS 1442, Ruth Ross, Box 34, F2 of 3

[4] 14 Jan. 1972, HOC A, Env 59

[5] 13 Oct. 1971, AMI MS 1442 Ross, Ruth, Box 32A

[6] Taranaki Herald 13 September 1862

[7] Press Cuttings Book 1, p. 37, HOC A

[8] The Story of Suzanne Aubert, p. 55

[9] Op. cit., p. 35

[10] Ross: HOC A, Env. 59

[11] Ross to Collins, 18 Oct 1973, AMI MS1442 Ross, Ruth, Box 34, F1 of 3

Agents of Understanding