In 1959, a young Sydney girl went to the movies to see Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story. Like any other member of her generation, Bernadette must have been struck by the elegance of this tomboy with wide brown eyes. But for her, the story of Sister Luke's rebellious nun, who nurses lepers in the Congo, falls in love with Peter Finch and in the film's final scene, hangs up her habit to face the light of day, must have had added resonance: that year Bernadette entered the cloistered world of the Carmelite sisters of Dulwich Hill. In the 45 years since, she's seen no movies, and no more Audrey Hepburn - no Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's or Natasha in War and Peace. For Sister Bernadette, Hepburn is a distant memory. "I think it was just a made-up order," she says of the convent in The Nun's Story. "Yes, I saw that when I was young."
Now think of life without war - no Vietnam, cnn or Fahrenheit 9/11 - a life where the only news comes filtered through the occasional visitor or the Vatican weekly newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. "When was the year the Pope was shot?" asks Sister Veronica, who was two years into monastic life when Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca made his 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. "Mass was just going to start, and Mother came in and said, 'The Pope's been shot.' We didn't know any details, but you can imagine how we prayed for him and the shock of it all."
That is about the easiest thing to imagine in the lives of the eight cloistered sisters of the Carmelite Monastery at Goonellabah, near Lismore, in northern New South Wales, who can be seen only through a grilled window in the reception area. It's into this modest room, watched over by old black-and-white photographs of St. Teresa of the Andes, that Sisters Bernadette, Veronica, Antoinette and Maria come in turn, each shedding a little more light on an existence which Sister Veronica herself can imagine outsiders wondering about: "I've been passing the monastery for five years. What do they do in there? What keeps them in there?" The grille is in many ways symbolic. And the longer a visitor remains here, the more the question arises: Who is shielding what, and from whom?
"We're the only people in the world, I think, who have the right to have a grille," Sister Veronica says of the Catholic Carmelite order. Their nine Australian and New Zealand monasteries can all be traced back more than eight centuries to a group of hermits living on Mount Carmel, near what is today Haifa, Israel. Four centuries later, in vila, Spain, St. Teresa formed the present order in 1562; three centuries after that, in 1885, the Carmel of Angoulme, France, established a foundation in Dulwich Hill, Sydney. The grille "is not to keep us in, or the world out," insists Sister Veronica. "It's more a statement that says, We're set aside for God, and we're set aside to pray."
That was what, in 1966, brought the sisters of Dulwich Hill to Goonellabah, to a subtropical hillside adjoining the Nightcap Range. "There seemed to be the need for places of prayer in Australia at that time," recalls Sister Bernadette, now the prioress, who has seen three sisters buried in the high-walled garden. Prayer is the air that they breathe. It's what brings them from their cells with the toll of the bell at 5:10 each morning, and what shapes their day, spent mainly in silence. There's morning prayer, private prayer, thanksgiving prayer, Vespers, and streams of rosaries, Little Hours and Stations of the Cross. The telephone brings more still. "We get so many people asking us for prayers," says Sister Bernadette. "Sometimes the phone rings almost all day."
The quest for self-sufficiency and extra funds means other activities as well. Beyond cooking and cleaning, Sister Veronica tends the monastery's vegetable garden, Sister Antoinette packages altar breads for other parishes, while Sister Maria is preparing the monastery website to sell home-made rosary beads and stationery. (Three "extern" sisters, who live outside the enclosure, look after the church and do the monastery's shopping.) But the nuns are only ever a bell's toll away from prayer. It's what brought Sister Maria to the community as an 18-year-old in 1971. "I think it's very sad these days," she says. "People are distracted by all the noise and the bustle that's going on out there."