The cache overlooks St Joseph’s School, The Strand.
Mary MacKillop was born in Melbourne in 1842. When she was in Penola she met Julian Tenison Woods and together they opened the first St Joseph's School in 1866.
Mary MacKillop and Julian Tenison Woods founded the Sisters of St Joseph to continue this work. Over the many following years, the number of Sisters grew as did their schools. Schools were opened as the needs arose: in country towns, mining towns, cities. The Sisters also became involved in other areas of need including setting up a refuge for women in need and orphanages for children, visiting prisons and working with the sick.
Queensland Story…
Mary MacKillop and five other Sisters of St Joseph arrived in Queensland on 31 December, 1869, at the invitation of James Quinn, first Catholic bishop of Brisbane and founder of the Catholic Education system in Queensland.
The Sisters offered Catholic education to the children of the working class in cities and isolated settlements according to the Woods-MacKillop system of parish-based schools.
During the next ten years the Sisters established fourteen schools, an orphanage at Mackay and were teaching about half of the total number of children attending Catholic schools in the diocese. Seventy-nine Sisters had worked in the colony and of these over sixty had joined the Sisterhood in Queensland.
These ten years, however, were marred by a controversy with Bishop Quinn over the Sisters’ style of government which placed the responsibility for the internal administration of the Sisterhood with the Sisters themselves rather than with the bishop of the diocese. This controversy culminated with Bishop Quinn asking them to leave his diocese. Although many of the laity petitioned the bishop to allow the Sisters to remain, the bishop refused, and in mid-July 1880 the last community of Josephites left the diocese of Brisbane.
Twenty years later the Josephites would return. The Sisters of St Joseph returned to Queensland in 1900, not to Brisbane, but to a country town, Clermont.
It was not until 1915 that the Sisters were invited to return to the Archdiocese of Brisbane, and in 1916 they opened Catholic schools at Nundah, a working class suburb of Brisbane.
Townsville…
In 1872, Townsville was still only an infant settlement when St Joseph's Church was built on the Strand. It stood on a site midway between the present St Patrick's College on the Strand and the Sisters of Mercy Chapel in Fryer Street. The first Parish Priest, Rev.Fr Connelly applied to Mother Mary MacKillop, foundress of the Sisters of St Joseph, for teachers to help him staff a school for the children of Catholic settlers in Townsville. The sisters opened a school and like the church, it was dedicated to St Joseph.
Some five years later this community of nuns who responded so well to local needs was recalled to Brisbane.
Mary MacKillop…
Mary MacKilop's famous saying was "Never see a need without doing something about it"
Well..... there was a need, a geochache in her honour, and something has been done about it!
This is one of many caches placed in significant locations of her story.
Mary died on August 8th, 1909.
She was declared Australia’s first Saint in 2012.