The Australian girls who loved Christ

Unconvential Women tells the story of Australian girls who gave up careers and romance for life in a convent, devoted to Christ.

Vianney Hatton studied at the University of Sydney and enjoyed a lovely friendship with a local boy before becoming a young nun

Towards the end of her high school years in Sydney, Vianney Hatton was fielding the usual questions about what she planned to do after graduation. She wasn’t ready to tell people her real plans, and had begun talking about a new profession called physiotherapy that she was interested in.

But once Vianney finished school, the time came to let her family know her real choice:

I remember walking along the beach—we were at Nelson Bay, which is a lovely seaside, bayside place up there in the Hunter Valley—with my dad when the Leaving results came out. I had a really good pass and I knew I’d get a Commonwealth scholarship and all that kind of thing, and I was saying I thought I wanted to be a nun, and he’s saying, ‘But you could use this scholarship, you see?’ And I said, ‘But I don’t know where I want to go with it.’ He said, ‘Well, what about this physiotherapy you’ve been talking about?’ And I had been talking about it, because nobody knew what it was in those days, least of all myself, but it was, you know, something to just hide behind, really. And my dad said ‘Well, why don’t you try that?’ So we hastened down to Sydney.

Vianney began her studies at Sydney University in 1953. She recalls sitting in her first lecture, thinking: “I know nothing about this! I haven’t done any of these subjects before and what am I doing this for? I should be doing Latin and English—doing something I like.” But she stuck with it, travelling from Kings Cross to Camperdown each day, often on foot, to attend her classes. Her father would follow her around the apartment as she got ready to leave, proffering toast and other breakfast items. At home in the evenings, she’d practise her therapeutic techniques on her young brother, Michael.

Vianney, second from left, enjoys a night out with fellow students at the University of Sydney. Her father insisted she study before making the final decision to go into a convent.

Vianney, straight out of boarding school, found Sydney University almost overwhelming. No old school friends had gone with her, and she wasn’t living on campus, so it wasn’t easy to make new friends. But by second year she had found her stride, and was finally growing up and out of her very sheltered, restricted childhood. Back in her early teens, Vianney’s father would often take her to the art gallery while she was at home for the holidays, and he would gently mock her for squirming awkwardly before the nudes. Now she was studying anatomy by day, and cutting the rug at Sydney’s famous Trocadero nightclub by night.

Most of Vianney’s social life revolved around groups of Catholic students. She joined the Newman Society, which held retreats, prayer meetings, and social events like dances. The Church had just introduced evening Mass, and Vianney and some of her fellow students began to attend a new chapel, built in an old ware house on Broadway, run by the Blessed Sacrament Fathers. It was through them that she heard about the order of nuns who devoted themselves to the Blessed Sacrament, and who were eagerly seeking postulants at their new convent in Melbourne. Vianney felt straight away that she needed to go there, saying: For me, Jesus was in Heaven and in the Blessed Sacrament, so when I found this order, yes, it was pretty clear.

Vianney at her Sydney University graduation, before going into the convent.

By the end of her second year, Vianney’s father had been transferred to the fire department at Springwood, in the Blue Mountains. Vianney remembers walking around the garden there, “trying to tell my parents, but particularly my father—it’s always he who is the dominant one in this—that I knew where I wanted to go. Anyhow, I finally got enough courage to tell him and he said, ‘Well, alright, but you should finish your studies first.’

Vianney, without telling her father exactly what she was up to, asked a friend if she could get a lift down to Melbourne with her family, as she had someone she needed to see. She went straight to the seminary at Werribee to meet Father Charlie Mayne. She knew Charlie from the Young Catholic Students retreats, and he took her to meet the Blessed Sacrament sisters. She had already been writing to Charlie about her vocation, and he often gave her guidance, suggesting books that might interest her. Together, they went to Armadale and knocked at the door of the convent. The heavy door opened as if by itself, and Vianney crossed the threshold to see a little grille in the wall, and the eyes of the Sister Portress peering at them from below her veil. In the parlour, she and Charlie spoke with the Mother Superior, again through a latticed grille, and thus Vianney got her first taste of the lives of the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament.

After that visit, I wasn’t sure that this was the place,” she said.

Her family was even less certain that the contemplative life would suit Vianney:

“They thought that my personality was such that I wouldn’t be very good. I mean, I was too gregarious, really, too used to a more enjoy able kind of life. So they thought that I’d be wasted on any kind of life like that.”

Her father was worried that she’d be unhappy?

“Very much so.”

But despite her own and others’ misgivings, Vianney’s longing to be with God only grew. She would visit the church on Broadway almost every day, to be as close to Jesus as she knew how.

“I used to kneel in the back of that church and say, ‘Oh, I want to be with you, God,’ all the silly—not silly, they were appropriate to the time and who I was as a young woman—because it is very much like, well, a love affair. When you’re that young, it is very much like choosing someone in a marriage, really.”

Unconventional Women by Sarah Gilbert

When at last she completed her studies, she thought she’d be able to leave for Melbourne. But again, her father, ever the voice of reason in Vianney’s life, told her he thought she should return the Commonwealth’s investment in her education. Dad said, ‘Well, you know, the government has educated you. You should at least work for the government.’

Vianney was dismayed, but she took a job as a resident physio at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, where she lived with a group of young female physios in a little cottage on the hospital grounds, just behind Missenden Road in Camperdown. Michael was by now at university, too, studying at the teachers’ college, and he’d come over to the house or the hospital to have lunch with his sister, or to borrow a few pounds so he could take a girl out. Despite her impatience to enter the convent, this was a great year for Vianney, living with friends and earning her own income, much of which she put aside to pay the modest cost of her postulancy and novitiate—the two periods of trial and initiation—at the convent.

In the summer of 1956–57, Vianney knew that she’d soon be ‘leaving the world’. She was nearing the end of her residency and began spending most of her weekends with a young man called Harry from Springwood:

When the relationship with a boy got to the kissing stage, you knew you had to stop then, but there was not too much stopping with the guy from Springwood.

His family loved Vianney, and they all seemed to hope the pair would marry. But in her heart, Vianney’s plans hadn’t changed. Her father, far from encouraging Vianney to pursue the relationship—he had never been keen to lose her to the convent, after all—was quite severe with her for giving the young man the wrong idea. Vianney, though divided, was sincere. I fell quite badly in love with Harry, but I knew it was going to happen. It was a hard decision to let it happen.

Vianney as a young nun.

More than a little heartbroken, Vianney at last began preparing her trousseau to send down to Armadale. The nuns had stipulated a rather long list of everyday items she would need, and Vianney pondered the life ahead as she and her mother packed and folded the austere regulation clothing. You had to have your black dress and your black shoes and your black stockings and oh, you had to have bloomers and all these kinds of things … I didn’t have those romantic feelings when I started to put all the towels together. My mother said to me, ‘What are you going to do with a dozen towels?’

On 11 May 1957 Vianney was once again at the threshold of the con vent in Armadale, peering at the Sister Portress through the grille, with her friend, Maureen Flood, who planned to go in with her.

They were 21 years old when they rang the convent bell and the door opened as if by some ghostly hand. The Sister Portress greeted them solemnly, and the girls were ushered through the heavy cloister door by another of the sisters, who urged them to get ready for Benediction.

So then they say, ‘Where’s your dress?’ And my dress is in a big tea chest that I sent down with all my trousseau. So I had to run up— it had been put into the room that I was to have.

Vianney was dismayed to find her dress all crushed.

You know how you are at twenty-one, you wanted to look nice, but I didn’t have the chance to iron it. She got into her black shoes and stockings and raced to meet Maureen in the parlour, where Father Charlie was waiting to bid them both a final goodbye, and to have a look at them in their outfits:

“Then they put a cape around us, because of course you mustn’t show any shape of a woman, and then they put a veil on us to go into the chapel. And so in we go to the chapel with our veils down over our faces, because we mustn’t be seen.”

This is an edited extract from Unconventional Women: The Story Of The Last Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Australia by Sarah Gilbert (MUP).