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ERLICKILYKA: see ERLIKILYIKAERLIKILIAKIRRA: see ERLIKILYIKAEUCHARIA, Sister, also PEARCE, OLIVE MAY (1914– ), domestic servant and missionary, was born
Olive May Pearce on 14 December 1914, at Glenbrook, New South Wales, second child of Thomas Westaway
Pearce and Elise May Isabel Pearce, nee Peters. Soon after Sister Eucharia’s birth the family moved to Helensburgh
and then to another small rural town, Tottenham, where they settled for the next 13 years. By the time they left
Tottenham there were six children in the family. While her father ran Tottenham’s only bakery and her mother
cared for the growing family, Sister Eucharia attended the local, two-teacher school, where the curriculum was
extended beyond the normal primary level to accommodate her and her older brother. When the family moved
to the Sydney suburb of Enfield in 1928 Sister Eucharia, reluctant to enrol in a new school, and a city school at
that, was employed in the cake shop her father had purchased. There, as in the home, she developed the personal
skills of working as a member of a team and the occupational skills of cooking that were to contribute greatly
to her success in her working life. The shop was sold when her mother’s health began to fail, leaving Sister
Eucharia to seek another position to supplement the family income. With only a basic education and no formal
qualifications, Sister Eucharia was fortunate to find congenial work as an assistant in a boutique where artificial
flowers were made and sold. This business could not be sustained during the Depression and, like her younger
sister, Sister Eucharia went into service.
While working as a domestic for a family in Liverpool Road, Enfield, she was required to pay daily visits to
a young friend of her employers who had been hospitalised with sarcoma and who later died. The girl’s death,
or more accurately, a dream following her death, was to have a profound effect on Sister Eucharia, then in her late
teenage years. Sister Eucharia dreamed that, on being asked what she would do if her life was spared, the girl had
replied with great conviction that she would become a nun in the order of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. It was an
order, and indeed a vocation, of which Sister Eucharia knew nothing and in which she had no interest. In the days
following her dream, however, Sister Eucharia became convinced that she was being called to take the girl’s place
in the service of the Church.
The Pearce family was not particularly religious. Rural New South Wales offered little in the way of Catholic
churches or pastoral care and the extent of Sister Eucharia’s early exposure to the church had been limited to
Mass held four times a year by an itinerant priest. Although city living had provided greater opportunity to attend
church services, the place of religion in the family had not changed. As a 14 year old Sister Eucharia had been
inspired by stories of a selfless, heroic Father Damien struggling to ease the suffering of outcast lepers in the
Pacific Islands before succumbing to the disease himself, and had decided that she too would one day work with
lepers. Such a desire had not been conceived in religious fervour and, now, the conviction that she had been called
to join a religious order filled Sister Eucharia with dread; the life of the church was for young women whose
grasp of reality was less secure than her own. When prolonged resistance did nothing to free her of the disquieting
belief, Sister Eucharia visited the convent of the order of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart at Kensington, sure that
she would come away free forever of an idea that was persistently disturbing her peace of mind. On the contrary,
she was greatly impressed and returned home to break the news to her parents of her intention to seek entry into
the order. There was no family precedent for a career in the church, which left Sister Eucharia with the daunting
task of convincing them, but more particularly her mother (her father thought it a sure passport to heaven for
his eldest daughter), of the seriousness of her conviction and her suitability for a vocation. Remembering Sister
Eucharia’s adolescent desire to work with lepers, her mother, only recently converted to Catholicism, sought vainly
for a promise that her daughter would never expose herself to the threat of a leprosy infection. It was an incident
that Sister Eucharia was to remember many years later, weaving as it did one of the vivid threads of her life.
With her parents’ support, and braving her brother’s threat to never speak to her again if she carried out her plan
(he was to become one of her most constant supporters), Sister Eucharia entered the convent on 8 December 1933,
a week before her 22nd birthday. Although she was never to live in close proximity to her family again, and her
correspondence with them during the early years of her religious life was restricted and governed by rules of the
order, Sister Eucharia was able to maintain strong familial links.
The order of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart was the companion order of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart
(MSC) and both were dedicated to missionary work amongst non-Christian peoples. The nuns pursued their goals
principally through medical and educational work and the majority of young women entering the order were given
training in one of these two fields. For Sister Eucharia, however, this was not to be; not only was she older than
most of the novitiates but she already had highly prized skills in cooking and household management. Following
just two years of religious training (the more common pattern was four or five years of training), she accompanied
a senior nun in the order, Mother Concepta, to Darwin where it was intended that she would work in the convent.
Soon after arrival in Darwin Mother Concepta arranged to visit the Catholic mission station on Bathurst Island
and made Sister Eucharia her companion for the trip. It was to be five and a half years before Sister Eucharia was
to leave the island as she was asked to stay on to assist with caring for the hundred or so children resident in the
mission dormitories and to teach the older girls to cook. The support of the nuns was essential to the mission work
of the Catholic Church in the Northern Territory, their presence allowing the housing of children in dormitories
and more extensive education work than the priests were able to provide. After service on Bathurst Island Sister
Eucharia was transferred to adjacent Melville Island when, in June 1941, a new home for Aboriginal children of
mixed ancestry was established there. Current tourist advertising notwithstanding, the Tiwi islands are no tropical