- page -
http://www.cdu.edu.au/cdupress
Go Back >> List of Entries
attached by the Provincial as chaplains to a group of Silesian Catholics emigrating in that year to South Australia,
and it was for that colonial and distant mission that Strele volunteered and was sent, arriving at Port Adelaide on
12 April 1867.
The Jesuit Mission in South Australia was centred on Sevenhill, near Clare, some 110 kilometres north of
Adelaide. As settlement in the colony expanded into the north, the Jesuits tended to the sacramental and spiritual
needs of the Catholics and constructed numerous churches and schools in the pioneer country towns, covering
all the northern and western areas of the colony beyond Kapunda. The foundation at Sevenhill operated as a
secondary school, a winery, a parish, a seminary and novitiate, a House of Studies, and as the mission centre for
the extensive circuit journeys made by the priests. Some 59 priests and brothers worked on this mission from 1848
until its merger with the Irish Jesuit Mission in the eastern states in 1901. Strele occupied important posts in the
Austrian Mission, teaching in the school and professing philosophy to the seminarians, doing pastoral work, and
was appointed Master of Novices in March 1868. Among his novices were John O’Brien, later to succeed Strele
as Administrator Apostolic for the Northern Territory, and Donald McKillop, later to succeed Strele as Superior
of the Northern Territory mission. Strele was appointed Superior of the South Australian Mission twice, 1870–73,
and 1880–82, during which time he planned the foundation of the Jesuit Mission in the Northern Territory.
In his autograph Historia Missionis, Strele mentions that he had sought permission from Jesuit superiors to
establish a mission to the Aborigines from 1867, but the General of the Order refused until the manpower situation
improved. In 1880 Father Duncan McNab, a diocesan priest who had worked with Aboriginal communities in
Queensland, made a lengthy submission to Holy See urging the establishment of a second Catholic mission, as the
Spanish Benedictine Mission in Western Australia had at that date been the only Catholic mission to the Aborigines
since 1842. Pope Leo XIII commissioned the Jesuits to undertake such a mission and the letter appointing the
Austrians to the task reached Sevenhill, South Australia, in February 1881, with Strele as the founding superior.
The Northern Territory was chosen because the blacks were numerous there and the whites few, and there was more
opportunity therefore to establish self-supporting colonies of Aborigines, on the model of the Jesuit Reductions in
Paraguay. All available literature was researched, and a reserve applied for, the first such request for the Northern
Territory. Strele, with two other priests and one brother, landed in the ‘straggling township’ of Palmerston on
24 September 1882, when the whites in the Territory numbered less than 500, and proceeded on 10 October to the
reserve granted to them, 130 hectares at Rapid Creek, at a place known as Gorumbai (‘elbow’), some 11 kilometres
out of Palmerston. The formidable obstacles to their work included the ‘dying pillow’ syndrome [represented
in the forecasts of extinction of the blacks made by government officials and residents such as W G Stretton,
J L Parsons and C J Dashwood, the white violence against ‘wild’ blacks (as given in Parson’s reports) and
the corruption of nearby Palmerston (‘lust, grog and opium’), a town in which they found ‘the number of white
Catholics not great, that of the good much less’! The Aboriginal groups with whom the Jesuits first worked were
the Larakia and the Woolna, but the closeness to Palmerston meant they could not act as a buffer against the
deterioration affecting the blacks. St Joseph’s Station at Rapid Creek was doomed to failure from the start, but
Strele never admitted that. Effectively it ceased work as a mission station in 1885 and operated as a farm to earn
money for the other stations after that, but also without enduring success. It was closed in December 1891.
Through 1885 Strele pressed the South Australian government for a reserve along the Daly River, and was
granted a block of eight kilometres’ river frontage extending thirty kilometres west, on the left bank. Without
inspecting the area first, Strele sent three Jesuits to establish the Holy Rosary Station (Uniya), which they did in
October 1886, as a prelude to a main station (Sacred Heart) to be founded later at Serpentine Lagoon, Hermit Hill,
on the western boundary of the reserve. Neither of these stations, nor any of the reserve, was suitable for agriculture
that, on the basis of the Reductions in Paraguay, was seen as the basic model. Nevertheless, Strele insisted on the
foundation of Sacred Heart in October 1889. The planting of rice was a failure, and the poverty and suffering of
the priests and brothers very real. The mission had no firm financial backing and depended on individual donations,
some help from the Austro–Hungarian Jesuit Province, contributions from a Bavarian Catholic Mission Society,
and rare gifts from the Australian bishops who had forbidden begging tours in Australia, causing Strele to travel to
Europe and North America in 1885 to solicit funds. Poverty bedevilled the operation and the sufferings and want
of the 10 Jesuits in the Territory must have distressed Strele, but he kept them at their stations on land unsuited for
their agricultural purposes.
In Catholic terms, the Northern Territory was known as the Diocese of Port Victoria, under the care of the
Spanish Benedictine Abbots at New Norcia in Western Australia, though no bishop had actually visited the Northern
Territory. In August 1888 Strele was appointed Administrator Apostolic of the Northern Territory, an office for
areas not yet declared bishoprics, but responsible for the temporal welfare of the church and the purchase of
properties for the establishment of churches. In this capacity, he attended the Plenary Council of the Bishops of
Australasia, held in Sydney in 1885. He purchased properties for future churches in Burrundie and Pine Creek, and
in 1887 treated Palmerston to its first fund-raising Bazaar, which ran for three days and raised 300 Pounds for the
building of the first ‘Star of the Sea’ church, later destroyed by cyclone and rebuilt, and now the site of the Catholic
Cathedral. Strele kept the title of Administrator Apostolic until his death, even though his term of office as Jesuit
Superior was completed in December 1890. Aged 57 when he arrived to found the mission, ill health broke him
and he was forced to return to Sevenhill, South Australia, in October 1892. He did pastoral work there until his
death on 15 December 1897. He was thus spared the anguish of witnessing the closing of his beloved mission in
June 1899 when floods over two years devastated the fourth and most successful station, which had been formed
in 1891 at Daly River, through the closing of the other three and concentration on the one effort.
In their understanding of tribal territory, their respect for and use of the Aboriginal language on the stations,
their permitting of important elements of Aboriginal culture for the blacks on the mission stations, and their great