Our BIG Sister
“Gratitude they say, is a most beautiful ornament of the human heart.” I agree, entirely. If I were ever asked to sit at a table with six people I’d really like to be sitting there with, one of those six would be Suzanne Aubert. For that chance, I would be grateful beyond words. She was, to me, a simply extraordinary woman and individual.
I have a penchant for the company of feet-in-the-mud types, wise counsel and rigorus thinkers, they improve me as a person and challenge my insensibilities. Suzanne Aubert (1835-1926), though better known to many as Sister Mary Joseph or Mother Aubert was a Catholic sister who started a home for orphans and the under-privileged in Jerusalem, on the Whanganui River here in New Zealand.
She founded the religious order, the ‘Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion’ in 1892 and later opened two hospitals in Wellington; the first ‘St Joseph’s Home for Incurables’ and ‘Our Lady’s Home of Compassion’. “She’d come from France to New Zealand in 1860 at the age of twenty-five to work in a Catholic mission and subsequently lived through nearly seven decades of great social change in New Zealand until she died in 1926 aged ninety-one.
She’d lived through the post-Waitangi history, years of uprooted, dislocating, change for both Maori and Pakeha (a New Zealander of European descent). She travelled along what I can only marvel at now as being a fast-changing time-line! She had many adventures, took risks, had fun yet also had her share of pain and grief. History can now show us, she had a tremendous understanding of what was happening then than most and an intelligent discernment of the consequences and implications.
She can leave you breathless just reading about her and not (I suspect) have even blinked at what she’d done in a day. She taught, nursed, walked thirty, even forty kilometres a day on her mission ‘rounds’; wrote a very significant book in the publication history of Maori language; set up a New-Zealand’s home-grown Catholic congregation, the Sisters of Compassion; ran a farm and an orchard; was ‘grandma’ to scores of homeless kids she helped bring up and developed and manufactured medicines. Phew! Superwoman? No, a pioneering woman, they were all made of substantial stuff!
She went on to develop a range of social welfare services. On behalf of these, she set up support systems and wherever she could lobbied intensively with church hierarchy, city mayors, government ministers, imperial governors. She was in truth, or to me at least, an everywoman, one for whom I have an enduring respect.
She was a skilled, persistant and informed political advocate for the needy and powerless, a gifted publicist and tactician who made sure that the health and welfare of the less powerful in society were issues of relevance in newspapers and Parliament, not to be ignored nor to be side-lined. She believed in an equality and self-esteem all people had by right and in this she exemplified the principles of her religious faith far more than many others.
Suzanne developed rongoa or herbal remedies that became the first widely-known, widely-used bicultural health treatments in New Zealand’s history. She was well-learned, inventive in chemistry and pharmacology and she is widely regarded as having pioneered specialist care of the disabled in this country.
From 1871 to 1883, Suzanne lived in Hawke’s Bay. She drew on the French tradition of herbal medicines and her interest in chemistry to experiment with native plants and create medicines. Her medicines was unusual on two counts. First, they were free, they were also local, indigenous and used Maori medicinal ingredients along with Pakeha chemistry and Pakeha wine (where she lived at that time went on to become Mission vineyards.)
By 1890 Suzanne decided to market her medicines to fund their Maori mission. She signed a contract with Kempthorne and Prosser. They publicised her medicines exhaustively in a wide range of newspapers. At the orchard farm three miles above Jerusalem, she built a two-storeyed house-cum-barn to dry the vegetation.
When the liquid had evaporated sufficiently, it was poured into demi johns. They were hauled by sledge down the steep hill to Jerusalem. Then down the river went the jars of concentrate to Wanganui where Kempthorne and Prosser took delivery of them. They made up the medicines and bottled them.
In Hawke’s Bay she was regularly seen with Maori women, gathering roots, barks, leaves and plants across the hills and swamps. Women could be recognised as tohunga makutu in their areas of specialised knowledge and gifts, and healing would be one of these. Suzanne’s rongoa were the culmination of years of shared expertise, bicultural expertise.
Experienced practitioners develop a practice that integrates inherited knowledge, new observations, new materials, and new knowledge. Suzanne and her Maori gatherers would have had a great deal of experience in order to assess, select and mix appropriate plants they knew had come from certain places, at certain times. Suzanne had stopped making medicine by the turn of the century, for several reasons.
The publicity got out of hand, the work was enormous but it was the sheer demand for the medicines that overwhelmed the venture. The operation became too big too fast. A court case in February 1894 was settled in her favour. Kempthorne and Prosser had tried to meet the demands by diluting their stock.
Perhaps her decision to stop was also influenced by her links with Maori who felt they were sharing their taonga with someone they respected. She was regarded among them as a skilful ‘doctor’ whom they perceived as having good practises, knowledge of the vegetation they knew and which she also brought to her cures. She wrapped this all in a healthy dose of her own faith and prayer.
Her gift then was to combine good medicine, common sense, laughter, friendship and love in a holistic view of life and health where spirituality also abounded.” It’s the way of the life healer, the whole being greater than the sum of all parts.
