'Went up Specimen Hill, Big Creek, Fiery Cross... ': Mother Aubert's Year on the Road

Abstract

Behind 54-year-old Suzanne Aubert as she set out on her 1889 collecting tour lay her child-hood in Lyon as Marie Henriette Suzanne Aubert, her eleven years from 1861 in Auckland as Sister Mary Joseph or Meri of the Nazareth Institute for Maori girls, her twelve years in Hawke's Bay as lay missioner and nurse. Before her stretched the long career in social welfare of Mother Aubert, in her time held by the people of Wellington almost as public property, with the value of 'living treasure'. She died in 1926 aged 91 years. The Sisters of Compassion continue her work.

The biography of Mother Aubert is going to be like an iceberg, a visible portion balanced by a submerged mass of mini-biographies. There seemed to be so many people in her life. Despite her religious intensity, spiritual concentration and self-reliance, Suzanne Aubert was a 'people' person and her apostolate, in religious terms, kept widening to include more and more. The diary for her collecting tourof1889 teemed with references to people, some of whom became significant in her projects while others provided the steady invisible base that sup-ported her and gave her confirmation of the validity of what she did and believed in.