Veronica Brady

Veronica Brady IBVM (born Patricia Mary Brady; 5 January 1929 – 20 August 2015) was an Australian religious sister who was a noted writer and academic. She was one of the first Australian religious sisters to broadcast on radio and to teach at a secular university.<ref name=AB /^[1] She was a member of the inaugural board of the Australian Broadcasting Company in the 1980s.<ref name=ES /^[2]

Brady was an authority on Nobel Prize-winning Australian author Patrick White and wrote South of My Days, a biography of Australian poet Judith Wright.^[3]

Career

Patricia Mary Brady was born in Melbourne in 1929 (she took the name of "Veronica" upon joining her religious order). She matriculated from Loreto Mandeville at the age of 15 before attending Melbourne University. She went on to complete one of the first PhD degrees on Australian literature, graduating from the University of Toronto in 1969 after completing a thesis on the writing of Patrick White (as "Patricia Mary Brady"). Brady returned to teach at Loreto Mandeville as well as Loreto Convent in Kirribilli, New South Wales, where she first met White.^[4] She went to the University of Western Australia in 1972 and retired as a Reader in 1994.

Her readings of White demonstrate a sympathetic understanding of the writer's ambitious project of reconfiguring Australian sensibilities, not least through devastating portrayals of the mundane, the rational, the conventional and the literal. With her interests in the apocalyptic Christianity of writers like William Blake, and her knowledge of competing western religious traditions and the philosophical writers who engaged with them, Brady was well placed to offer an engagement with White’s complex and sometimes contradictory portrayals of spiritual experience. Several essays published early in her career, including her study of A Fringe of Leaves, retain an important place in the critical canon.

Whilst White's work remained at the centre of Brady’s writing and teaching, she also published scholarly essays on the fiction of Rolf Boldrewood, Joseph Furphy (a favourite), Tom Keneally, David Malouf, Les Murray, Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead and Randolph Stow. Another activity was reviewing and she published around 100 responses to new works of fiction, poetry and criticism. Published first in the UWA journal Westerly, her reviews eventually appeared in most major Australian literary and critical journals – Arena, Australian Book Review, Australian Historical Studies, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, Australian Literary Studies, Australian Society, CRNLE Reviews Journal, Fremantle Arts Review, Helix, Island, Kunapipi, Makar, Overland, Southerly and Westerly – as well as newspapers such as The Age, Canberra Times, Sydney Morning Herald and the West Australian.

Brady regarded reflection on colonisation, and meaningful forms of engagement and reparation for Indigenous Australians, as the most urgent issues to be faced in Australia. More general books and essays on these themes, written in the middle and the later stages of her career, often used the work of White and other creative writers as a touchstone. During and after her career teaching at the University of Western Australia from 1972 to 1994 she became an authoritative critic and commentator on subjects related to literature, politics and spirituality. She was sought after as a speaker and interviewee, even appearing on the ABC comedy program Good News Week where she played up to the host's shock at her violating of stereotypes about older women and nuns.

Her love of words was probably inherited from her Irish-Australian father.^[5] Childhood books that remained lifelong companions included The Magic Pudding, Winnie The Pooh and archy and mehitabel, from which she was fond of quoting; a particular favourite being the cockroach Mehitabel’s maxim “toujours gai kid” and “there’s more than one dance in the old dame yet”, a line she often used in her later years.

After retirement, whilst continuing her work as a reviewer and speaker in general and academic forums, Brady completed a 586-page biographical study of Judith Wright titled South of My Days (also the title of an early poem by Wright). The biography draws on primary sources and interviews, and demonstrates the sympathy to the writer that Brady brought to the work of White, arguing that Wright’s political activism was closely related to her poetry.

As a teacher, Brady was sometimes intimidating but always sympathetic to those students who made the effort to prepare for her classes. She regarded creative writers as special beings who should be supported where possible and sought to instil this view in others. (Knowing some students aspired to book reviewing, she once remarked in a tutorial that it was important to be large-hearted, unless a writer used demeaning stereotypes in which case being critical was a "duty".) She was generous with her time and her personal library – her kindness was often discreet, whilst her dissent from conventions she thought oppressive or unjust was public.

An avid cyclist, Brady was regularly seen pedalling to work on her bike, "Xavier", well into her 70s, enjoying what Gail Jones described as Franciscan rejoicing in simple acceleration.

Brady was known for being outspoken. She publicly criticised the Vatican's stance on abortion, homosexuality and contraception, was involved in the Aboriginal rights movement and the anti-uranium mining lobby as well as supporting the ordination of women as priests in the Catholic Church.^[6] Her view of Australia's conservative political elite was, perhaps, best summed up by her forecasts as to which circle of Dante’s hell was the likely destination of various Liberal prime ministers.

Brady's books included The Future People: Christianity, Modern Culture and the Future (1971); The Mystics (1974); A Crucible of Prophets: Australians and the Question of God (1981); Playing Catholic: Essays on Four Catholic Plays (1991); Polyphonies of the Self (1993); and Caught in the Draught: Contemporary Australian Culture and Society (1994); as well as South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright (1998). She also penned numerous essays.

Brady’s uncle Jack Collins, and cousins Geoff and Michael Collins, played for the Melbourne Football Club.^[7]

ABC broadcaster Phillip Adams called her "my favourite catholic. The one of whom Pope John Paul II used to ask every morning when he woke up 'Is she dead yet?'."^[8]

Brady died on 20 August 2015 in Western Australia at the age of 86 (outlasting John Paul II by ten years). She had been in care for the previous two years.^[9]

Kath Jordan's biography of Brady, Larrikin Angel, was published by Roundhouse Press in 2009.^[10]

References