Aborigeno con gli Aborigeni per l’evangelizzazione in Australia: il testo della Relazione (1883) per Propaganda Fide del vescovo Rudesindo Salvado (review)

Rosendo Salvado was born in Spain on March 1, 1814, and died in Rome in 1900. He was ordained as a Benedictine at Naples in 1839 and left for Western Australia in 1846 to give his life to the Christianization and civilization of the Aborigines. In Rome in 1883 he wrote a report for Propaganda Fide that forms the body of this splendidly presented and well-illustrated book, although it lacks adequate maps. The first half is a useful introduction by two Italian scholars who could have benefited from the help of a competent historian of Australia. For many years, the estimate of Aborigines in Australia in 1788 was about 300,000, which is that given on page 91. Nowadays, that estimate has risen to at least 700,000; some say 1 million. In earlier times, low estimates helped to obscure the rapid fall in Aboriginal numbers, bordering in places on extinction after white settlement. Furthermore, there are many spelling mistakes in names and places. For example, the eminent scientist of the Australian National University, Jim Bowler, would be amused to find himself rendered here as “Jim Boiler” (p. 79n26).

On arrival, Salvado acted on his conviction that he must go out and live among the Aborigines in the bush where they had not already been vitiated by contact with the whites. His provisions were soon exhausted, forcing him to live off the land on kangaroos, lizards, snakes, and the like while sleeping on the ground in a different locality each night. In addition to their nomadic lifestyle the Aborigines also went “walkabout,” which led him to conclude that doing so was not an aimless activity but a kind of religious act that united them with their “country” and its sacred places. Salvado rapidly decided that both the Christianization of the Aborigines and the development of civilization among them, twinned in the great Benedictine tradition, demanded stability. Hence the need for a monastery about which the Aborigines could live and become self-reliant by engaging in agriculture and the rearing and tending of flocks, principally sheep. New Norcia, eighty-four miles from Perth, was founded in 1847, although many years passed before it resembled a monastery in the physical sense.

The vicissitudes suffered by Salvado in the bush were as nothing compared to those to which Bishops John Brady and Joseph Serra, his mentally unstable superiors in Perth, subjected him. Finally, New Norcia became an Abbazia Nullius in 1867 with Salvado already, and to his dismay, a bishop since 1849, as abbot for life. The turn in fortunes from then on was remarkable. Monastic life flourished, as did the Aboriginal community. Baptized, educated, married, and cared for, they worked happily on the monastic lands as builders, shepherds, mill hands, female telegraphists, nurses, and stockmen.

New Norcia rapidly became an unrivaled example of apostolic zeal poured out for a people whose dignity was never infringed. To Salvado, the Aborigines were not savages but, as he called them, Australiani capable of achieving any level of education and culture to which they were given access. That the local civil authorities contributed so generously to the development of New Norcia, and especially with land grants, is greatly to their credit. Their main source of chagrin was that the New Norcia cricket team, in which the monks played no role, invariably defeated the gentlemen of Perth summer by summer.

The regrettable outcome for this fine venture by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana could be that it remains unread. Couched in the quaint and, in part, archaic Italian of Salvado, it demands translation lest its treasures lie hidden as they have been since 1883.