Mary Mackillop & St Charles Church, Ryde

On Saturday August 8th, we celebrate the Feast of St Mary Mackillop. But not everyone knows that St Mary MacKillop had close personal associations with St Charles’ Church at Ryde.

After government aid for denominational schools was withdrawn in 1880, the Marist Fathers (who were then in charge of the parish) were able to persuade the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart (the ‘Brown Joeys’, the order founded by Mary MacKillop) to take over the parish school, in 1883. Two nuns and a lay teacher would walk to Ryde each school day from the convent at Hunters Hill and return home in the evening. Five Sisters were buried in St Charles’ churchyard cemetery during the years 1883-1886.


In May 1886, Mary MacKillop’s own mother, Flora, was drowned in a shipwreck on the NSW south coast. Her body was the only one recovered that bore no disfigurement from rocks or sharks and her beloved scapular still hung round her neck. Her body was brought to Sydney and buried at St Charles’. Mary MacKillop is known to have visited her grave.

In 1973, fearing that the churchyard cemetery might be redeveloped, the order had Flora’s remains, and part of the white marble gravestone commemorating her burial, removed from St Charles’, and the remains were reinterred in the Sisters of St Joseph Lawn Section at Northern Suburbs (now Macquarie Park) Cemetery. The names of other family members can still be seen on the lower part of the stone, in the corner of St Charles’ churchyard cemetery, close to the grave of the five Sisters.

By Richard Mathews, Archivist at Ryde-Gladesville