MH17 and an old, eerie building

In 1981 when I started high school at Stuartholme in Brisbane, there was a two-storey building called Joigny.  It was separated from the main building by a short walk across the bitumen where we girls sat cross-legged in groups to eat our morning tea and lunch.  The fibro structure was burning hot in summer and freezing in winter.  Mrs Spiller, who always wore court shoes, taught typing upstairs and Mrs Moodie, who often wore what looked like a tea-cosy as a hat, taught art. There were store rooms that were forever storing things and always locked up.

     The floors were wooden and every footstep of every brown Bata school shoe and Mrs Spiller's court shoes echoed eerily in the wide open spaces.  The walls and ceilings were marked with scratches and smudges and paint was peeling.  The windows were jammed or panels of glass missing. It was a lonely place and enough to make me dread typing and art.  There were rumours about it being haunted which wasn’t surprising.  The main building, which was converted to a military hospital during World War Two, was definitely haunted.

     I was twelve and thought Joigny was the strangest name for an unwelcoming building.

     Jawani was also an island off Lae, PNG where my family lived. Joigny.  Jawani. Homophomes, but antonyms.  Where Joigny was a sad, hollow place, Jawani was a warm, tropical island where coconut palms leaned languidly over snow white sand that sloped beneath the warm equatorial sea to a reef of aquamarines and magentas and emeralds that took my breath away when I was snorkelling.  There were nautilus and cowrie shells, red and black sea snakes, lion fish, purple starfish and thousands of iridescent fish darting this way and that.  

     I was a rebellious teenager who constantly questioned the existence of God which frustrated the nuns at Stuarthome.  But the reef off Jawani was the nearest I came to proof there might actually be a god.

     When I heard about the MH17 disaster, I planned to not follow the news, out of respect to the victims and their families.  They would never know me or my intentions, but I imagined they would be horrified to think people became fascinated, in a macabre way by the tragedy and read and re-read the minute-by-minute reporting.

     However, my home page is the ABC News and information about the plane is hard to avoid, though I tried.  I didn’t need to read any of the headlines except the small blue ones on the far right.  However on day one of reporting a word in the main article jumped out at me, perhaps because of its foreign nature.  Joigny.  A word I hadn’t seen, heard or mentally spoken for thirty one years, in an ABC article.

     ‘… Sacred Heart, returning home from attending a retreat in Joigny in France.’

     Joigny.  Ja-wa-ni.  The face in the image attached to the article was unsettlingly familiar, unsettling because the article was about the MH17 tragedy and images associated with tragedies are always of victims.  It looked like an older version of the Sister Tiernan who was a nun at the convent at Stuartholme, a Sacred Heart school, in the early eighties.

     I am certain it is the same Sister Tiernan.  I pictured her back then when I guessed she was in her early thirties (though it must have been early forties), smooth-skinned and rosy cheeked, slim with thick, wavy hair, cut simply and short as most nuns kept their tresses.  She always wore white-collared shirts (with a cardigan in winter) and plaid skirts with sensible pumps. 

     It’s strange what one remembers after three decades.  I don’t remember if she taught classes or perhaps it was only religion. Whatever her role, she had a heavy presence, maybe as a boarding supervisor because we girls often chatted with her. 

     Sister Tiernan is the one who explained my confusion about the bible.  I refused to accept the stories in the bible because they could not have happened such as Jesus walking on water, restoring sight to the blind and humankind descending from Adam and Eve.  We were in the hall.  I can picture it.

     ‘Cathy,’ she said softly, ‘they are stories to illustrate a point.  They don’t need to have happened as facts.  They help people understand Jesus’ word.’

     I wondered why the hell someone couldn’t have told me that before.  It made all the sense in the world.

     I do remember Sister Tiernan had the same handwriting as the other nuns such as Sisters Toohey (the principal), Lentaigne (the music teacher), Carroll (the science teacher) and Banon (English, I think).  It was similar to italics, angular, sloped to the right.  It was deliberate, strong, the sort of handwriting I wanted and practised, but could never achieve.  I remember questioning one of the nuns at Stuartholme and was told it was the handwriting of order of Sacred Heart, or something to that effect. 

     But what I remember most vividly about Sister Tiernan was her soft voice, gentle caring smile and serene nature.  It was the sort of quality found in people who are compassionate and tolerant of all, including rebellious teenage girls who struggled to reconcile religious theory with the science taught by Sister Carroll.

     A beautiful soul. A terrible loss.  

     Sister Tiernan was returning from a retreat at Joigny.  So after 31 years I learned Joigny was a place, but where?  A quick Google search revealed it was the French birthplace of Madeleine Sophie Barat who was called to God from an early age.  To help people heal following the turmoil of the French revolution, she established the Society of the Sacred Heart in 1800 and shared God’s love through education and spirituality.

     An eerie, unwelcoming building named Joigny?  In joigny, I guess we students were supposed to find a sort of contentment during our typing and art classes.