The Story of Suzanne Aubert

BWB, 2009.

Suzanne Aubert grew up in a French provincial family in the mid-nineteenth century. Lyon's Catholic missionary spirit brought her to live with Maori girls in war-anxious 1860s Auckland. She nursed Maori and Pakeha in Hawke's Bay as the settler population swelled in the 1870s. In the 1880s and 1890s, living up the Whanganui River at Jerusalem, she set up New Zealand's home-grown Catholic congregation, published a significant Maori text, broke in a hill farm, manufactured medicines, and gathered babies and children through the family-fracturing years of economic depression. The turn of the century sent her windswept skirts through the streets of the capital. There she would be a constant sign of liking and caring for people 'of all creeds, and none' until she died in 1926. This rich and finely detailed portrait of Suzanne Aubert, the small French nun who strode the streets and roads of New Zealand on behalf of the country's poor and neglected, draws on wide-ranging research in France and Italy as well as New Zealand. It includes much original material from the archives of the congregation she founded, the Sisters of Compassion.