Saving St Brigid's

At the top of a hill in south-west Victoria, surrounded by rolling green hills that fall

away to the Southern Ocean, sits a grand old red-brick church. For more than 150

years, these fertile volcanic fields have sustained the largest rural population of Irish

descent in Australia. Built and paid for by the children of potato-famine survivors,

St Brigid’s is a symbol of faith and hope in an ancient land, by a cold, wild sea.


In 2009, the Catholic Church put the church and hall up for sale, against the wishes

of the local community. What began as a small local issue soon became a national

news story, in a battle that went all the way to Rome.

Saving St Brigid’s is the truly unique story of a small Australian rural community who,

in the spirit of their Irish rebel ancestors, stood up for what they believed in. Their

fight for justice awakened the author to the richness of her Irish Catholic culture,

and its lasting legacy on the community, and the Church, she grew up in. Through

the lens of her Irish heritage and that of the local Indigenous people, she weaves

together a lyrical narrative of song and story, and discovers just how much our

ancestral traditions have to teach us if we are to transform the world we live in.