Beyond All Telling: A History of Loreto in Western Australia
Australian History Local History Educational History Religious Memoir Genealogy Reference Women's Biography Catholic Church History Western Australia Regional Studies
Beyond All Telling: A History of Loreto in Western Australia is the only comprehensive, single-volume account of the pioneering Loreto Sisters who arrived from Ireland in 1897 and quietly shaped the social, educational and spiritual fabric of the west for a century. Over 418 carefully researched pages, Anne Carter—herself a Loreto old-girl turned historian—travels from the first horse-drawn wagon load of nuns who landed in Fremantle to the network of schools, hospitals and social-justice programmes that still bear the Loreto name today. Readers discover how the order founded Perth’s first permanent girls’ college, braved the isolation of the goldfields to open convents in Kalgoorlie and Boulder, and lobbied for female tertiary entrance long before it was fashionable. The result is a living mosaic of eyewitness diary excerpts, newspaper clippings, archival photographs and oral recollections that makes Western Australian history feel immediate and deeply personal.
What makes this 1997 first-edition paperback especially sought-after is that it was printed in a short country-town run for the centenary and never reprinted; most copies were absorbed into school libraries or lost to humidity. The book therefore doubles as both a narrative biography and an indispensable reference for genealogists—every nun is named, every property transaction is footnoted, and a 30-page appendix lists thousands of former pupils, boarders and benefactors. Local historians value the detailed maps of long-vanished convents, while collectors of Australiana prize the period photographs (many taken by the Sisters themselves) that capture horse-drawn trams, billabong picnics and 1890s classrooms unchanged by time.
Present copy remains clean and tight inside; pages are unmarked and the generous margins invite further annotation by researchers. The cover carries the expected edge-creasing of a book that has travelled across the Nullarbor more than once, yet the spine is square and the binding still flexible—perfect for reading, not simply shelf-display. If you are building a collection of Western Australian memoir, Catholic history, or women’s biography, this scarce Loreto centenary history is a cornerstone volume that rarely surfaces in the second-hand market.
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