Sister Sue McGovern, left, Father Kevin Goode and Sister Margaret Ryan have spent the past nine weeks in the bushfire ravaged areas lending advice, helping hands and shoulders to cry on.


She conned her way into the fire-stricken town for the privilege of helping people whose lives had been shattered.

PEOPLE all over Kinglake had heard about the South Australian nun who turned up to help around their ravaged town the week after Black Saturday. They just never expected what they found when they finally met her.

"I'd be having a conversation with people and suddenly they'd stop and say to me, almost in shock, 'You're the nun?" says Sister Sue McGovern, laughing. "They were still expecting the big habit."

Sister McGovern's order, the Josephites, gave up traditional costume before she joined — "luckily", she adds — but you suspect she'd never be one for robes and wimples anyway.

When she arrived in Kinglake it was at the wheel of a large white Mazda truck. She was wearing a wristband that somehow she'd conned to get her through the roadblocks, and her accommodation was a two-man tent she pitched in someone's backyard. She tended to practical rather than spiritual needs, working in the shire offices helping people seek new water tanks and the like.

Weeks later she still doesn't look the part in a jumper, boots and knee-patched khaki work pants, with dirt and woodstain under her fingernails from helping people muck out and repairing their furniture.

But across bushfire-affected Victoria they're thanking God for people like Sister McGovern. Their churches may have been destroyed but priests, nuns, ministers and pastoral teams of all denominations have spent the last nine weeks tirelessly caring for parishioners and strangers alike. They have lent advice, helping hands and shoulders to cry on.

In Kinglake, Sister McGovern works closely with Sister Margaret Ryan, a pastoral associate from Diamond Creek, and Father Kevin Goode, a Franciscan who on February 9 was driving to Melbourne to begin semi-retirement after years working with AIDS sufferers in Sydney.

News of the fires changed the 71-year-old's course. "This looked like a need so I put up my hand," he says.

His job is to make contact with parishioners who have remained in town and locate those who have left, though he puts it another way: "I go from one house to another having cups of tea — and once in a while, a really good cup of Italian coffee.

"I drop in and if people are happy to have me, I sit down and we talk. More often I just listen. I'm a listener. That's all you need to do and that's the one thing they need from me. Sometimes I barely have to say anything."

Sister Ryan, who has worked in hospices, says listening is often the greatest gift you can give someone who is grieving. "When you're listening, what you're doing is letting the people hold what's lost in their arms," she says.

"You listen and you let them talk about a death, or about the loss of their home. You allow them to cry and you allow them to grieve. People say they've told their story 500 times, they're going crazy, but they're not. They're holding that thing they've lost until it's the right time to let go.

"When they are ready they will give that person back to God."

It's a great privilege, adds Father Goode. Not long after he arrived at Kinglake he found a man quietly standing beside two newly planted standard rose bushes.

"He said he'd just put them in. He said, 'They're for my wife and son.' It was just desolation around him, the poor guy was totally alone and I felt so blessed to be allowed to share his grief.

"That kind of human suffering, all you can do is hold it because it's so sacred to that fella. Make sure you understand that what you're receiving is such a treasure and you appreciate it as a treasure."

Sister McGovern doesn't "try to push God," she says. "The level of religion that comes into it is just being here. When people die, especially children, there's a lot of rawness in the community. I know people are angry, I know there's a lot of questions.

"My thing is about finding people's resilience and hope. That's what I try to witness. I came because I saw a need and that need was to try to make a difficult path as smooth as possible for people."

Sister Ryan distributes food vouchers and money from the Sisters of Mercy fund to help locals buy farming equipment or petrol. She hunts up firewood for one of the cafes, "anything that will help this town's engine start turning over again", she says.

But at times there are stark questions. "In that first week, people were saying, 'Where the hell is God in all this?'," she says. "My answer is that really none of us can know. All we can say is that when something like this happens, it's like a snake shaking off its old skin.

"Every one of us has only a limited understanding of who God is. When something like this happens it shakes up our sense of God and we have to begin the search anew. And perhaps in that deeper search we get a deeper answer."

In this disaster, and before what Sister Ryan describes as "our winter of weeping", there is an opportunity for the Church to show its human face, adds Father Goode.

"Because what Christianity is about is that God became human and we've got to get back to that human face," he says. "There really is a gap between church and many, many people and I think the bridge is going to be that we're all human together."