Description
Veronica Brady (1929-2015) was a nun, academic and activist. Her intellectual life, firmly rooted in Australian culture, was focussed on stripping the thin veneer of our dominant materialistic culture to forge a greater understanding of our place in a more just world. One-time member of the ABC Board, Brady was a wine-loving, bike-riding, diminutive figure with a fierce reputation for plain speaking. An expert on Australian literature, and living life as a “communist” in a community of Loreto nuns, teaching, she cut a non-conformist figure in an age when the humanist values she upheld seemed increasingly under threat. She strove to defend them with a sharp mind, a contemporary Christian theology, and a willingness to put her boots on the ground in street protests.
The essays gathered here by colleagues, students, friends and family bring her compassion, interests and concerns to life with an immediacy, fondness and respect. She inspired others, through her writings, actions and teaching, and the essays reveal her larger-than-life character, her passion for teaching, her concerns for justice for Indigenous Australians, and the intellectual and spiritual legacy she bequeathed to us all.
Editors:
Kieran Dolin is an Associate Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia.
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is a Senior Lecturer and chairs the discipline of English and Cultural Studies at The University of Western Australia.
Dominic Hyde is a recently-retired Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The University of Queensland, specializing in logic and, more recently, environmental philosophy
Cover photograph: University of Western Australia Archives, Sister Paticia Veronica Brady IBVM, Portrait, 16302P.
