The Inspiration Behind the Song
June 26, 2025
One of the special features that has already emerged from Mercy…Our Pilgrimage of Hope is a song written for our pilgrimage by Sister Helen Kearins. At a recent Zoom session with Institute staff, Helen shared her inspiration for the song.
After I’ve been asked to write it, the sense of pilgrim is what came to me straight away. In 1996 I went to Ireland for the first time and as well as connecting to my own roots, learnt a little about pre-Christian Celtic Spirituality. I had been working with Aboriginal people and I got the sense of the pre–Christian Celtic spirituality and Aboriginal spirituality having a lot in common.
When I returned, I brought together in Galong in Central New South Wales, Sister Anne McLay from Brisbane and an Aboriginal woman, Maisie Kavanagh, for a conversation and invited a group of Mercy Sisters and friends to attend. Anne talked about the Celtic spirituality and Maisie would respond from her Aboriginal spirituality. Anne knew a lot about the pre-Christian Celtic spirituality, as well as being a historian.
Anne shared about a place in Ireland, a bit north of Westport, called Croagh Patrick that has long been a place of pilgrimage. It is a huge cliff. She talked about the druids and people for hundreds of years having made a pilgrimage there before Christianity came to Ireland. When she finished, Maisie paused and said, ‘ Pilgrimage. That’s what we mean by walkabout.’
I noticed a few heads drop around the circle that we were sitting in and mine slightly too because the term ‘walkabout’ has often been used in a derogatory way. Often people tried to say that Aboriginal people can’t concentrate. If tennis great Evonne Goolagong lost concentration in a tennis match, someone would say she had ‘gone walkabout’.
To hear Maisie talk about walkabout as a sacred duty, to go to their country, to maintain the relationship with it, to care for the land, animals and vegetation, just shifted that understanding for me and the idea has never left me. And it came back pretty much straight away when thinking about this song. I thought somehow, it’s got to be about that. This can’t be about European pilgrimage. We have a centuries old tradition or pilgrimage here in this very land.
I had to go out to Griffith for work and I was driving back to Canberra, via Young. If people know Central New South Wales, there is a road called the Mary Gilmore Way which runs from Ariah Park to Grenfell. Mary was a great Australian poet. Her image is on the Australian $10 note. She was very involved with social justice issues and Aboriginal people. So, as I’m driving towards Young along the Mary Gilmore Way I said, ‘All right Mary, you know some ideas would be good!’.
I was also conscious that I was in Wiradjuri country. I just had this sense of driving through the landscape and tuning into it and waiting for what comes. The first line of the song was what came first, the notion that this has ..’always been a pilgrim country’. For 60,000 years or more people have been ‘walking about’ on sacred land, carrying out their sacred duty.
By the time I got to Young I had the chorus written. So with great thanks to Mary Gilmore and the Wiradjuri people! The verses came later and expanded this central idea and included some of the well used steps of pilgrimage.
Click here to download a copy of the lyrics