In this edition.

As the first woman to graduate in law in South Australia, lawyer, writer, social activist, and legal officer for the United Nations Organisation, Mary Tenison Woods provides an important subject for the opening article by Margaret Press. Mary's difficulties in balancing her career with family responsibilities would find many echoes in this century.

St Aloysius College, Angas Street, Adelaide, gave Mary Tenison Woods and other noted alumni their high school education. Indeed convents provided the bulk of high school education for girls in the early 1900s. Anna Barbaro's article looks at the sources of convent education in Australia and finds them in early modern Europe rather than in England as has been suggested elsewhere. Anna received the ACHS-James MacGinley Award (2002) for this study.

Integrating the roles of eminent historian, priest and bishop was the challenge for Eris O'Brien, and it might be said that his scholarship helped him to become a highly respected and influential Archbishop. Elizabeth Johnston traces the stages, difficulties and twists in his scholarly journey which reached different goals from the ones originally proposed.

Goals and dreams are also David Flannery's theme as he examines the long struggle of Catholics in Canberra to build a cathedral on Cathedral Hill. From the 1920s to 1980 this dream was pursued, modified and finally put aside. That Australian Catholics would not have their National Shrine like that of Washington DC poses interesting reflections on the nature of the Australian Church.

Several thousand assisted female immigrants, mostly single Irish girls, arriving in Adelaide in the mid 1850s when there was very limited employment, encountered great difficulties, injustices and dangers. The governor wrote that 'their probable future destiny 'was painful to contemplate'. Marie Steiner looks at the role of Fr Michael Ryan in helping these women while he was a member of the government's Female Immigration Board in 1855-56.

Finally, the books reviewed have a breadth and variety of topic beyond those of most previous selections. While the Australian Catholic Church figures strongly, we also have books on other Christian churches in Australia and on Australian connections with Rome and Oceania.

John Luttrell fms (Editor)