Faith, resilience and the fine art of listening: a conversation with Mary Nolan AM

A ripple went through the music festival crowd: ‘There they are!’ Silver-haired Mary Nolan and her son Chris were being escorted onto the stage at the Golden Plains music festival, one of two huge events held on their farm in Meredith each year. Chris Nolan, who lives with a permanent brain injury that has left him a quadriplegic, gave his trademark, festival-opening ‘Long Blink’, and with that, thousands of people began a long weekend of dancing in the hot, dry, central-Victorian bush.

Mary Nolan’s life has been shaped by music and her deep Catholic faith. Her faith has been particularly influenced by Ignatian spirituality, with its emphasis on reflection, self-awareness and the practice of listening. But that ability to listen was honed in her childhood, growing up on a farm in western Victoria as the eldest of four children, and being the link between her parents as they split up. Divorce was rare in the 1950s, especially among Catholic families.

‘I learnt to listen, really listen … to attune to what mood my father was in and listen to my mother. I was a sort of go-between in a way,’ she says, adding that she was also the driving force behind maintaining her siblings’ relationship with their father after they left with their mother.

With the help of supportive teachers, the intelligent young Mary went to a good school run by the Mercy sisters in Ballarat and then studied radiography by correspondence.

‘I would have liked to have gone to university to do something, possibly music. I was good at music and I did piano. I did cello for a while,’ she says. ‘But anyway, you learn to bloom where you’re planted, really.’

Mary says that in those days, Catholic girls tended to be directed towards nursing in Catholic hospitals, but she didn’t want to be a nurse. ‘A Mercy nun, Sr Genevieve, suggested radiography. So I gave it a go.’

Those listening skills she’d developed in adolescence proved essential in developing her career, which she loved and maintained even after her children were born in the mid-1960s.

‘A lot of people are quite anxious when they have to have something done,’ she says. ‘I learnt to listen very well to the people coming in. I’d always spend time talking with them. They would be grateful for that because it defused their anxiety somewhat by sharing it.

‘A couple of the radiographers who knew me used to say, “If you’ve got any funny people, hard people—you know, people who might be a bit difficult—Mary’s good with them.” It was that whole thing of trying to engage at a personal level really, and make it easy for them.’

Mary met her husband John through a mutual friend. The friend was from Meredith, where John’s family had their farm. Mary recalls the first time she saw the farm, as she and the friend were driving past: ‘She said, “Oh, that’s where John lives.” And I thought, what a God-forsaken place. And that’s now where I’m actually living.’

She married John and moved to the Meredith farm where they raised their two children, Lou and Chris. Living well out of town, they made their own fun, she says. ‘We loved music. I played piano, so we’d often have get-togethers. And somebody would say, “Oh, listen to this. I’ve just got it”. We had a record machine, singalongs ... sounds, the whole thing about listening.’

It’s been a good life.

She genuinely does love music. The night before she spoke with Melbourne Catholic, Mary had been out late listening to live music in a Brunswick venue at which, she says proudly, ‘I was the oldest one there.’

As Mary continues her story, it is easy to focus on the trials and tragedies, but she is not having any of that. ‘It’s been a good life,’ she says firmly.

But there is no doubt that without her faith, the ability to cope with what life has thrown at her would have been different.

Mary’s daughter died at the age of 21 in a car accident. ‘It was almost as if she knew she didn’t have a lot of time,’ says Mary. ‘She was full-on; she lived the day she had, fully. She was a character, and she was very generous too.

‘She knew she was better in the sun—she had bipolar—so she went up to Queensland and got herself a place.

‘But her death was really … yeah, really terrible.’

Then, in 1996, her son Chris contracted an illness in Vietnam that caused a catastrophic brain injury. Mary explains that Chris was working as a solicitor with an extremely heavy workload. ‘Chris was probably working too hard. He went out one night, came home and just didn’t wake up.’

Mary and her husband John, who died in 2017, brought Chris back to Australia, where he remained in Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital for months. It was when he laughed at a joke cracked by a visiting cousin that it became clear Chris’s intellect was unaffected by the illness that had attacked his body.

He is a man adored by all: his friends with whom he started the music festivals in the 1990s on his parents’ farm; his many cousins, aunts and uncles; and especially his mother. Her fight to give him the best quality of life has been extraordinary.

It’s living with a deep respect for the other person—everyone’s got something to offer. Listening, we can help one another discover what’s deep in us.

Mary was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2011 for her advocacy on behalf of young people with brain injuries being placed in nursing homes for the elderly.

‘It was pioneering work,’ Mary says. ‘It was a human rights issue, bringing attention to young people with brain injuries. They were just treated as if they weren’t there, were not living.’

She credits her listening skills with helping Chris communicate what he needed, ‘listening beyond the words’. It was a revelation, she says, to understand that people with hypoxic brain injury like Chris can tell you what they want. ‘I think it’s living with a deep respect for the other person—everyone’s got something to offer. Listening, we can help one another discover what’s deep in us.’

Mary has always been a practising Catholic, but she had a religious awakening of sorts with the Second Vatican Council—the 21st ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, convened by Pope John XXIII in the early 1960s to help reconnect the Church with the people in an increasingly secularised world. She describes it as a breath of fresh air.

‘[It was] giving permission that faith didn’t have to be just a ‘church on a Sunday’ sort of thing. It opened the windows for some people, I think, although some people found it really difficult. But there was room for everybody.

‘In a sense, you could pray as you were walking along and still feel that you really have communed with God and not feel guilty that you hadn’t sat in a church to do it.

‘You lived your life according to your faith—faith and life were not separate.’

Mary subsequently became involved in the Christian Life Community (CLC), which describes itself as ‘ordinary people living ordinary lives’ inspired by Ignatian spirituality. She held leadership roles within the CLC, serving as its president in Australia and later as the world vice president.

Faith is living life according to the promptings of the spirit.

The community provided her with a framework for a practical spirituality. She speaks about living with a constant awareness of God’s presence in daily life, and about personal practices of prayer and contemplation, where she takes time to reflect on her day and discern the spiritual movements within her.

‘I think faith is living life according to the promptings of the spirit, really. That’s what I mean if I stop at the end of the day and ask: What’s gone well? What hasn’t gone so well?’

Her life, rooted in Christian hope, reflects a quiet yet steadfast trust in God. It’s an active hope, expressed through listening, reflection and a commitment to love and serve others.