Profile: Delia Donahoe

About This Author

Delia Donahoe was born to a dairy farming couple in Boisdale, East Gippsland in 1939. She was the second of five children born between 1937 and 1944. Her family, like most families at the time suffered the privations of the war years. She was blessed by having creative and industrious parents, who for their times were well educated. Her father spent some years at Assumption College, Kilmore, her mother at Notre Dame de Sion, Bairnsdale. Sr. Delia commenced her primary schooling at the little two room State School at Boisdale, and went on to board at Sion in Sale. On completing her schooling here , excelling scholastically, musically and athletically, she was too young to go to Teacher's College, so spent a year Student Teaching at the, by now, Consolidated School, Boisdale. After qualifying at Burwood Teacher's College (now Deakin University) she was posted to Gippsland schools, Woodside, Stratford, and Maffra. (In those days, teachers went where they were posted) sometimes her "digs" we're anything but satisfactory, a herd-tester's hut, workers bungalow at the back of the pub. Maybe this was good preparation for a young lady destined for Mission work. After several years she volunteered as a lay-missionary in Papua New Guinea, which was then still a protectorate of Australia. The Lay- missionary life laid out before her the direction she knew she wanted to go. She entered the order of nuns of The Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, and spent her postulancy and Novitiate at the beautiful "Hartzer Park", at Burradoo, via Bowral. She then taught for a period at the primary school in Kensington, Sydney, and to her delight was recalled to her beloved mission work in Papua. Her first book " Little Bit Not Far " outlines some of her experiences in Eastern Papua, and this book "Counting Moons in Kalabus" another aspect of her challenging and rewarding experiences in the jails. Sister Delia has been Catholic Chaplain at the Alfred Hospital, (Melb.) and now in her mid-seventies is parish assistant at a Melbourne Parish.