When she rises to talk, Dawn Cardona’s deep voice rings effortlessly through the meeting room. As the new principal of Darwin’s Nungalinya Theological College she is touring NSW, Adelaide and Melbourne to heighten awareness of its work. She mentions triumphantly that one of their students, Theodore Tipaloura, is to be made a deacon in early December at his home parish on Bathurst Island. Then there is a sardonic grin: she wonders if she’ll need a new passport to go there, since the Howard government has just excised Bathurst Island from Australia in order to prevent some desperate Turks from claiming asylum. Cardona is unsurprised; she is no stranger to the vagaries of government.
At a young-looking 40, she is probably the youngest person in the meeting room at St John’s Southgate on an unseasonably warm and muggy November morning. St John’s is a Lutheran church, much sought after by musicians for its excellent acoustics, tucked into the new brutalist developments around Melbourne’s southern and docklands area. Over the last 15 years, hotels, offices and shops have mushroomed, along with the casino and the kind of apartment blocks that are favoured by youngish lawyers and advertising folk with no pets or children. St John’s is just as new, but its timber fittings inside and bits of garden outside make an oasis in the grey concrete tourist traps that surround it.
The space is late 20th century but the people who have come to see Cardona, are drawn firmly from the first half. Kind grey heads nod appreciatively as she talks; lined faces are bright and eager with goodwill. It is obvious that she is comfortable around the kind of enthusiasm that Catholics are often embarrassed about, and that Protestants can do very well.
Cardona looks as though she fits this postmodern space well. She represents many new things, many firsts: the first Catholic, the first woman principal of Nungalinya. She is one of nine children, a single mother, who likes self-help books, loves fishing and never forgets her Bible. ‘I keep it close to my heart,’ she says. ‘My mum was a strict Catholic. I always try to live by what it says. I see myself as here to do the work of Jesus.’
She has entered into her job at a turbulent time for education in Australia, when higher education finds itself under the scrutiny of those whose first priority is not