Catherine Brosnaham Coffey (1805 – 31 August 1894) was an Irish-born Australian pioneer in the Port Phillip District who was the first Catholic school teacher in Melbourne and the first sacristan of the first Catholic church in Victoria, St Francis.[1] She taught catechism classes to children in colonial Melbourne prior to the arrival of the colony's first Catholic priest in 1839. Coffey’s contribution to Catholic education was celebrated in a St Patrick’s Day pageant at the Melbourne Town Hall in 1930 and she was singled out by Archbishop Justin Simonds in 1939 in a requiem for pioneers as “an outstanding Catholic personality”.
Catherine Coffey
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Born | 1805
County Kerry, Ireland
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Died | 31 August 1894 (1894-09-01) (aged 89)
Creswick, Victoria
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Other names | Catherine Coffee |
Occupation(s) | Catechist School teacher |
In 1838, Coffey travelled from Ireland to the Port Phillip District (now in Victoria), via Tasmania, with her husband Jeremiah and their infant child.[2] They were early pioneers to the area, the first settlement on the banks of the Yarra River having taken place in 1835. The first Catholic priest, Patrick Geoghegan, a Franciscan friar, didn’t arrive in the colony until 1839, and Coffey taught Roman Catholic catechesis to children during the period when no Catholic priest was available.[3][4] Roman Catholic canon law gives the responsibility of teaching children the catechism to pastors, bishops, clerics and members of religious societies.[5] Coffey was the first lay person and the first woman reported to have taught the Catholic catechism to children in Victoria, and is referred to as the first teacher at a Catholic school in Melbourne.[1][2][6][7] When Geoghegan arrived in 1839, he praised Coffey for her initiative and for her “care and zeal” in establishing and conducting the first school in Melbourne.[2] Coffey’s contribution to Catholic education was celebrated in a St Patrick’s Day pageant at the Melbourne Town Hall in 1930.[8] She was singled out by Archbishop Justin Simonds as “an outstanding Catholic personality” in a requiem for pioneers in 1939.[9] Geoghegan used a small travelling wooden box that belonged to Coffey, covered with a linen cloth, as the altar for the first mass held in the Port Phillip District.[10] This box is held by the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne at the Goold Catholic Museum.[3]
After leaving the Port Phillip District the Coffey family spent about 10 years on a property on the Great Dividing Range, before settling in Spring Hill, Creswick on some of the earliest land purchased in Victoria. They later moved to Ballarat.[11] Catherine and Jeremiah Coffey had many children, six of whom pre-deceased them; they were survived only by their youngest child.[11] An obituary published on 3 September 1894 noted: "Mrs Coffey was the mother of a fine family whose members were well known and highly respected in the district".[11] Both Catherine and Jeremiah are buried in the Catholic section of the Creswick New Cemetery in regional Victoria.[12]