Australian Dictionary of Biography

Mary Lewis

Sourced from 'Always Begin with a Story: Memoirs of Mary Lewis'

Mary Lewis (1908-1998), social worker, was born on 13 April 1908 in North Adelaide, second youngest of eight children of Patrick McMahon Glynn, Irish-born barrister and politician, and his Melbourne-born wife Abigail, née Dynon. Raised in a stable Catholic home, Mary’s childhood was rich with classical literature, music, and theatre, though she often yearned for ‘more physical closeness and affection’ from her parents (Lewis 2001, 27). She was sent to the local St Dominic’s Priory College before joining an older sister at Sacré Cœur in Melbourne. Not a dedicated pupil, she persuaded her mother to allow her to join a group of students she was chaperoning to attend the canonisations of Thérèse of Lisieux and the Society of the Sacred Heart foundress, Madeleine Sophie Barat, in Rome in 1925.

On her return to Australia, Glynn remained at home and mixed with a young social set. On 16 November 1927 she married Leslie Joseph Lewis, a South Australian-born Catholic pastoralist, at St Laurence’s Church, North Adelaide. He owned an isolated property near Wilcannia on the Darling River, New South Wales, where they resided. When Mary became pregnant, she returned to Adelaide to have the child, Deidre, in 1928. She did the same again when her son, Patrick, was born in 1930. The time away did not help the Lewises’ relationship, and Mary’s hope that she could live like others who were isolated from their spouses and spend time in both places did not last. They separated in 1934 and later divorced. An inheritance from her father helped her to stay in Adelaide with the children.

Over the following years, Lewis had a series of romantic relationships. These led her to struggle inwardly over the Church’s teachings on marriage and intimacy, which told her to live a single and chaste life. One of her partners desperately wanted to marry her, but she refused, tormented by feelings of guilt and shame. She was later shattered by the news that he had died in a shooting accident. In 1937, by way of escape, she went to England with her children and met up with her sister Dympna. She sent her children to boarding school and settled at Notting Hill Gate, London. Lewis herself found work at a local restaurant and had a relationship with the restaurant manager Thomas Gill, with whom she and her children lived.

At the beginning of World War II, Lewis returned to Australia and, to break with the past, lived in Sydney. With the war in the Pacific, the family—including Dympna—relocated to Bowral in the Southern Highlands. Inspired by an eccentric parish priest, Lewis became heavily involved in local church activity, including teaching religion at a number of Catholic boys’ homes and throwing herself into the task of opening a community centre for the Catholic United Services Auxiliary (CUSA). Towards the end of the war, the family returned to Sydney, and Lewis sent her children to boarding school while she joined the staff at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Rose Bay, supervising students for their evening study and sporting activities.

By chance, Lewis found a newspaper advertisement seeking mature students to study social work at the University of Sydney (DipSocStud, 1947). Her application was successful and she was able to stay at the university’s Sancta Sophia College. After her graduation, she accepted a job as a social worker at the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau (later Centacare), and so began her long association with the bureau, of which she later became assistant director. Over time the bureau was able to capitalise on government grants to expand its services. In 1955 Lewis made use of an opportunity to return to Europe, chaperoning a friend’s daughter. Armed with letters of introduction, she visited similar, more developed organisations in England. Returning home, and not one to stand back, she eagerly accepted an offer from the Catholic Weekly to write an advice column, which led to invitations to speak at parish functions. In the mid-1960s she joined Channel 7’s television program ‘People in Conflict,’ an afternoon talk show that provided advice to individuals experiencing various emotional and personal challenges.

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), Lewis had hoped that the Church would adopt a more tolerant view towards contraception. The encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) came as a devastating blow that left her and many others disappointed. Only a year earlier, she had been presented with the Cross of Leo XIII (1967) by the Catholic cardinal (Sir) Norman Gilroy for her contribution to social welfare. In 1967 she was elected to the Sydney Diocesan Pastoral Council and instigated the establishment of its Institute of Counselling (1968). She was also a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers.

A training program aimed at staff development was initiated at Sancta Sophia College in the 1960s. Lewis gave lectures on marriage counselling and acted as a group facilitator until 1975, when she decided it was time to leave the bureau. Until the early 1980s she acted as a consultant to priests at St Patrick’s, Church Hill, home to the Marist Fathers and Sydney’s oldest Catholic church, for pastoral and or welfare matters. In retirement she travelled in Australia and began working on her memoirs. On 8 April 1998 she died at James Milson Retirement Village, North Sydney, from a cardiac arrest. She was survived by her two children and was buried in the Northern Suburbs Catholic lawn cemetery.

A confident and inspiring public speaker, with a deep capacity for empathy, Lewis took a practical approach to counselling and was a skilled negotiator, especially with church authorities. Her son remembered her as a formidable, forthright, and ‘at times fragile private person,’ admitting that he was sometimes ‘overawed by the strength of her personality’ (Lewis 2001, 8-11). Though Lewis struggled with feelings of loneliness throughout her life, she came to value the freedom of being a single woman and saw friendship as ‘the mainstream of my existence’ (Lewis 2001, 174). People turned to her for help, because of her maturity, compassion, and training. Her memoirs were published posthumously by her son.