Fr Ed returns to Tasmania for the quiet life

By Catherine Sheehan

Fr Edmond Travers MSC said he felt “amazed” and “grateful” to have returned to Tasmania after 38 years to live a life of silence and solitude as a hermit at Mangana.

Serving as Parish Priest at Moonah for five years in the early 1980’s, Fr Ed arrived back in Tasmania earlier this year and is currently residing at Oatlands.

After a lifetime of study, teaching, and missionary work as priest of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC), Fr Ed said in recent years he had discerned a calling to the eremitical life of a hermit.

With Archbishop Julian’s permission he will live as a hermit next to the Catholic Church in Mangana.

Fr Ed described Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church at Mangana as “very beautiful” and said that it had been “built by our MSCs when we first came to Tasmania”.

Tasmania had been the first MSC mission in Australia, he added, with Fr John Graham as the first MSC Parish Priest at Mangana.

Growing up in a farming family in Cleve, in rural South Australia, Fr Ed said he first felt a vocational calling when he was just six years old. He recalls that shortly after making his First Holy Communion, he had “walked off into the mallee scrub” one day and began a conversation with God.

“I can still see the dew hanging on the trees, the morning dew, and having a conversation with my indwelling Lord,” he said.

Fr Ed remembers telling God that he would like to join him in heaven.

“And I heard Him say to me, ‘No, I want you to stay. I have something important for you to do’.”

He joined the MSC’s in 1967 when he was 25 years of age and entered St Paul’s National Seminary in Kensington, Sydney, the following year. He was ordained a priest in 1971 and was posted to Darwin where he experienced the devastation of Cyclone Tracey.

In 1981 Fr Ed was moved to Tasmania, serving as Parish Priest at Moonah for five years.

After studying spirituality in the USA, he returned to Sydney where he ran the Douglas Park Retreat Centre for 12 years. He also served as Spiritual Director at the Seminary of the Good Shepherd in Sydney for nine years.

As a hermit, Fr Ed said his life at Mangana would be built around praying the hours of the Divine Office, contemplative prayer, spiritual reading, and the Mass. He will also continue to give spiritual retreats for clergy and religious communities.