KNIGHT FAITHFUL
Dr John Michael Gunson 1822-1884
Knight of the Order of St Gregory the Great
Dr John Michael Gunson 1822-1884
Knight of the Order of St Gregory the Great
Peter Moore
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KNIGHT FAITHFUL
Dr John Michael Gunson 1822-1884 Knight of the Order of St Gregory the Great Peter Moore |
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John Gunson was born into a middling merchant family in Limerick, Ireland and died a respected surgeon in Adelaide, South Australia. His heredity and religious conversion, medical training in Limerick, Dublin and Paris, his medical practice at Oxford, and his emigration in 1852 are each traced as backgrounds to a certain pre-eminence in colonial South Australia. He lent his professional and social status in support of the fledgling Catholic Church, and of successive bishops in the impoverished diocese, and Bishop Reynolds repaid his generosity by nominating Gunson to Pope Leo XIII as a Chevalier of St Gregory the Great. Gunson’s evolving engagement with his new country is seen in the names he gave his houses – first Emerald Villa, then Erina House and, out of the city, The Acacias (now Loreto College). At the same time he declared his Irishness from the chair at John Redmond’s Adelaide meetings to raise funds for Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, and helped raise money by urging fellow Irish migrants to commit themselves to their new home in ‘Australia, the Land of our Adoption’. A ‘grand tour’ to Ireland and Europe left him dissatisfied, and Adelaide loomed as ‘home’ once more, as he returned to take his own medicine. First and longest-serving member of the founding Council of the University of Adelaide, member-lecturer of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, occasional writer of letter to editors, and long-time executive and director of Catholic societies and charities, Gunson is a ‘Richard Mahony’-like figure in a South Australian context.
$20 RRP incl GST 60 + iv pages, bibliography, index |
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