On the road to Christmas Hills

Christmas is a time to celebrate the places we treasure and the people we love. We travel to Christmas Hills in the north of Tasmania, and along the way visit four communities where the year's challenges have been vanquished and the locals are doing just that.

- SAMANTHA A TRENOWETH

The people of wild, windswept, northern Tasmania are a passionate lot. And they're prepared to fight for the things they treasure their rugged coastline, their families and communities, their language and their towering, ancient forests. In recent times, they’ve also battled tenaciously for their Anglican churches. And this year, the small but steadfast congregation at St Stephen’s, in the tiny coastal hamlet of Penguin, will celebrate Christmas with a special sense of gratitude that they’ve survived another year.

The sky has cleared after weeks of flooding rain and Bass Strait is sparkling indigo and silver as a dozen or so parishioners file out of church and across the yard towards the hall for coffee, biscuits and a natter.

“We’re just like a family here at St Stephen’s,” says Rev. Helen Gleeson, who has been ministering to her flock in this postcard-pretty, white weatherboard church for 20 years. Like any family, they’ve drawn closer through adversity.

“It all began back in 2000,” Helen explains. “Our church was experiencing some financial problems and there was a lack of clergy in our area, so we couldn’t afford a minister.”

The Anglican Church came up with the idea of "locally enabled ministry teams". So parishioners voted for ordinary members of the congregation who they thought had the makings of a priestly vocation, and when the votes were tallied, Helen's name was near the top of the list.

There were two years of training after that but Helen, who heretofore had been a special education teacher, says her Sunday duties "aren't too different from teaching, really". She was ordained in 2002 and received an emotional welcome from her congregation, who were delighted to have a dear and wise friend offering counsel every Sunday.