 | NORML News: Mother Aubert New Zealand's PATRON SAINT OF POT |
 The nun who first grew cannabis in Aotearoa is about to be made a saint, reports brodie Andrews in NORML News Winter 2004.Suzanne Aubert, the first person known to cultivate cannabis in New Zealand for medicine, and described by some as our greatest woman, is about to be made a saint.
Mother Mary Joseph (Suzanne) Aubert, a French nun, founded the Sisters of Compassion mission at Hiruharama/Jerusalem, and concocted potent medicinal brews of cannabis hemp to ease the nun's menstrual pains and to help asthmatics and recovering alcoholics.
Jerusalem later became infamous in the 1970s as James K Baxter's "Open Door" commune. Baxter was a great Mother Aubert admirer.
Now the Catholic Church is considering the Beatification of Mother Aubert as a saint - and NORML says she is New Zealand's "patron saint of pot".
Aubert arrived in New Zealand in December 1860, aged 25, having served as a nurse in the Crimean War. She was already an accomplished physician having studied biology and chemistry semisecretly in France, as women were not admitted to university at that time.
Suzanne became a Maori scholar and wrote several books in that language and was also a fluent speaker of English, Italian and Spanish, as well as her native French.
In her early years in the northern districts, around Auckland and in Hawkes Bay areas, she toured the outback as a nurse and midwife tending and healing sick European and Maori alike, walking thousands of miles at times unaccompanied. During this time she made an intensive study of New Zealand flora for medicinal plants.
She became trusted by the Maori, and allowed to watch and study their healing tech- niques and how they prepared herbal remedies. Combined with her own formal studies she developed herbal remedies of outstanding medicinal value.
In 1883 Aubert established western style education among Maori tribesfolk at ‚Jerusalem' on the upper reaches of the Wanganui river. She started a mission which included a school, an orphanage and a hospice and founded the Sisters of Compassion.
The nuns planted extensive orchards and vegetable gardens and grew and processed herbs including cannabis for medi- cine. Following the Egyptian campaign of 1800, Indian Hemp (cannabis) was highly regarded and deeply ingrained in French medicine. Mother Aubert used it as both a tea for asthma (among other things) and made a brew of hemp cooked in milk for the nuns' menstrual cramps, and to help recovering alcoholics.
Explosions were sometimes heard in the middle of the night as she experimented with her medicines in a crude bush laboratory. On one occasion she was poisoned with strong ammonia from a mislabel- ling mishap and very nearly buried alive.
Suzanne became totally paralysed and unable to move a muscle though she was still fully conscious. She heard herself being declared dead by the doctor, was placed in her coffin, the grave dug, and Bishop Pompallier was ready to preside over the ceremony. At that moment a nun returned from an overseas trip and insisted Aubert was not dead.
Aubert eventually recovered and her ‚native plant' remedies became the basis of a thriving business which supported the convent and orphanage. She was the first person to success- fully combine Maori and Western medicines into products, and the first person to commercially extract New Zealand native plants.
They were commercially distributed as a range of herbal remedies known as ‚Rongoas'.
The Evening Post in 1892 called Aubert's remedies "The chief proprietary medicine of New Zealand".
At the height of operations some 4000 bottles a month were distributed from the Kempthorrne and Prosser factory down river, and were sold throughout the colony and Australia. But dodgy practices by the firm (they watered down the syrups to get more bottles) led to a court case to break her contract with them, and the cessation of operations.
Suzanne found this "commercial enterprise and betrayal" very distressing and a huge distraction from her work with the ill and dispossessed. When pressure for her recipes grew too intense, she tore her notes up and so her formulae were lost, though there are several surviving full bottles in at the Sisters of Compassion centre in Island Bay, Wellington.
Suzanne was the "Mother Teresa" of her day and went on to found the Homes of Compassion and Hospitals in Wellington, Auckland, Carterton, Timaru and Australia for orphans and the sick.
Suzanne died aged 91 on 1st October 1926. She had a mile-long funeral cortege described in the papers of the day as i.the greatest funeral New Zealand had ever accorded any womanla, yet she went to her final resting- place as she went through life: without flowers. In life she asked for nothing for herself and in the hour of her death she had willed that no token of esteem should be bestowed upon her remains. While the floral tributes were absent, present was a country's love.
Suzanne Aubert is now to be beatified as a saint by the Catholic Church: "After having consulted with the Holy see (The Vatican), my brother Bishops and the faithful of the Archdiocese and having verified the existence of a true and widespread reputation of sanctity, enjoyed by her during her life and growing ever stronger after her death, as well as ample evidence of the granting of graces and favours by God through her intercession, I Cardinal Thomas Williams, Archbishop of Wellington do hereby make public this petition of the Sister's of Compassion for this cause, and thus declare I am initiating the Cause of Beatifi- cation and Canonization of the Servant of God Suzanne Aubert, on this the fifteenth day of March in the year of our Lord 2004."
Wow what a woman! A new "patron saint" for Pot.
References: "Never let go" by Pat Rafter; "New Zealand Green" by Redmer Yska; www.hoc.org.nz
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