2023 Father Brian Maher Lecture

The 2023 Father Brian Maher Lecture will be delivered by Cheryl Bollard, Project Coordinator for Family History ACT's Canberra Pioneers Projects, on Tuesday 4 April.

The Voices of Many: The significance of the Father Brian Maher Collection will be an exploration of the historical significance of the collection and the insights it provides into the Irish Catholic settlement of the Limestone Plains region. 

Brian Maher was born at Corowa NSW in 1936 and passed away in Canberra in 2021. He was ordained as Priest in the Catholic Church in Canberra in 1966 and spent most of his life serving catholic communities in the Canberra Region as their Parish Priest.

Father Maher was also a keen exponent of family history who applied his skills to learning more about the families in his parishes. Over a period of more than four decades he amassed a large collection of written papers and files, detailing the lives of 425 Catholic families and their descendants. Many of these families are directly linked to the early settlers in the ACT and southern New South Wales, and include Irish immigrants, convicts, and free settlers.

This unique and valuable manuscript collection is now in the care of Family History ACT. With the support of two ACT Heritage Grants, the Canberra Pioneers Project is digitising and indexing the records held in the Father Brian Maher Collection to preserve these precious artefacts and to make the information that they comprise available to researchers.

For more information or to register to attend the 2023 Father Brian Maher Lecture Click Here