FATHER Nikola Cabraja was a fresh faced 29-year-old priest when he disembarked at Perth Airport in 1979 from Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia, the new Catholic priest for WA’s sizeable Croatian diaspora.
After several hours detained in Customs – “I had lots of books” – he was met by a handful of Croatians eager to meet their new priest.
So began an odyssey that will see Fr Cabraja celebrate 50 years as a Catholic priest tomorrow (Sunday June 29), 46 as the chaplain at St Anne’s church in North Fremantle.
• Father Nikola Cabraja is celebrating his 50th year as a priest. Photo by Eddie Albrecht
Fr Cabraja threw himself into pastoral work immediately and it wasn’t long before the pews of St Anne’s were again full and the high wooden ceilings echoed with warm tones of the church organ and a new choir.
But the story could have been very different.
By the late 1960s the North Fremantle landmark was slowly falling into disrepair – the congregation had dwindled to a handful – and the church was put on the market in early 1970.
Through a series of fortuitous events, another Croatian Catholic priest not long in Australia found himself before the archbishop of Perth asking if he could get a parish.
Archbishop Lancelot Goody gave Fr Veceslav Supuk the keys to St Anne’s, where just a handful of original parishioners was left from a congregation of more than 900 in the mid-1900s.
Interestingly, these parishioners still attend mass at St Anne’s.
In 1972, the first mass in Croatian was conducted at St Anne’s.
Some years later, the community offered to buy the land behind the church where St Anne’s Primary School was located.
• Continued in Online Extra
by EDDIE ALBRECHT
——————
THERE’S MORE IN ONLINE EXTRA
WE couldn’t fit all of Fr Cabraja’s story in the printed edition, but the good news is that there’s plenty of room in our Online Extra. Head to www.fremantleherald.com to see the digital edition of the paper, or better still subscribe and receive it in your inbox weekly. Also in this week’s edition is Electrify the Valley, great movie reviews on Cranko Nef and The Tasters from Paula Holland, a look at rising star Heim Cooper who’s on his way to Freo, and a look at what adding some Indigenous perspectives to the Manjaree story might mean.