And justice for one – or three

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In 1970, Mother Teresa arrived in Melbourne with six sisters and established the House of Compassion in Fitzroy. On the cobbled stone backstreets, with rising tower blocks looming overhead, the sisters lived and worked among the very, very poor.

At the end of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the elves sail away from Middle-earth, leaving the humans to fend for themselves. All the visible and invisible work they have been doing will cease, and we, the readers, fear for those left behind.

As a Uniting Church minister who grew up in the north, I had no idea the sisters were still with us. I thought they had faded away, or left in boats for another shore.

Recently, I worked with a mother – tall and graceful, like a waterbird – who needed help attending court with her two tiny girls.

We arrived at the Magistrates’ Court early and ready, and were told, twice, to go to the wrong place: wrong building, wrong floor. Finally, we ended up back where we began and went up in the lift to the court.

The twins were restless, their little heads bouncing from side to side like curly-mopped meerkats, unable to sit still. We arrived in an octagon-shaped space, with arm-like corridors extending from a central circle. A shafted light well opened in the butter-beige........

© The Sydney Morning Herald