Father George and Sister Veronica
At the Abbey Church and community at Caboolture, Father George and Sister Veronica work in a spirit of service, connection, and inter-faith dialogue.
Text and interview by Geoff Ginn.
Camera and sound by Jess White and Geoff Ginn. Video production and editing by Geoff Ginn.
This is a 7 minute read and 22 minute video, published December 2025.
The Abbey Church at Caboolture is a calm and secluded place, set amid shady trees with the quiet contemplation and simple daily routine of the monastic tradition. But frequently through the year it hums with activity: church services, art gallery events, the annual Abbey Medieval Festival, fundraisers, picnics, and public lectures. In recent years the turnoff from the main road to Abbey Place has been enlarged to manage this traffic flow. But outside of these events the shaded surrounds of the small church, with its gardens and medieval stained glass, are serene and peaceful.
Figure 1: St Michael's Abbey Church interior, showing central altar (QAR).
The Abbey and its setting
The Abbey Church is part of a larger precinct that includes St Michael’s College and the Abbey Museum of Art and Archaeology. Both college and museum are dynamic and service-driven, engaging with the broader community — in Caboolture and beyond — in teaching, research, and recreation. This evokes a contradiction: members of the Abbey community have sought seclusion from the world, to focus on their religious vocation. But at the same time, ‘the Abbey’ has become a byword in this part of southeast Queensland for a unique and popular confluence of elements, from fine arts and medieval artefacts to archaeological digs for school groups, jousting, and historical re-enactment.
The story of the Abbey Church, beginning at this site in 1965 but with deeper origins, has been told elsewhere (Ginn, 2012). The importance of key personalities and experiences in that story, however, remains largely undocumented.
Since the 1930s and its commencement in London, a small group of families — the Wards, the Chamberlains, the Strongs, the Cuffes, and the Balls — has formed the core of the Abbey community, some across three generations. Building on the labours of their predecessors, and conscious of their legacy, the current leaders of the Abbey continue its work under very different circumstances in Caboolture.
Introducing Father George
Father George and Sister Veronica joined the Abbey under different circumstances, and in different stages of life. Today, however, they have shared views of the value of their endeavours in faith and spirituality, and speak with a common voice of the challenges and opportunities they face.
George Cuffe was born in Cyprus, the son of Maurice and Doris Cuffe, among an expatriate group of English families living there since 1946. The families had together formed an Adventist intentional community of around a dozen members, known as the Confraternity of the Kingdom of Christ, initially in London’s northern outskirts in the early 1930s. Led by Father John Ward, an intellectually-curious Christian mystic, they lived with a common religious purpose to prepare for the sacred advent of Christ’s return.
Figure 2: Abbey Church interior, detail of stained glass, October 2023 (QAR).
A lifelong antiquarian and art history collector, John Ward’s historical convictions and perspectives imbued the everyday life of his Confraternity. Members took monastic vows, adopted simple vestments, and dedicated themselves to a simple routine of prayer, service, and contemplation in the style of medieval religious orders. After Ward, formerly Anglican and himself the son of a clergyman, took holy orders in the Orthodox Catholic Church of England, his Confraternity formally aligned with that organisation and Ward was consecrated as a bishop. Other members of his community such as Maurice Cuffe were later ordained as priests in the Orthodox Catholic tradition.
In Cyprus the small community encountered significant setbacks, not the least of them being Ward’s passing after a stroke in 1949. It was difficult to sustain basic self-sufficiency, and with the outbreak of civil disorder in the 1950s it was decided to continue their peregrinations to Australia. As a small boy, growing up with his parents and other families and their children, George remembers a frugal life in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, before a final move to Caboolture and the newly-purchased dairy farm in 1965.
‘When we got here, it was quite a shock to the system,’ he recalls, ‘ … because there was absolutely nothing here apart from an old broken-down shed, a small fibro house, and a well. And everything else that you see on the property [today] has over these last fifty years been created and built by the labour of the hands of those people who are part of the community.’
By the 1970s, as a young man, George was working alongside other members of the Confraternity, part of a second generation constructing buildings, raising livestock, and growing vegetables for sale. Ward’s priceless collection of historical antiquities remained with them, stored in boxes, to be finally re-displayed in 1986 with the opening of the Abbey Museum. George was ordained a priest in 1979, and assumed the leadership of the church and community in 2000.
Figure 3: Father George Cuffe, October 2023 (QAR).
Introducing Sister Veronica
By this time Veronica Ruygrok had also entered ‘the life’, as the commitment to religious service in a monastic or abbey context is known. Born into a conventional Roman Catholic family of six children in Mount Isa, Veronica attended convent schools where she had a curious, independent-minded, and often sceptical approach to religious instruction.
Completing teacher training at Mount Gravatt in the early 1970s, she came into contact with Sister Hilda of the Abbey community. Her initial plan was to travel to Boston to study at the famed Perkins School for the Blind, but this changed when she encountered the distinctive and (for her) inspiring atmosphere of the Abbey Church and its small resident community. She remembers that she was impressed by ‘the Christ-likeness of the lifestyle. It was simple. It was encompassing. It was non-judgemental. People accepted you for who you were. And I really felt like this is where … I had a vocation here, that God was calling me to spend my life here.’
Figure 4: St Michael's Abbey Church interior, October 2023 (QAR).
In 1975 Veronica joined the community as a novice, and in time became a fully professed member. A new dormitory building had just been completed, as the membership peaked at around 25, where she remembers a very old-fashioned style of religious life, with vows of obedience, poverty, and sacrifice. Daily tasks involved gardening, harvesting, preserving fruit and vegetables, and making candles and soap in an atmosphere of quiet diligence and self-sufficiency.
Figure 5: Sister Veronica Ruygrok, Abbey Church, October 2023 (QAR).
Her teaching expertise was key in the community’s establishment and development of St Michael’s College from 1983. Within three years the school had twenty pupils and three modest buildings, all constructed by the community. With Sister Veronica as its Principal until recently, the college is now a substantial independent primary school, with some 380 enrolments, high-quality facilities including a Performing Arts Complex, and a waiting list based on its excellent local reputation.
Change and continuity
From pigs and pumpkins to medieval art treasures, and from the dilapidated sheds of a dairy farm to an impressively modern primary school, the multi-faceted work of the Abbey Church and community has evolved and expanded in a remarkable variability.
In this, we find perhaps another contradiction. In order to remain a vital spiritual centre, that honours the ethos of its founders and builders, the prime movers of the Abbey Church have always embraced the obligation of change in a changing world. In Lampedusa’s modern classic The Leopard, one character voices the dilemma facing a fading aristocracy at the founding of modern Italy: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’
In a similar way the St Michael’s Abbey community, through the commitments of its core people, has evolved as a beacon of spiritual influence by embracing a reality of constant response and innovation. For George, the small but dynamic community has evolved in pursuit of an underlying realisation ‘that we’re all brothers and sisters, which leads into the multi-faith area, but it comes very much from the original idea, that every single person is a child of God, which was John Ward’s particular understanding as well. And a lot of our services that we’ve had over all these years, have been focused on that, on our soul journey.’
Veronica shares this sense of positive prospects, as entities like the college and the museum around the church ‘are established, well managed, and they will continue under the umbrella of the Confraternity and we will endeavour to see that that happens. But now we are moving into more of that pastoral care work of really connecting community, because for 58 years Caboolture people in the surrounds have seen us, always there like a big lighthouse, you know, travelling sort of light into many parts of their lives.’
Now more than sixty years since its re-founding in Caboolture, the Abbey community looks ahead with confidence at the certain prospect of further changes to come.
Oral history interview: Fr George and Sr Veronica
Sources and further reading
Cuffe, George and Ruygrok, Veronica. 2023. Interview, Abbey Church, 3 October.
Ginn, Geoffrey A.C. 2012. Archangels and Archaeology: J.S.M. Ward’s Kingdom of the Wise. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.
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