A Victorian-era classroom session, historic walks, a pipe band procession and a special Mass are plans for the Arrowtown celebration of Australasia's first saint. The Blessed Mary MacKillop, who died in 1909, aged 67, founded the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart, an order committed to helping the needy in rural areas, which spread from Australia to New Zealand and around the world.

Mother Mary was beatified by the late Pope John Paul II in 1995 and will be canonised in the Vatican on October 17.

Arrowtown will host a weekend of activities to commemorate the canonisation and its links with the religious leader, who will be officially known as St Mary of the Cross (MacKillop), on the weekend of November 6 and 7.

The dates were chosen to allow time for invited representatives of the sisterhood to return from the Vatican and participate in person, organising committee chairwoman Margaret Hyland, of Arrowtown, said, on Thursday.

Historic walks in the footsteps of Mother Mary were scheduled, from the Lakes District Museum to Mary MacKillop's Cottage, on the Saturday.

Mrs Hyland was part of the parish group who restored the cottage in the early 1990s.

She will be back in the habit to play Mother Mary and tell spectators about her life and legacy.

"She was a strong woman, she lived in Australia in Victorian times when women were seen and not heard," Mrs Hyland said.

"She wanted sisters to live among the poor in the outback and to set up schools and refuges.

Some of the bishops resented the fact they couldn't control her order."

On the Saturday afternoon, about 20 pupils from St Joseph's School in Queenstown will dress in period clothes and use slate boards and pencils.

They will take part in an hour-long re-enactment of the Victorian school classes taught by Mother Mary and the sisterhood, this time tutored by museum education officer Angela Verry.

A social function to greet visitors and pilgrims arriving for Sunday Mass would be held in and near St Patrick's Cottage, next to the church, on the Saturday afternoon.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Dunedin, the Most Rev Colin Campbell, will preside at Mass, in the Arrowtown Athenaeum Hall on the Sunday at 11am.

The hall was chosen to cater for the 300 to 400 parishioners expected to attend, instead of using the 120-seat St Patrick's Church.

A procession from the church to the hall and Mass will be led by the Queenstown and Southern Lakes Highland Pipe Band, in honour of Mother Mary's Scots heritage. Mrs Hyland, on behalf of the six-strong committee, said all were welcome to join in.

Deputy prime minister and Clutha-Southland MP Bill English, as well as the incoming Queenstown Lakes mayor and former pupils and supporters of the cottage restoration were invited along with the sisterhood, she said.

(Source Otago Daily Times)