STORY JOHN DUNN PHOTOS KATARINA SILVESTER

Attribution to R.M.Williams OUTBACK magazine (Issue #155 June/July 2024), reproduced with permission

When he moved to Roma, Qld, Father Tom Duncan obtained his pilot’s licence so he could visit parishioners in more remote areas.

In 2020, the newly ordained Catholic priest Father Thomas ‘Tom’ Duncan was chatting with the Bishop of Toowoomba, Qld. They were in the middle of an 8-hour, 740km drive to and from St George on a pastoral visit, and agreed there had to be a better way to serve the 500,000sq km Toowoomba Diocese, with its 77,400 Catholics.

The following year, 30-year-old Fr Tom was transferred from Toowoomba to Roma, becoming parish priest of a huge area. Bearing in mind the conversation he’d had with bishop Robert McGuckin, he enthusiastically obtained his pilot’s licence, so that he could cover many of the long-haul journeys in a Piper Cherokee or an Italian-built Tecnam, which he hires from the local aero club. While road travel remains a large part of Fr Tom’s daily diary, he envisages the future involving greater use of aircraft to cover the longer journeys he often makes. “The distances are huge in Queensland, as they are in every area of the outback, so flying will become the most practical way of meeting the requirements of the people out there,” he says. “There is a shortage of priests and there’s likely to be even fewer in the outback in the years ahead so flying is a great help to reach our far-flung people.”

Fr Tom’s base is All Saints at Roma. But he is also priest director at St Columba’s, Mitchell, St Mary’s Wallumbilla, and Immaculate Conception, Surat, as well as looking after former churches at Injune, Yuleba and Jackson. He is also dean of an area including Roma, St George, Cunnamulla, Charleville and Quilpie, plus all the associated smaller communities between. There was a time when many of these places had priests of their own, but now many have none.

Fr Tom also visits places such as Birdsville, close to the NT border, which is outside his normal jurisdiction, but he goes “because we have no presence there and the Catholics in the town need to be shown that they are not forgotten”. On the ground in Roma, Fr Tom has become a well-known figure. He wears the traditional black cassock, which is common attire for the clergy in many parts of the world, but not often in Australia, particularly in the hotter areas of the interior where more informal dress is the norm. “I believe it is important to be seen for who you are,” he explains. “Portraying a religious presence in the community shows the church is out and about and active among the people.”

It wasn’t all that long ago that Fr Tom was seen in a different light. The Courier Mail in Brisbane, reflecting on his decision to become a priest, looked back on his youth in the town of Miles, 140km down the Warrego Highway from Roma. The newspaper called him “a trouble-making teen who had become a dedicated man of God”.

Fr Tom doesn’t dispute it. “We weren’t bad – just naughty. A bit mischievous perhaps. But some people were shocked,” he says. His parents, Mark Duncan, a Miles builder, and his wife Sheryl, had sent their son off to board at Marist College at Ashgrove in Brisbane and it was there, as his education finished, that Tom says he “felt an emptiness about the rest of my life – a sense of loss when contemplating what lay ahead, and a feeling that I didn’t know where to go. And that led to my thinking that God might be calling me.”

That thought was confirmed in the year he spent labouring in a furniture factory in Brisbane, before he began studying for the priesthood, joining “a huge and ancient tradition, both immense and overwhelming, standing between God and God’s people and trying to open up a new and fulfilling world for them”.

Looking back on his decision to become a pilot, Fr Tom recalls that “both the bishop and myself recognised the benefit of being able to fly would enhance my ministry, because the shrinking number of clergy was making taking the sacraments to people increasingly difficult”.

His aviation course was completed in 2022. Refreshers are usually conducted at Redcliffe, north of Brisbane.

Week to week, though, Fr Tom sits competently and comfortably in the cockpit of his small, single-engined aircraft, as he takes off into the seemingly unending vastness of the Queensland outback. “We now live in a world of high technology and we have to speak that language and use the means it involves,” he says.