When a small group of strictly enclosed Irish nuns arrived in Ballarat in 1875, with their charismatic leader, Mother Gonzaga Barry, who could have imagined the influence they would have on Catholic education in Australia? Since then, Loreto nuns have not only founded their own schools, but run parish schools, worked in indigenous and other disadvantaged communities, taught in universities and held prominent positions in public life. Loreto in Australia is the story of women of great strength, charm and deep spirituality, fulfilling the prediction of their seventeenth-century founder Mary Ward that ""women in time to come will do great matters"".