The Spanish Benedictines Rosendo Salvado and José Serra founded a mission among the Yued Noongar people on 1 March 1846, some 130 kilometres north of Perth, and named it after St. Benedict's birthplace, Nursia (Australian Dictionary of Biography). Before they left Rome, Vincent Pallotti — later canonised — had given them a painting of Our Lady of Good Counsel for the mission's good fortune.
In the mission's first harvest a bushfire swept toward the crop. Salvado, by the account in his own Memorie storiche dell'Australia (1851), seized the picture and went out against the fire, praying; the wind changed, and the fire fell back. A historian of the mission notes that the scene 'could not have failed to impress' the Aboriginal people who heard of it — a missionary investing an image with power over the bush. Devotional retellings add detail and a December 1847 date that the sources do not support.
New Norcia is still a Benedictine monastery, and Salvado's writings are among the early records of the Noongar language and customs. But the mission's history is not only this: its institutions for Aboriginal children are part of the record of the Stolen Generations, and the Australian Catholic Historical Society acknowledges that the Church was 'wrongly complicit' in the removal of children.
What is not claimed here: no Church authority has examined or judged the turning of the fire; it is Salvado's account of what happened, written a few years afterward.