From Linda Fisher
I’m honoured to have been asked by ADRA to write about an amazing woman – Stella Cornelius - who was, in the true sense of the Hebrew words, an Eishat Chayil, a ‘woman of worth’.
This is a personal tribute to someone who was a beacon of light to me, someone I put on a pedestal and who never toppled from that perch. She had that effect on so many others, because Stella was truly one-in-a-million: charming, indefatigable, caring, generous, wise principled, and totally inclusive. Soft on the outside, and steely on the inside, Stella managed to get her own way in almost every venture she undertook, making people feel good about giving.
I first met Stella when I was working at Community Justice Centres, in the 1980s, and up until the past 12 months or so, we keep in semi-regular contact. In her gentle yet persistent way, she cajoled me, nurtured me, prodded me, pushed me, and praised me, to take different directions in my career, to expand my world, and to look at life a little differently.
One of her ideas, in the 1990s, was to institute a dialogue between Jews and Muslims. To this end, she contacted me, told me of her plan for meetings between ‘lay’ women – on the basis that it takes a lot more than just mere men in important positions to change the world! We contacted Barbara Coddington, a lawyer-mediator, who happily gave up her very busy practice for an afternoon each month to steer our conversations, and the ‘Group of Eight’ met at Sydney University (in a room that Stella organised) to discuss our similarities and also our differences. Stella came to the first couple of sessions, then left it to us. It was an interesting and challenging time for all of us, and ultimately very enlightening as we discovered that – despite our real differences – there were very many more similarities in our outlooks on life than appeared on the surface. With the pregnancy of two of the Muslim women, the emigration to Israel of one of the Jewish women, and Barbara’s expanding legal practice, the group came to an end after about 18 months. We all felt it would not be successful to introduce ‘new blood’.
For some years Stella also came to our home in Lindfield for our Jewish Passover and New Year’s celebrations, and participated with pleasure. My parents were struck with how gracious she was, and my father took great delight in showing her the label inside my mother’s Persian lamb coat – Cornelius Furs!
I’m not sure that everyone in ADRA is aware, but Stella also owned the building 1474a King Street, generously allowing ADRA to store its archives there and to use it as a mailing address. She also allowed the space to be used for seminars, and sometimes attended these herself. I remember speaking at one of these, probably in the early 1990s, and Stella taking great delight in participating in the discussion on ‘What Makes a Mediator?’
More recently, Stella’s generosity extended to assisting Mieke Brandon and me with Conflict Resolution Network material for the first edition of Mediating with Families’ (Fisher, L & Brandon, M, Pearson Education, Frenchs Forest, 2002), and also for the second (Fisher, L & Brandon, Mediating with Families, ThomsonReuters, 2009). She was delighted that we had also used material from her daughter Helena’s book (The Gentle Revolution, Cornelius, H, Simon & Shuster, Sydney, 1998), which she had previously given to me as a gift. We were just as delighted that we had been able to do so.
When my husband Mark, and then I, became quite seriously ill a few years ago, one of the first phone calls I received was from Stella. Not intruding, simply and gently wanting to know how the world was treating us. And she followed that up every few months – just to let us know she cared.
The overflowing crowd at Stella’s memorial service was a testament to her lasting legacy. The ways in which Stella touched and affected all of us are myriad. She has left us, but she is still with us in countless ways. Stella is unforgettable.