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Mary Helen MacKillop was born on 15 January 1842 in Fitzroy, Melbourne, then part of the British colony of New South Wales. She was the eldest of eight children of Alexander MacKillop and Flora MacDonald, Scottish Catholic immigrants. Her father had begun studies for the priesthood at the Scots College in Rome but did not proceed to ordination, and after settling in Australia he was unable to provide a stable livelihood. The family moved often and lived in reduced circumstances. Mary received some formal schooling and was also taught at home by her father. From her mid-teens she worked to support her parents and siblings, first in a Melbourne stationery shop and later as a governess and teacher in rural Victoria and South Australia.

In 1866, while working at Penola in South Australia, she and the local priest Father Julian Tenison Woods opened a Catholic school for poor children and founded a new religious congregation, the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. MacKillop took the name Sister Mary of the Cross and became the first member and superior of the institute. The Josephites were marked by a vow of poverty that forbade the congregation to own property, by a simple brown habit, and by a mission to teach and care for the poor in isolated bush districts as well as in towns. Within a few years sisters were staffing numerous small schools across South Australia, and the congregation also established an orphanage and other works of charity.

Conflict with Bishop Laurence Sheil of Adelaide over the centralised government of the order and over Woods's influence led to MacKillop's excommunication in September 1871 and to an attempt to suppress the Josephites. The sentence was lifted in February 1872, shortly before Sheil's death. In 1873 MacKillop travelled to Rome and obtained from Pope Pius IX approval of a revised rule that preserved the congregation's essential character while placing it more firmly under episcopal and Roman oversight. She served several terms as superior general, though she was removed from office for a period in the 1880s amid further disputes with bishops in New South Wales and South Australia; her sisters later restored her to leadership. The Josephites continued to expand, founding houses in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and New Zealand.

From 1901 MacKillop's health declined. A stroke in 1902 left her paralysed on her right side, and she spent her remaining years in a wheelchair while still corresponding and advising the congregation. She died on 8 August 1909 at the Josephite convent in North Sydney and was buried at Gore Hill Cemetery; in 1914 her remains were transferred to a tomb in the Mary MacKillop Memorial Chapel adjoining the convent. Devotion to her grew in Australia through the twentieth century. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Sydney in January 1995 and canonised by Pope Benedict XVI in Saint Peter's Square on 17 October 2010, becoming the first Australian recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church. Her feast is kept on 8 August.

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