Race, nationality and religion in Australia The Irish Catholics, the labour movement and

the working class in the 19th and 20th centuries By Bob Gould The influence of the Catholic Irish on the emergence of a radical Australian national consciousness has been relatively neglected in general histories of Australia, including leftist ones. For instance, in No Paradise for Workers, 1988, by Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright, the impact of the Irish Catholics on the labour movement is presented, without evidence, as essentially conservative. Miriam Dixson, the one-time leftist labour historian, now turned conservative populist, focussed a major part of her book, The Real Matildas on the allegation that "backward" Irish women retarded women's rights in Australia, and she has now, in The Imaginary Australian located the Irish influence as the major source of undesirable negativity towards her artificially reconstructed Anglophile version of Australian identity. The often missing presence of the Irish Catholic dimension in general Australian history has flawed a lot of liberal and leftist Australian historiography, including much labour history. This absence or understatement of the influence of Irish Catholics makes many histories of Australia in the 19th century mysterious and sometimes almost unintelligible. A current example of this is Stuart Macintyre's Concise History of Australia, in which the Irish Catholics are almost invisible. This makes Macintyre's short history considerably inferior to the short histories of Manning Clark and Russell Ward, with which it will inevitably be compared. The neglect by many historians of the critically oppositional role of the Irish Catholics in Australian society lays the way open for ahistorical concepts such as the one developed by Miriam Dixson, in which she celebrates retrospectively her imaginary hegemonic "Anglo-Celtic core culture" in the 19th century. In reality, that was a period of the sharpest conflict between an underclass consisting of the Irish Catholics and the other oppressed social groups, on the one hand, and ruling class British Australia on the other. Further to this point, it is not really possible to get an accurate fix on class formation in 19th century Australia without fully understanding the oppositional role of the Irish Catholics, which contributed constantly to democratic upheavals and fed into the emergence of a distinctive Australian working class, and late in the century, a Labor industrial and political movement. The "debate on class" among labour historians can't be illuminated or resolved in any rounded way without reference to the considerable social and political influence and impact of Irish Catholics in Australia, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which has so far been neglected or obliterated by some historians, of whom Macintyre is representative. The older liberal and Marxist labour historians, Manning Clark, Ian Turner, Brian Fitzpatrick, Russell Ward and Rupert Lockwood, are much more comprehensive and accurate in their coverage of the role of the Irish than the later, "new left" historians, such as Humphrey McQueen and Stuart Macintyre. Right-wing historians, such as Geoffrey Blainey, Allan Atkinson and Miriam Dixson either neglect the influence of the Irish, or are positively hostile to them, like Dixson. For that reason, when Robert Hughes' ground-breaking The Fatal Shore was published, one striking aspect of that book was its healthy correction to this neglect of the Irish. Hughes's book has been the most popular work about Australian history ever, which of course has not endeared him or his book to some dreary professional historians, whose narrowly focused institutional histories often suffer badly by comparison with the robust social history of Hughes. One academic "Marxist", of the arid postmodernist sort that passes for Marxism in academe nowadays, attacked Hughes in an academic journal for being not "historically materialist" enough, whatever that may mean in this context. The high-profile right-wing populist, Paul Sheehan, obviously dislikes The Fatal Shore intensely. In my view, Hughes's book (along with Eris O'Brien's The Foundation of Australia) is the necessary starting point for any overview of the origins of Australia. Over the last 15 years there has been a development of a specific discipline of Irish Australian studies by people like Oliver McDonagh, Keith Amos, Colm Kiernan, Patrick O'Farrell and now Tom Keneally, located both in Australia and in Ireland, and we are indebted greatly to the work of this school. Although this discipline of Irish-Australian cultural studies has not yet been comprehensively incorporated into general Australian history, it has provided a large and growing body of work, which will inevitably contribute to the development in the future of a balanced, liberal, leftist, Marxist Australian historiography, into which the Irish Catholics and their enormous political, social and cultural influence will be properly incorporated. One of the first things to understand about Australian history, national consciousness and the labour movement in the 19th century is the demographics of Australian population growth. This, of course, can't be separated from the more traditional Marxist approach, which deals with the development of the economy, and the emergence of the capitalist class and the working class, but those areas have been studied extensively, while the religious and ethnic make-up of 19th century and early 20th century Australia has been largely overlooked

The indefatigable demographer, Charles Price, and his computer, have thrown a lot of light on the numerical significance of the Irish. The convict period The raw statistics of the convict era are illuminating: 168,000 people were deported to Australia as convicts, of whom 28,000 were women, about 22 per cent were Irish Catholics, and possibly even more had been because of the large number of convicts who did not state a religion. The more significant figure, however, is the breakdown among the women. A massive 47 per cent of the convict women were Irish Catholics, a figure that has only been noted by historians in recent years, particularly by Kay Daniels and those who put together the Atlas and Statistics volume of the 1988 Australians, A Historical Atlas published by Fairfax, Syme and Weldon. This statistic about convict women is of great significance, for instance, for anyone engaged in the current practice of family history who manages to locate a convict in their ancestry. There are about three chances out of five, statistically, that their convict ancestor, male or female, was an Irish catholic. In another chapter, I advance the proposition that anyone who had ancestors here before the gold rush that began in the 1840s has a high statistical probability of having some Aboriginal ancestry as well. The most oppressed, the Irish and the Aboriginals, contributed enormous amounts to the gene pool of White Australia before the gold rushes. In a book that is very important to this inquiry, The Irish Emigrant Experience in Australia edited by John O'Brien and Patrick Travers, 1991, there is an extremely useful chapter by Jakelin Troy, in which the author, in describing the origins of "NSW pidgin", the beginnings of the distinct Australian dialect, documents in enormous detail the constant contact with, and interaction between, Irish convicts and Aboriginals on the expanding edge of European settlement in NSW. Pre-Gold-Rrush convict Australia was mainly an open-air prison outpost of British imperialism. In the early years the British ruling caste feared and hated their convict slaves, particularly the Irish, and the rulers of the colony were in considerable fear for many years of Irish revolts, one of which took place in 1804 at Castle Hill. The military and civilian dictatorship of the British deprived the Irish Catholics for 30 years of the consolations of their religion, and tried to enforce conformity to the established Anglican church, but these efforts were totally unsuccessful. The Irish would have nothing to do with the religion of the English oppressor and, indeed, most English, Scottish and Welsh convicts would have nothing to do with the Anglican Church of the English ruling class either. The church parades and the flogging parsons, who doubled as brutal magistrates in convict society, were part of the established order, which was the obvious enemy of all the oppressed: Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh. The battle of the Irish Catholics for religious freedom in Britain's penal-colony, military-dictatorship early NSW The colony commenced life as a harsh military dictatorship. Eris O'Brien's important book, Foundation of Catholicism in Australia (two volumes, Angus and Robertson, 1922) has this to say about the religious arrangements in the new colony: At Phillip's departure from it in 1792, it has been reckoned, the population of the convict settlements at Sydney and at Norfolk Island was 4414; of these one-third were Catholics. It was not merely the absence of their priests that made the lot of Catholics hard, but the fact that they were compelled to attend Protestant religious services, against which they had ever held conscientious objections. On November 9, 1791, Phillip issued the following regulation: "Every person will regularly attend divine worship ... The Commissary is directed to stop 2lbs of meat from every overseer, and 1.5lbs from every convict, male or female, who does not attend divine worship." Governor Hunter, his successor, had similar ideas. In his evidence before the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1812, he stated that he had given a general order that he expected the people to attend divine service, sent constables around the town with directions that, if they found anyone idling during the time of divine service, they were to put them in gaol and settle the point next morning. Governor King acted in like manner until in 1803 certain instructions came from England; then he judged it expedient to grant unto the Revd. Mr Dixon a conditional emancipation to enable him to exercise his clerical functions as a Roman Catholic priest ... which permission shall remain in full force and effect as long as he, the said Mr Dixon (and no other priest), shall strictly adhere to the rules and regulations which he has this day bound himself by oath to observe." These regulations are worth quoting insofar as they give a picture of the times and of Catholic disabilities, which otherwise could not be so well described: "Regulations to be observed by the Rev. Mr Dixon and the Catholic congregations of this colony "1st. They will observe, with all becoming gratitude, that this extension of liberal toleration proceeds from the piety and benevolence of our most gracious Sovereign ... "3rd. As Mr Dixon will be allowed to perform his clerical functions once in three weeks at the settlements of Sydney, Parramatta, and Hawkesbury, in rotation, the magistrates are strictly forbid suffering those Catholics who reside at the places where service is not performing from resorting to the settlement and district at which the priest officiates for the day. "6th. And to the end that strict decorum may be observed, a certain number of the police will be stationed at and about the places appointed during the service. "7th. Every person throughout the colony will observe that the law has sufficiently provided for the punishment of those who may disquiet or disturb any assembly of religious worship whatever, or misuse any priest or teacher of any tolerated sect." The regulations emphasisd the fact that tolerated sects should be grateful for small mercies. But even this toleration was of short duration. Fathers Dixon and Harold, who had been deported as persons implicated in the Irish rebellion, reached Sydney in 1800, and Father O'Neil in 1801; but their status as convicts prevented the carrying out of their priestly functions. Father Dixon celebrated the first public Mass in Australia on May 15, 1803, probably in the house of James Meehan; but his work was officially brought to a close in 1804 by an order withdrawing the privileges previously granted, probably because he was suspected of connivance at the disturbances of that year. He may, however, have continued to minister privately to his people until his departure in 1808. The period of suffering and privation then began anew, and continued until the arrival of Fathers Conolly and Therry in 1820. During those 12 years the plight of the Catholic convicts and people was deplorable. A hint of the state of public opinion on the relative positions of the Anglican and Catholic Churches is given in Judge Burton's book dealing with this period: "Wherever the British flag is planted, there, by that very fact, the Protestant church becomes the national and established fact." In many Protestant minds this mistaken idea admitted of no qualification; and there is no reason, in most cases, to doubt their sincerity. It will be necessary, then, to enter the atmosphere in which they lived, and to credit them with all the honesty that they can claim. But it is difficult to justify, even according to their ways of thinking, the unmitigated savagery and severity with which they punished those who claimed conscientious exemption from Church of England services. James Bonwick, a Protestant writer on early Australian history, draws a startling picture of Catholic disabilities. "New South Wales in the beginning," he writes, "was regarded as England over the way, and absolutely attached to the Church of England, and Catholics could expect no favour. All had to go to church; they were driven as sheep to the fold, and whatever their scruples, they had to go ... If a man humbly entreated to stay behind because he was a Presbyterian, he incurred the danger of a flogging. It is said that upon a similar appeal from another who exclaimed :I am a Catholic", he was silenced by the cry of a clerical magistrate, "Go to church or be flogged". Roger Therry paints a similar picture. Writing of facts that were familiar to him, he says: "the local Government of New South Wales promulgated a regulation that the whole prison population indiscriminately should attend the Church of England, under penalty of 25 lashes for the first refusal, 50 for the second, and transportation to a penal settlement for the third refusal. Regulations made by Macquarie, enforcing attendance at church on all convicts - and even on ticket-of-leave men - will be found in vol. vii of the Historical Records of New South Wales ... This condition of affairs continued until the arrival of the Very Rev. Jeremiah O'Flynn in 1817, when for a few brief months the Catholic faith was taught surreptitiously by a priest whose admittance to the colony was unsanctioned. Because he had not asked permission to come to the colony, and persisted in ministering to his Irish flock without authority, Governor Macquarie, after a few months, summarily deported Father O'Flynn. Macquarie's regulations. The magistrate had to be informed about the location of Sunday Mass so police could be present to monitor sedition In 1820, when London finally gave permission for Fathers Therry and Connolly to come to the Colony, they were given a stipend of a hundred pounds per annum, which was insultingly only a third of that paid to the Anglican chaplains. Macquarie also presented them with a set of regulations, some of which make fascinating reading. I shall now advert to some points, which are more of necessary local arrangement and political expediency in this colony, that what I have already dwelt on, and shall preface them by observing to you that the melancholy effects lately produced in England by large popular meetings under the itinerant political demagogues, long practised in the arts of faction, and ripe for anarchy and confusion, having made the enactment of certain laws, in regard to future assemblages of people, a matter of absolute necessity in order to restrain the excesses to which they were becoming every day more and more dupes, it will be incumbent on the Government to tread in the steps of those of the mother country, in order to avert the evils arising out of such popular meetings. In order, therefore, to guard against large meetings taking place under any pretence whatever, unless when called together by the proper legal authority, it will be expected and required of you: 1st. - That, when you shall have fixed on certain stations whereat you propose to celebrate service, at regular periods, you transmit to me, or the Governor for the time being, a return of the places you shall have so determined on, whereby I shall be enabled to judge of their fitness, and when approved by me, I shall transmit authority to the magistrates to permit the assemblage of your congregation at those particular places. But no meeting or assemblage of Roman Catholics, consisting of more than five persons, for the celebration of the rites or service of your Church, is to be convened or held at any other place or places than those approved in the foregoing manner unless leave for their special purposes shall have been first had and obtained from the magistrate residing nearest to the proposed place of assemblage, and notice of the time, at which the intended meeting may be proposed to be held shall also be given to the said magistrate, whose permission must be obtained before such meeting or congregation shall be assembled. There it all was. If you didn't front for the Anglican Church parade in the first 30 years of the colony, you could be starved or flogged, and often were. The extract from the regulations of the relatively liberal Governor Macquarie indicates clearly the deep-rooted political fears of the danger of "sedition" involved in political freedom for the Catholics. Eris O'Brien's bald account of the British military-religious dictatorship in early NSW is rather rivetting to a modern eye. It goes a long way towards explaining the animosity of Catholics and the secular working class and other nonconforming religious groups towards the Anglican Church, which has persisted into modern times. (This extract also underlines the insulting and cavalier way in which Stuart Macintyre treats this question of religious persecution in early NSW, in his Concise History of Australia, by considerably understating its importance and failing to even name the deported priest.) Allan Grocott has written a very detailed and thorough account of the relationship of convict society to religion, Convicts, Clergymen and Churches. Attitudes of convicts and ex-convicts towards the churches and clergy in New South Wales from 1788 to 1851. This 300-page book thoroughly documents from diaries, memoirs and eyewitness accounts, the attitude of convict and ex-convict and native-born "currency" Australia, to religion. The Catholics, by and large, although little schooled in their religion because of the absence of priests in the first 30 years, hung on doggedly to their connection with the Church, because it was part of their national identity in opposition to British Imperialism. The non-Irish section of the convicts loathed and distrusted the Anglican Church because of its association with the ruling classes, but they didn't have the same hostility to Catholic priests and the Catholic religion, because the Catholic Church didn't have those ruling-class associations. The extraordinarily greedy, brutal and sanctimonious flogging parson/magistrate, Samuel Marsden, was the epitome of the upper-class religion that the convicts hated. A curious phenomenon that Grocott documents again and again is the attitude to religious consolation of convicts about to be executed, of whom there were hundreds over the period. They frequently rejected the Anglican parsons, and they would make their peace with God, if they so wished, to a Catholic priest, even if they weren't Catholic. Those who verbalised their reasons for this, said that they believed that the priests, being bound by the secrecy of the Catholic confessional, would keep their secrets, whereas the Anglican parsons, being servants of the State, would treat their confessed secrets like a policeman would, if he were to hear their confession. Manning Clark on convict Australia Since Manning Clark's death, there have been a series of vindictive attacks on him, supplemented by the bizarre, vicious and totally eccentric proposition that he was a KGB agent. In fact, Clark was a complex, serious historian, whose historical inquiry produced in him a number of interests in conflict and tension. As a historian, he was fascinated by Lenin and the Russian Revolution, but he also had an enormous interest in and respect for the contribution of Irish Catholics and the Catholic Church to Australian society. In 1956, well before he was famous, he published two groundbreaking articles on the origins of the convicts transported to eastern Australia between 1787 and 1852. The following extracts from the second of these articles (Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand, November 1956), are of enormous intrinsic value to the thrust of this investigation. In these articles, one sees the first development of Clark's views on the role of the Irish Catholics in Austalia, and their significance in the development of the labour movement, a theme that later ran through the whole of Clark's groundbreaking six-volume Australian history. Much of the animosity to Clark from conservative historians is a product of their hostility to the entirely accurate picture Clark draws in his history of the enormous historical importance of the development of the labour movement in Australia, including the contribution of the Irish Catholic strand to it. The following extract also does considerable damage to the notion of Clark as some sort of KGB agent. Ireland was to export to Australia something more than the human wrecks of grinding poverty, and the rebels against the foreign oppressor. The Irish brought with them the values of men who had fought for centuries to preserve their religion, their culture and their material resources against the Anglo-Saxon. The town thief in Great Britain, as we have seen, was contemptuous of the laws against theft, and proud of his criminal record, but opposition did not extend beyond his own narrow experience of the law. Neither by temperament nor by experience did he feel the necessity to extend his criticism from the law of theft to the law in general. The Irish contempt for the law had no such limitations. The laws, which were designed to restrain the lawless habits were treated with ridicule. The sanctity of an oath was disregarded to protect the guilty from punishments disproportionate to their crimes. Evasion or trampling upon laws treating poverty as a crime was held to be a meritorious act. So in Ireland necessity created and sanctified lawlessness. Transportation did not purge their minds of such sentiments. The Irish were the leaders of the ill-fated convict rebellion in 1801; they played a major role in bushranging, stamped it as the Irish equivalent of the agrarian riot, and thus encouraged the idea that all methods were justifiable provided the motive was to take down the mighty from their seat, and send the rich empty away. It is true that economic security in Australia gradually weaned the Irish from the use of violence for political and social purposes, that they came to accept the hustings and the ballot box as political methods rather than the faggot, the knife and the gun. However in their long fight with the laws of the Anglo-Saxons the Irish had a loyal ally, and that was the Roman Catholic Church. This close association between the Church and the grievances of the Irish was the germ of its alliance with radical politics in the history of Australia. In Ireland the Church was almost entirely dependent on the peasants for its income, and the essential condition for the approval of the peasantry was opposition to the English domination. "The priest", as a Protestant observed at the end of the 18th century, "must follow the impulse of the popular wave, or be left behind on the beach to perish". The convicts were the cause of the transplanting of this association from Ireland to Australia. Father Therry protected the convicts from excessive punishments, and rescued them from the clutches of sadistic masters. Father Polding went further; he condemned the convict system because it was creating an aristocracy of wealth, "the worst of all tyrannies", he said, and one in which "the children grow up with all the degraded propensities of slave holders". So during the transportation period the priests of the Church had shown an active sympathy with the underdog, and had criticised the foundations of that society. Fifty years later, in 1891, a prince of the Church, Cardinal Moran, justified the use of the strike by the workers to secure wages which would enable them to live in comfort and respectability. Thus the priest has been at the side of the workers in the main phases of their history in Australia - mitigating their suffering in the dark days of discipline by the lash, castigating the iniquities of excessive economic inequality, and supporting desperate methods to increase their mite of material well-being. Incidentally it would be interesting to examine how far the Church's teaching has persuaded its followers not to expect too much from human endeavours, and imprinted on the Labor movement through its renegades apocalyptic notions of human regeneration. Such speculations are however outside the scope of this inquiry. We must be content with noting that the convict system was the occasion for the transplanting from Ireland of the alliance between the Church and radical politics, and this surely had a far greater influence on the history of Australia than the Scottish martyrs, the Dorchester labourers, or any of those few convicts whom sudden economic disaster had driven to petty crime. Indeed the enforced association between the town convicts, with their twist to the ideals of social equality and fraternity, and their contempt for the laws of property, and the Irish convicts, with their irreverence for all the laws of the Anglo-Saxon and their long-standing alliance with the Church of Rome in their struggle against poverty - this was the seed from which great and mighty trees were to grow in our history. The man who wrote the above, Manning Clark as a young historian, a KGB agent? What a heap of rubbish. On the evidence above, he was more likely to have been an agent of the Vatican! Perhaps the loopy investigators who have been looking for his Order of Lenin, should start digging for his Papal Knighthood. In fact, secular humanist, liberal and labour movement historians of Protestant background, of the old school, like Manning Clark and Russel Ward, got on very well with, and were in fact influenced by, the Catholic historian, Dr Eris O'Brien, who ended up Bishop of Canberra-Goulburn, and whose pioneering and seminal work on the convict era, The Foundation of Australia, first published in 1937, was the original source book on the brutal British Imperialist origins of convict Australia. The almost complete secularisation of the non-Catholic section of the Australian working class, commenced quite decisively in convict times, and the later development of the labour movement, is very much the story of the alliance between the Irish Catholic section of the proletariat, and the irreligious bulk of the working class. The British Government introduces assisted migration to the Australian colonies, and the immigration schemes are swamped by the land-hungry, famine-driven Catholic Irish, including some of my troublesome ancestors Before, during and after the gold rush, the British capitalist authorities, in their desire to develop Australia, invested capital and organised the immigration of workers to develop the country and produce profits for the capitalist class. To encourage immigration they organised a wide variety of sponsored migration schemes, starting with the Wakefield scheme for orderly settlement of South Australia. This development of sponsored migration happened to coincide with the crisis in Ireland and its explosive population growth, which peaked at about 8.2 million at the time of the disastrous famine imposed on Ireland by British imperialism in the 1840s by means of the notorious Corn Laws. The problem and paradox for the imperialist development of British Australia was that, due to the Victorian boom in England, it was often hard to get migrants from England, even with the economic incentive of cheap passage, but the starving, land-hungry and politically disaffected Irish were clamouring to come to Australia. Reading the threatened racist responses of the British-Australian ruling class to the mass Irish immigration of the 19th century is very like reading Pauline Hanson, Geoffrey Blainey or Paul Sheehan writing about Asian migration in the 20th century. A constant theme, throughout the middle part of the 19th century until about 1880, was the very tangible fear of many of the upper class representatives of British-Australia about the flood of Irish Catholics into the Australian colonies via the assisted migration schemes. For instance, John Dunmore Lang's fascinating pamphlet, republished in 1978 by the Library of Australian History, called The Fatal Mistake is an almost comical assault on the practical result of the Wakefield scheme, which was that the Irish Catholics were pouring in because the immigration agents in England, who worked on commission, found them easier to get. John Dunmore Lang is famous for the frequent outbursts he made about how the "Papists" were swamping the colony, whenever he travelled in southern NSW around Young, Booroowa or Goulburn, places like that, which in the 1860s and the 1870s got to be almost 50 per cent Irish Catholic. British Imperialism and the invention of the "White Race" There is a very useful book called The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen, published by Verso in 1994. This book is a detailed Marxist study of how the British developed an ideology of racial supremacy and manufactured the notion of the "British White Race", in the course of conquering Ireland and dispossessing the native Irish of their land, particularly in Ulster. The notion of the "British Race" manufactured in the course of this conquest went on to be the model for notions of the "White Race" in the United States, and the "British White Race" in Australia. This deliberate manufacture of the idea of the "British White Race" was carried on during the whole period of the colonisation of Australia and underlies the conflict between the British ruling class, on the one hand, and on the other, the Irish, the original Aboriginal population and the Chinese in Australia. A striking expression of this British-Australian racism in evolution is encapsulated in the person of Bishop Broughton, the first Anglican Bishop of Sydney and Primate of Australia. While in internal Anglican church politics he was a moderate high churchman, he was also a rabid anti-Irish, anti-Papist like John Dunmore Lang, and he repeatedly agitated against the "Irish Catholics taking over the colony". He was also the initiator, the chairman and the driving force for a number of years of the first committee, composed of important members of the Sydney British establishment, campaigning against Chinese immigration to Australia in the 1850s! The rabid racism of the local rulers of British Australia was constantly reinforced by pressure from the Colonial Office, where, from 1813 to 1847, as Permanent Secretary, Sir James Stephen, a member of the Clapham sect of evangelicals, was the dominant personality. In a major study of his private papers in 1964, Rupert Lockwood discovered a constant preoccupation on the part of Stephen with keeping out the Chinese from the Australian colonies, keeping out other Europeans and severely limiting the Irish, in favour of developing the colonies for the divinely selected and sanctioned "British race". This prejudice was systematically implemented by Stephen in his long tenure at the Colonial Office. John Dunmore Lang and Caroline Chisholm Caroline Chisholm, the lady for a long time on the currency, was a competent middle-class Englishwoman, a convert to the Catholic Church, who emigrated to Australia from India with her army officer husband in the 1830s. Being an energetic woman, with philanthropic interests, she initiated a program of assisting migrants to the Australian colonies, getting them work, ensuring them initial accommodation, etc, from which she extended her activities to organising assisted emigration from the U.K. to Australia. Later in life, she also campaigned against the squatters in favour of free selection, and for universal suffrage, vote by ballot, and payment of members of parliament, all the most radical demands of the day. She was an effective and persuasive public speaker, which was a very rare accomplishment for a woman in the middle of the 19th century. She strenuously defended the rights of Chinese and Indians to migrate to Australia. Unfortunately for her, the social circumstances of the period ensured that the majority of assisted emigrants were Irish Catholics and, being a civilised human being, she did not discriminate against her co-religionists. All unbiased observers said that she was completely impartial in matters of religion. Nevertheless, her personal adherence to the Catholic religion provoked the bigot John Dunmore Lang into a series of quite extraordinary attacks on her immigration activities, which he continued for many years. The flavour of these attacks can be seen from the following extract of Lang's words from Margaret Kiddle's excellent biography of Chisholm. Mrs. Chisholm is a Roman Catholic, of no common caste, a perfect devotee of the Papacy. In all her efforts on behalf of emigration she is completely identified with the Romish priesthood of New South Wales ... her whole and sole object is to Romanize that Great Colony and by means of a second and, if possible, still greater land-flood of Irish Popery under the guise of a great scheme of National Emigration, to present it in one time to God, the Virgin Mary and the Pope, purified, or at least in the fair way of speedily becoming so, from the foul and pestilential heresy of Protestantism! This opinion, he declared, was held by some of the most influential colonists of New South Wales. Dunmore Lang's sectarian religious animosity to Caroline Chisholm is echoed in the 20th century in a "leftist" and "feminist" hostility to Chisholm, of which the following venomous extract from Stuart Macintyre's A Concise History of Australia (the only reference to Chisholm in the book) is typical: The family was one such device. In 1841 Caroline Chisholm, the wife of an army officer, established a female immigrants' home in Sydney to rescue single women from the mortal sin to which they were so perilously exposed. She accompanied them into rural areas and placed them in domestic employment under suitable masters in the hope that matrimony would follow. To end the "monstrous disparity" between the sexes and rescue the colonies from "the demoralising state of bachelorism" was her aim, so that "civilisation and religion will advance, until the spire of the churches will guide the stranger from hamlet to hamlet, and the shepherds' huts become homes for happy men and virtuous women". In this scheme of "family colonisation" the women were to serve the men as wives and mothers in order to reclaim them to Christian virtue; or, as she put it, they were pressed into service as "God's police". Macintyre once considered himself a Marxist. Karl Marx's favourite historical aphorism was "history is whole cloth". No whole cloth here for Macintyre. Chisholm is slandered because her activities assisting the immigration of tens of thousands of poor, single women, mainly from Ireland, to a much better life in the Australian colonies, and fighting hard for their welfare when they got here, was conducted within the then dominant social and cultural atmosphere, in which she inevitably had to operate. In 1990 an enthusiast in Brisbane reprinted Chisholm's short novel, Little Joe, from its serialisation in the Empire newspaper of the 1860s. This novel further reveals just how progressive Caroline Chisholm was. Among the other radical causes listed above, she was also in favour of the total withdrawal of government financial support for all religion, including her own Catholic Church. The best piece about Chisholm by far, is the chapter on her in Strength of Spirit. Pioneering Women of Achievement, by Susanna De Vries, published by Millennium Books in 1995. This chapter goes into intelligent and sympathetic detail about Chisholm's radical activities, and the strong support given to them by her husband, Archie Chisholm. Macintyre's barbed paragraph about Chisholm in his Concise History even has a smidgeon of the religious bigotry of Dunmore Lang, without spelling it out too explicitly, in the nasty little reference to mortal sin and Christian virtue. Macintyre deliberately avoids direct reference to Chisholm's Catholicism, but he gets it in anyway. Her many other popular and democratic activities, which were widely commented on at the time, don't get a mention. Some Marxist! "The monstrous regiment of women." The dangers presented by Irish Catholic women migrants, from the point of view of Imperial British Australia Demographically the most significant aspect of this mass migration of Irish Catholics related to the women. A sub-section of the general assisted migration scheme was several special schemes for single women to correct the sexual imbalance in the colonies from the convict period and the gold rush. The problem was that to fill these schemes for single women it was necessary to scour the workhouses of England and Ireland, and after the famine even the English workhouses were crowded with single Irish women who were anxious to migrate to the colonies. As a result, something like 85 per cent of the single women brought out under these schemes turned out to be Irish Catholics. The comical, racist and bigoted attitude of the British-Australian ruling class to these women is expressed in the following extracts, again from the wonderfully useful book, The Irish Emigrant Experience in Australia: But not everyone was impressed by their looks. An Anglican clergyman who saw them at Plymouth said they were very strong, short, with a thick-set frame of body and stout-limbed. "They certainly, poor things, could not boast of much beauty or personal attractions ... On the whole I would say they were better calculated for milking cows and undergoing the drudgery of a farm servant's life than to perform the office of lady's maid." (page 38) It was decided that the Irish workhouse girls should be allocated to separate ships, as the Emigration Commissioners were of the opinion that "their habits and manners make them very unacceptable companions to English emigrants". (page 38) A charge that the matrons and Mr Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines, had called the orphans "Irish Brutes" was denied, but they admitted to addressing them "under certain provocation", as "dirty brutes". (page 53) (The Irish female emigrants were automatically placed under the control of the Protector of Aborigines.) The really vehement attacks came from the Melbourne Argus, with charges such as this: "... it is downright robbery to withhold our funds and lavish it upon a set of ignorant creatures, whose whole knowledge of household duty barely reaches to distinguish the inside from the outside of a potato, and whose chief employment hitherto has consisted of some such intellectual occupation as occasionally trotting across a bog to fetch back a runaway pig." When the Irish rallied to defend their own the Argus scoffed: "but Paddy, dear funny Pat ... boldly takes his stand by his thick-waisted orphan, and rashly risks the character of the whole body of the bright-eyed daughters of Erin, upon his success in proving the dumpy darling a Venus de Medici in personal beauty, a Lucretia in purity and propriety of conduct, and a Mrs Rundell in housekepping and culinary skill." (page 57) The real fear of the Argus was that "the orphan's main aim was to marry and convert "irreligious" bushmen with the result that "the mother will dictate religion to the family and every one of those girls will some day be the centre of a Roman Catholic circle." (page 57) Well, it wasn't quite the elaborate conspiracy that the Argus proclaimed, but the very large sponsored female migration of Catholic Irish women in the 19th century did have some of the effects that they feared. It is really quite bizarre that the two modern books by Miriam Dixson, The Real Matildas and The Imaginary Australian reproduce a very similar view of the influence of Irish Catholic women in Australia to the reactionary outlook of the British triumphalist Argus in the 19th century, quoted above. Multiculturalism started in Australia with European settlement in 1788. The Irish Catholics were the first ethnic minority, and Aboriginal Australians were rapidly reduced to being an ethnic minority in their own land. Once again, I am obliged to refer to the work of Charles Price and his redoubtable computer. Doing a breakdown, in his inimitible way, trying to track the ethnic makeup of Australia in 1978, from all the past censuses and migration records, he came up with the following figure, of about 3 million "full equivalents" of people descended from Irish Catholics on their mother's side and 2.25 million on the father's side. This notion of "full equivalents" of people, of course, understates the cultural impact, because, throughout the 19th and indeed the 20th century, the products of mixed marriages usually came to identify with the Irish Catholic "other" in the Australian culture. The late 19th century was also the period leading up to the Ni Temere Decree of the Catholic Church, which insisted that the children of mixed marriages be brought up Catholics. By and large, the secular working class partners in mixed marriages didn't mind this too much. As I have indicated above, the Catholic Church wasn't seen as the enemy in the same way as the Anglican and other Protestant Churches were, and this, of course, explains the large number of members of the Catholic community, both prominent and humble, with English or Scottish names. There's almost no Catholic family that doesn't have a significant non-Irish component from these circumstances, and this contributed massively to an increase in the weight of the Irish Catholic community in Australian life. An interesting feature of the 19th century was that Irish Protestants often married Irish Catholics because they had national origins and experience in common. While the majority of Irish Protestants were British loyalists, there were, however, a significant minority of them who were republican nationalists, and even several of the Fenian prisoners deported to Western Australia were Protestants. Towards the end of the 1880s and the start of the 1890s, Catholics were up around 30 per cent of the population, a proportion they didn't reach again until the past 10 years or so. This recent rise in the Catholic proportion of the population is, once again, from mass migration, over the last 40 years from, however, countries other than Ireland. Land hunger and the Irish The constant migration of the Irish to Australia in the latter half of the 19th century was deeply linked to the desire for land. It was chain migration from certain districts and regions in Ireland, fuelled again and again by the possibility of acquiring land and setting oneself up as a small farmer in the new country. Patrick O'Farrell has done useful research into the letters from the Irish in Australia to their families at home, documenting the land hunger in Ireland and the possibility of satisfying this desire for land in Australia that constantly stimulated the chain migration. O'Farrell has also established that most Irish migrants to Australia came either from the south-western counties of Clare, Tipperary and Cork, or from Ulster. In Australia the constant agitation of the democratic interest in the colonies for breaking the grip of the pastoralists over land, came significantly from the Irish. In the 1860s the democratic agitation for access to land culminated in the Robertson Land Act in NSW and similar acts in other colonies, allowing for "free selection" of small farms within large pastoral holdings. In the subsequent vigorous rush of free selectors to get a bit of land, and the land wars with the pastoralists that ensued, the Irish figured very prominently, and were probably a majority of the free selectors. The Irish who didn't manage to get land, or who failed as farmers, became a very large proportion of the growing urban proletariat in the developing colonial cities. The spectacular way Irish immigrants began to dominate certain areas in rural NSW is described and analysed in an important recent book, The Kingdom of the Ryans by historian Malcolm Campbell. He studies particularly the area around Young and Booroowa, where the population of Irish background got up to around 50 per cent of the population. The whole south-west slopes area of NSW had a much higher Catholic and Irish population than the average, as did the Bathurst area, the Mudgee area, the Dubbo area and the Forbes, Wilcannia, Bourke region, among others. An interesting demographic feature of NSW is that all those rural or provincial areas of high Irish Catholic concentration in the 19th century still have a significantly higher proportion of Catholics than the average in the state. Those regions have also been the main regions in rural NSW where, from time to time, in various electoral upsurges, the Labor Party has won rural seats. In the Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand First Series, published in 1964, a quiet Marxist historian, D.W.A. Baker, who taught most of his life at the ANU, published the best article on the Robertson Act, The Origins of Robertson's Lands Acts. This shortish article is a gem, but one paragraph is in particular worth quoting. Again, pointing to the land laws as the reason, the same paper [the People's Advocate] observed that "the working man here has no chance; a labourer he is, and a labourer he must continue". A correspondent of the same paper who signed himself "AN IRISH LABOURER AND REPUBLICAN" put the same idea in more forcible language: "Fellow-Workmen, there can no longer be a doubt that the mushroom aristocracy of this colony, the men who have battened upon convict labour, and who have heretofore sent more of their fellow beings to the gibbet and the triangles than the most abominable slaveholders of the West India Islands, or of the Carolinas - have formed a vast conspiracy to defraud you of the proceeds of your labour, and to reduce you to a state of vassalage worse even than that of the miserable Coolies, with whom Towns and Company are about to deluge the land ... you have been compelled to fly from your native lands to escape the galling yoke of a merciless despotism in the shape of monarchy, and its blasphemous attendant an Aristocracy. And when you expect to find a new home in this new land, capable of supporting millions of your fellow men, you can no more secure an acre of land unless at 50 to 100 times its value, than you can secure it in the domain of the Duke of Norfolk, Devonshire or Northumberland, in order that a few cormorant squatters may monopolise the whole of it ... Shirley Fitzgerald on the Irish in Sydney In 1987 Shirley Fitzgerald, who is now the Sydney City Historian, published her quite extraordinary book Rising Damp. Sydney 1870-90, which is by far the best and most ingenious historical and sociological study of the early development of Sydney. Quite a bit of this book is taken up by a study of the Irish in Sydney because they were such a large, significant and socially mobile section of the population. Fitzgerald has made excellent use of all the documentary material available to chart their social movement and activity, because what happened to the Irish in Sydney tells you a great deal about the city as a whole. First of all, Irish Catholics were around a quarter of the population. They were heavily concentrated in the inner suburbs and the city, and there were many fewer of them in the middle-class outer suburbs, but there was a fairly high concentration of Irish servant women in the very rich suburbs, where they were domestics in the homes of the upper classes. A study of marriage records and rate books shows that the Irish men were already noticeably socially mobile up the occupational ladder, a process that has continued into the 20th century until now. Many of the Irish in Sydney had started their immigrant experience in Australia in the bush, but moved to Sydney, obviously because of the greater opportunities in the city. The marriage records show a certain social mobility "downwards" on the part of the Irish women. Shirley Fitzgerald's explanation for this is that the very large surplus of marriageable Irish women over Irish men in the colony made it necessary for a number of them to marry whoever was available, and the racist prejudice of the English middle class against the Irish limited their marriage opportunities as well. Another obvious phenomenon noted by Fitzgerald is the much larger number of Irish Catholic women, than men, who married non-Catholics, which gets us back to Charles Price's statistic about the 3 million Australians descended from Irish women, as against the 2.25 million descended from Irish men. Shirley Fitzgerald's very useful and original work is supplemented greatly by a new book of history and archaeology, Inside the Rocks by Grace Karskens. Karskens demonstrates from the archaeological and historical record of The Rocks the enormous and vibrant influence of the Irish in The Rocks, particularly the Irish women. Many of the Irish women married seamen and ex-seamen from the four corners of the globe and the children of these unions contributed to the growth of a vigorous, independent-minded, trade-union-oriented, largely Catholic proletarian community in Australia's oldest locality. The Irish national question in Australia The 19th century was one of constant struggle for national independence in Ireland. First of all, the struggle for Catholic emancipation, which succeeded in 1829. Secondly, the national rising in 1848. Thirdly, the Fenian agitation from the 1860s to the 1880s. And finally, the land war in Ireland, led by Michael Davitt and the Land League, in the 1880s, followed immediately by the parliamentary campaign for Home Rule, led by the charismatic Charles Stuart Parnell. The Irish who came to Australia were profoundly involved in, and affected by, each of these stages in the national struggle in Ireland. Australia was also a place of deportation for Irish rebels, starting with the convicts from the rebellion of 1798, continuing with the young Irelanders like John Mitchell, exiled to Tasmania in 1848, and culminating in the Fenian prisoners deported to Western Australia on the Rougemont, the very last convict ship in 1867. In the Catholic Church in Australia, as it got organised, there was a conflict between the English and Irish interest, but by the middle of the century, the Irish interest won out, and from then on Irish priests and bishops predominated in the Catholic Church. Initially, the Irish hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Australia were a bit ambiguous in relation to the national struggle in Ireland, and a number of the Bishops reflected the ultra-conservative strand of the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, which came to be associated in the public mind in Ireland and Australia with Cardinal Paul Cullen. This strand of the Irish hierarchy was rather hostile to the national movement, particularly to the Fenians, but the masses of Catholic Irish, both in Ireland and Australia, while in religious matters they were loyal to the church, often tended to ignore the Cullenites in matters of politics. The constant Fenian mobilisation from the 1860s to the 1890s became a mass movement in Ireland despite the opposition of Cardinal Cullen, and it had a great deal of impact on the Irish in Australia. The definitive work on the Fenians in Australia is The Fenians in Australia by Keith Amos (UNSW 1988). The spectre of Fenianism in Australia reached fever pitch in 1868, when a deranged Irishman called O'Farrell, who appears to have been a rather nutty lone wolf with no connection with the Fenians, tried to assassinate Queen Victoria's younger son, Prince Alfred, during the first royal tour of Australia. That old humbug, Henry Parkes, the dominant NSW politician in 1868, immediately launched an amazing sectarian witchhunt against the Irish for his own political purposes, the poor deranged O'Farrell was hanged, and Parkes milked an alleged Fenian conspiracy for all he could get politically, for the next 10 years. (Parkes' demagogy is well studied in Robert Travers' excellent deconstruction called The Grand Old Man.) A curious by-product of this event was the foundation of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown, Sydney. When the Duke was wounded, the authorities suddenly discovered that there wasn't a hospital suitable for "someone of quality" like the Duke, and as a result the rich and famous of Sydney raised money to start a hospital of sufficient prestige, and they called it Royal Prince Alfred. It's one of the delicious ironies of history that RPA has grown into the main metropolitan and rather proletarian hospital in the inner city and has for many years been a stormy centre of trade union activity in the health system in NSW, particularly in the nursing profession. In the 1980s, at the time of the 100th anniversary of RPAH, a curious correspondence took place between the RPAH administration and the office of the Governor of NSW. On seeking a copy for exhibition of the official document making RPAH a Royal hospital, the RPA administrators got the embarrassing response from the Governor's office that no trace of any permission could be found, but that, nevertheless, as RPAH was a good institution, it could now be confirmed as Royal. This raises the culturally significant but rather academic point as to how many of the hospitals and other institutions which claim to be Royal actually have the letters patent to justify the title. The real Fenians in Australia While Irish men and women who sympathised with the Fenians had nothing to do with O'Farrell's assassination attempt, there were a large number of them, and despite periods of proscription of Fenianism by the Catholic hierarchy, they were quite active. For a start, a number of the civilian Fenian leaders who were deported to Western Australia were pardoned in the early 1870s, on condition that they didn't go back to Ireland, and many stayed in the Australian colonies. A couple of them even acquired a stone quarry in Petersham, Sydney. The great Irish cause in Ireland, Britain, the United States and Australasia in the 1870s was the campaign to liberate the military Fenian prisoners still held in durance vile in Western Australia. They had committed the unforgiveable crime, from the point of view of the British ruling class, of organising a very nearly successful 15,000-strong Fenian military conspiracy inside the British Army in Ireland. One of the military Fenians, John Boyle O'Reilly, an early socialist, had, after a saga of extraordinary adventure, escaped on an American whaler to the United States, where he settled in Boston, became the editor of a Catholic paper, The Boston Pilot and became a major leader of the Irish national movement in the United States. Along with that other extraordinary military Fenian leader, John Devoy, who had become the leader of the "legal front" for Fenianism in the United States, the Clann Na Gael, O'Reilley set about organising the rescue and escape of the rest of the military Fenians still convicts in Fremantle. The story of this escape is recounted in Amos's book, in other books, and in a recent biography of John Boyle O'Reilly, called Fanatic Heart, by A. G. Evans, published by the University of W.A. Press. Also published in November last year was The Great Shame, Tom Keneally's magisterial and comprehensive, although rather slow-moving, coverage of these events and of Irish immigration to Australia, which has deservedly become an instant best seller. O'Reilly, Devoy and the Clann Na Gael bought themselves a sturdy Boston whaler, the Catalpa and hired themselves an upright Yankee whaler captain from New Bedford, Captain George Anthony, and a crew. They sent agents under assumed names to Western Australia via Sydney, who, in a chapter of amazing incident, made contact with the Sydney Fenians who owned the stone quarry, and who had also been collecting money in Australia and New Zealand to rescue the military Fenians, which they immediately handed over to the agent of the Clann Na Gael, Martin Breslin, who went on to Western Australia, to organise the escape. Breslin made contact with Fenian sympathisers in Perth and Fremantle, including several Catholic priests, particularly the "Fenian priest", Father John O'Reilly, and the redoubtable Father McCabe, who had already helped organise the earlier escape of John Boyle O'Reilly. The chaplain to the Fremantle convict prison, Father J. Carreras, a Spaniard, was the go-between with the prisoners in the jail. There were many contretemps, adventures and problems, including a confrontation between the Catalpa and a British gunboat, during which Captain Anthony pointed out that if they shelled the American flag on the high seas, a war might be started. In the face of this prospect, the gunboat gave up, the rescue was completed, and the rescued prisoners settled in the United States. It's recorded that Irish were celebrating throughout the world, at the release of the Fenian prisoners, even as far away as the streets of Omaha, Nebraska. In the course of organising this rescue, some Fenians even cut the undersea telegraph cable north of Darwin, as a result of which the vindictive British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was actually speaking in the British parliament to successfully defeat a bill moved by Irish nationalists for the release of the Fenians after they had been rescued, and he didn't know about it because the cable had been cut. The amazing thing about the Catalpa Fenian conspiracy, was that it involved hundreds of people in Australasia, the United States, Ireland and Britain, and yet it was not leaked to the British authorities. Such was the rebel sentiment of the Irish in Australasia in the 19th century. I have a theory that the Catalpa incident would make the greatest adventure film of all time. It would sell in every market in the English-speaking world. It has Australians, Irish, vicious British ruling class characters, upright Yankee captains, sea adventure and whaling - one hell of a film script! Constant sectarian turmoil in the 19th century Throughout the 19th century, from the gold rushes onward, when mass migration from Ireland really got going, there was constant sectarian turmoil in the Australian colonies, initiated by Protestant bigots. In these conflicts, the Catholic Irish often gave as good as they got, for instance in the sectarian riots in Melbourne in the early 1840s. Politicians like Parkes soon learned to wield the sectarian issue against the Irish Catholics for their electoral purposes. But the Irish Catholics soon learned to mobilise Irish votes in their own interests, and the sectarian issue seesawed in elections to the various colonial parliaments. The Irish Catholics, broadly speaking, were in the forefront, and at the cutting edge, of every democratic agitation in the colonies, and in two quite extraordinary incidents of physical rebellion, first of all the Eureka Stockade, which defined Australian national sentiment ever afterwards, and then the Kelly outbreak, an allegedly criminal explosion which, however, had a pronounced Irish republican tinge. Michael Roe's important book, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835-1851, published by the ANU Press in 1965, was based on his thesis, which was supervised by Manning Clark. A major part of this pioneering work of intellectual history is a detailed description of the location of the Catholic religious community, largely on the leftist democratic side, in the conflicts of the period covered. By contrast, Protestant religious groups were by and large solidly on the side of the conservative squatting interests, the enormous influence of which Roe powerfully describes. Another important book that describes the democratic turmoil in the Catholic Church in that period is Hierarchy and Democracy in Australia 1788-1870 by T.L. Suttor, which is sympathetic to the English Benedictines rather than the Irish clerics, and gives a very detailed account of the developments. Within the Catholic community itself there was a fair amount of factionalism and turmoil, with the laity often asserting their rights and interests against the clergy. In the 1860s and the 1870s there was a fairly constant anti-clerical mood anytime the local Catholic clergy set their faces against a new forward development of the national movement in Ireland. The Irish Catholics in Australia, while generally identifying closely with Catholicism, as one of the symbols of their national identity, were anything but putty in the hands of their priests. There were some Irish Catholic bishops in Australia who were ultra-conservative, like the extraordinarily greedy and avaricious Archbishop Goold of Melbourne, and also Archbishop Quinn of Brisbane, who after starting out in a more progressive way, became an ultra-conservative authoritarian in old age. Bishops like Goold and Quinn faced a constant turmoil of vigorous and often colourful opposition from their flock, and usually lost out in the end in these conflicts. Over time, the radical sentiment of the Irish Catholic rank and file, stemming both from convict experiences in Australia, and experiences in Ireland, had a profoundly radicalising and democratising impact on their clergy. It soon became a feature of Catholicism in Australia that the clergy did not often move too far away from the Irish and Australian nationalist and democratic sentiments of their flock. Archdeacon John McEncroe The transitional leader in the Australian Catholic community between the English Benedictines and Cardinal Moran was Archdeacon John McEncroe. After his ordination in Ireland, McEncroe went to the United States for a number of years. In early life, as a priest, he suffered a bit from the occupational hazard of the celibate Irish Catholic clergy, in that he became a pronounced alcoholic. After a number of years of alcoholism, he recovered and took the pledge and he made a new start in his priesthood in Sydney, where he became the senior Catholic cleric in Australasia. Not unlike many recovered alcoholics, he showed enormous energy in his leadership of the Catholic community. He was an occasionally autocratic and irascible kind of man, but his Irish Australian flock idolised him and understood him well. His basic instincts were leftist and democratic, given the context of the time, and he engaged in fairly long-lived political interventions in the Australian colonies, on the democratic side. He was a vocal and public opponent of the continuance of transportation and of Wentworth's self-interested scheme for a "bunyip aristocracy", to the defeat of which he was a major contributor. At the mass meetings in Sydney called to discuss Wentworth's proposals, the most damaging speech, which was decisive in drowning Wentworth's proposal in ridicule, was made by the silver-tongued young Catholic lawyer, Daniel Deniehy, in which Deniehy, during an hour-long address, made the devastating quip about a "bunyip aristocracy". McEncroe encouraged several leading Catholic laymen, including Deniehy, to stand for the colonial legislature, which upset the Protestant Ascendancy in NSW no end. He even lent discrete support for the campaign of the Catholic laity for greater say in church affairs. His interesting and significant life is well described in the book, John McEncroe, Colonial Democrat by Sister Delia Birchley, published in 1986. Deniehy's fascinating life is described in a very fine biography by Cyril Pearl, published a few years ago. Throughout the 19th century and up to the time of the conscription campaigns of 1916 and 1917 there were quite a few urban disturbances of one sort or another. They often took the form of Irish Catholic and secular non-Catholic republicans and others disrupting public events associated with the ethos of the British ruling class. The classic example of this were the so-called Republican Riots in Sydney in 1887, when public meetings to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee were taken over by the large radical section of the population of Sydney who carried motions at these meetings condemning the British monarchy as of no value to the democratic interest in Australia. Another example was the activities of the "Active Service Brigade", angry urban unemployed workers organised by Arthur Desmond during the slump of the 1890s, who disrupted Parliament and Protestant church services. Cardinal Moran comes to Sydney and turns the Catholic community into a powerful political force This process reached its culmination in the 1880s when Patrick Moran, the nephew of Cardinal Cullen, was appointed to the See of Sydney, and made a Cardinal, the first Australian Cardinal. Like his uncle, Cullen, Moran had spent a lot of time in Rome at the Irish College and in other capacities, and had become a shrewd Vatican diplomat. However, even before he had been translated (moved) to Australia he had been somewhat to the left of his reactionary uncle on the Irish national question. (When he made a return trip to Ireland and Rome in 1888, he submitted to the Vatican an angry secret report on conditions in Ireland, defending Irish national rights and interests, and pointing out, quite realistically, that further Vatican support for British imperialist rule in Ireland would endanger the interests of the Catholic Church in Ireland.) In Australia, Moran was further radicalised by the democratic spirit amongst his flock, and he contributed his own feisty intelligence and wit to the government of the Catholic Church in Australia and the defence of the interests of the Catholic community. A man of some erudition, he rather deliberately inflamed the already existing sectarian atmosphere of the time, obviously with an eye to consolidating the Irish Catholic tribe around his leadership. This aspect of his activities, which has embarrassed later Catholic historians a bit, was the three or four times he launched quite amusing, but brutal, verbal attacks on Protestant missioneries in the Pacific Islands. He obviously had strong memories of the notorious incident in Irish history "Dermot King of Leinster and the Foreigners", in which an Irish King had made an unwise and historically fatal alliance with the first English invaders of Ireland. Moran pointed out that many of the Protestant missioneries in the South Pacific were gunrunners who had bribed Fijian and Samoan chiefs to convert to their church by providing them with guns to make war against their tribal opponents (or even members of their own tribe), and that this had been backed up by British diplomacy and the British navy, a case of the British flag following the missioneries, a very common phenomenon in the 19th century. All of this was true and many people knew it, and Moran returned to this theme three or four times over 30 years during his Episcopate in Sydney. Every time Moran made these attacks on the Protestant missioneries in the Pacific, he aroused British imperial and Protestant anger, and two or three times aggrieved protest meetings were held against Moran on this topic in the Town Hall, attended by 40 or 50 Protestant ministers, and the angry middle-class Protestants of the Primrose League and the Orange Lodges. Moran's outbursts, however, had the effect he obviously desired, and both Irish Catholic and secular democratic, particularly working class opinion rallied to the side of the assertive and colourful Catholic Prelate. Cardinal Moran ticks off Bill MacNamara Moran's period as Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, 1882-1911, coincided with the foundation and development of the Labor Party from 1891 on. In the strikes of the early 1890s, the Cardinal, while offering to mediate, generally defended the trade union side, and he quite deliberately recognised and endorsed the reality, which was that when the Labor Party was formed the Irish Catholic interest generally moved into it and supported it electorally. Being, in the final analysis, a shrewd, Rome-oriented Irish Catholic Prelate, somewhat in the mold of his uncle, Cardinal Cullen, he attempted to restrain what he regarded as extremist elements in the labour movement, and he occasionally ticked them off, particularly extremists who were backsliders from his own flock. In 1892 W.H. (Bill) McNamara, who later became the proprietor of McNamara's Bookshop which, for 30 years was the famous centre of labour movement and socialist politics in Sydney, and whose two step-daughters married Henry Lawson and Jack Lang respectively, and whose son became the leader of the Socialisation Units in the ALP in the Lang epoch in the 1930s, was the secretary of the Sydney Unemployed Group organised by the Australian Socialist League. To quote from Father Patrick Ford's book Cardinal Moran and the ALP: On 8 March, the Unemployed Executive Committee met there and unanimously resolved: "That this meeting is of opinion that it is the duty of the heads of the churches to make a powerful appeal to the wealthy members of their congregations to relieve the ghastly poverty and destitution existing among hundreds of men, women and children who are on the verge of starvation and suffer great privations. Unless the clergy do this they fail to carry out the principles of true Christianity". The resolution was forwarded to Cardinal Moran in a letter from McNamara under the address Leigh House. Moran's reply was firm, and charged with a severity its author would probably have curbed had he foreseen that McNamara was to publish it. It read: "Sir, In reply to your communication, forwarded as you state, on the part of the executive of the unemployed, I beg to state that I have the sincerest sympathy with the labouring classes, ministering with devotedness to their wants, spiritual and temporal. I can attest that there is at present, and there has been for some time past, a great deal of poverty and destitution among the working families and small shopkeepers, owing to the general depression of the times. We have done whatever little lay within our power to alleviate the prevalent distress. A good many diocesan works were carried out last year. During the past few weeks other works have been begun, such as additions to St Vincent's Hospital, the presbytery at Camperdown, a new church at Blacktown, and a new school at Balmain. Should any sums be placed at my disposal, I will be only too happy to distribute them as faithfully as I can among the truly deserving destitute families. "Allow me to remark, however, that there is another class with whom I have no sympathy. There are the professional unemployed the aim of whose leaders is to bring discredit on the cause of honest labour, and whose endeavour it is, by political intrigue, to sow dissensions and to stir up evil passions among our citizens. It was hard enough in times past to cope with mercenary and trading unemployed. Such men are styled in France "chevaliers d'industrie" - ie, men ready to have a hand in anything except work. They are a disgrace to the honest working class, and they are an insuperable difficulty in the path of those who devote their energies to uphold the advance of the best interests of the labour cause. "As regards yourself personally, permit me to add one word. There is an individual bearing your name whose blatant impiety I see referred to from time to time in the public press. I trust that you are not this person. In writing these lines I have given you the benefit of the doubt. But should you happen to be that individual, I consider that it would not be wise for any honest citizen to hold correspondence with men of such folly and delusions." Your faithful servant, PATRICK F. CARDINAL MORAN Cardinal Moran shifts to the left During the 1890s, Moran made some public interventions opposing what he called the Continental Socialists in the Labor Party, but saying that Australian socialism was okay, and generally endorsing the overwhelming tendency of his flock to support the new party, while, as the above exchange with McNamara highlights so colourfully, trying to protect his flock against cultural contamination that might flow from the necessary political alliance with Labor. He was not very successful in drawing lines between his flock and the more secular sections of the labour movement, and by the early years of the new century he shifted further to the left himself and gave up polemicising against the left in the labour movement, in favour of general defence of the labour movement against its opponents, thereby recognising the reality of the deepening involvement of most of his flock with the new labour movement and its aspirations. The final stage of Moran's radicalisation, driven by the radicalisation of his flock, is described by A.E. Cahill, in the Journal of Religious History, for December 1989. When Cardinal Moran died in Sydney in 1911 his funeral drew more than a quarter of a million people to the area around St Mary's cathedral. It was an appropriately spectacular ending for his 27-year "reign". In his Catholic institutional context he had became a unique figure: head of the local hierarchy but also Apostolic Delegate, the Pope's representative in dealing with that hierarchy. He had exercised a formative, if sometimes unintentional, influence on the making of a distinctive Australian Catholic culture - a culture all the stronger for the fact that, unlike the Catholics of the United States, the Australian Catholics were overwhelmingly homogenous in Irish ethnic origin. In the last decade of his life he was often hailed on Irish occasions as "the greatest living Irishman". Still, much of the population of the newly independent Commonwealth remained emotionally dependent on the continuing British cultural empire, and Moran's Catholics were, in the words of one of the most articulate of them, "like a substance held in suspension, but never quite in solution." ... The results of Moran's public career, in church and society, were - and remain - ambivalent. The journalists' sense of loss was certainly not universal, even among Catholics. A few days after the funeral one of Sydney's few really wealthy Catholics, Thomas Donovan, wrote to an English Catholic prelate, who was himself soon to be made a cardinal: "Cardinal Moran is dead, and relief has come to many a sore heart". Distressed especially by Moran's public advocacy of Irish nationalist and Labor causes, Donovan wanted outside help to ensure that Moran's politics, the politics of a "firebrand", would be buried with him as far as the Catholic Church in Australia was concerned. Donovan knew - and bitterly resented the fact - that Moran had in recent weeks been host to "envoys" of the Irish Parliamentary Party, "out here now scouring the country for gold". But his sore heart would have been even more relieved by Moran's death if he had known about less public events. In the third-last week of his life, Moran had helped the first New South Wales Labor government survive a major parliamentary crisis. In the last week of July 1911 Acting Premier W.A. Holman, having already lost his working majority when two Labor members resigned over land policy, was threatened with the resignation of a third Labor member, Peter McGarry, a Catholic. On the night of 28 July one of Holman's ministers, Acting Treasurer A.C. Carmichael, went to see the Cardinal at St Mary's presbytery, accompanied by another Catholic Labor member, P.J. Minahan. Moran agreed to see McGarry the following morning and, in his own laconic account: "Very few words sufficed to set him right. I told him he would be known as Judas all his life, if he betrayed his party at such a crisis". McGarry went back to pledge loyalty to the McGowen-Holman government and to convey Moran's "congratulations to Mr Holman on the singular ability of which he had given proof". The Labor Party increased its strength at the next elections and remained in government for another five years. At Moran's funeral Minahan was the "organizer of mourning arrangements", Carmichael was one of the leading mourners, and Holman paid tribute to Moran's public defence of Labor, declaring that he was more impressed with the "sagacity of Moran than with that of any other public thinker in the Commonwealth". Earlier in the year Moran received wide publicity for one of the most controversial examples of his advocacy of radical political causes. In a referendum held in April 1911 the new federal Labor government - formed in April 1910, six months before its New South Wales counterpart - sought increased power to deal with industry and with commercial and financial corporations and, specifically, power to nationalise monopolies. Moran gave strong public support for the Yes campaign, in NSW circumstances, where the majority of state Labor ministers (including Holman) were opponents of the proposals. It was in response to speeches (including one by Holman) that suggested the proposals were incompatible with the idea of Home Rule that Moran made his most forthright intervention. But within days of his first pro-Yes statement - a statement in line with the trend of his thinking for more than a decade - he received anxious inquiries from Cardinal Gibbons, the senior member of the American Catholic hierarchy (and a man with whom Moran was bracketed in Rome as "the two democratic cardinals") and from John Ireland, archbishop of St Paul, Minnesota, a friend of presidents and industrialists and an enthusiastic advocate of the American way, for Catholicism as for everything else. American industrialists and financiers had become alarmed by the possibility that Australian constitutional precedents, especially federal government action against monopolies, might be followed in the United States. Gibbons, with characteristic caution, referred to American press reports that the party behind the referendum proposals, the Labor Party, drew the majority of its members "from the ranks of the Socialists" and yet received "the bulk of the Roman Catholic vote": "It is this alliance of the Roman Catholics of Australia with the party of the Socialists which has caused the surprise here." A puzzled Gibbons asked his fellow member of the Roman College of Cardinals - in which they were both veterans, ranking second and third in seniority - to provide an explanation that would allay American fears. Ireland, with candour equally characteristic, explained that he was writing from Washington "under an urgent request from representatives of large American industries". Whereas Gibbons had hinted at concern about government intervention in industrial relations, Ireland stressed local alarm about possible anti-monopoly legislation, which would exclude from Australia "American commerce and American enterprise" and "create a wide breach between this country and yours". Moran waited for referendum results before replying that the alarm was premature: "the result was a triumphant vote of No" - in fact, a 61 per cent No vote in a very low poll. He gave no indication, however, that he had himself been a very prominent public supporter of the "socialistic" proposals, which he continued to advocate. In his last newspaper interview the geographic context was different but the message was similar: "If imperialism were to have its way tomorrow, subordinating the interests of Australia to the capitalists of London, Australia would never develop, as she must develop, to be a great nation, and a great benefactor, in her future destiny, to all the Eastern world. The irreligious proletariat and small farmers and the Irish Catholics, get together and form a Labor Party The formation and development of the Labor Party in all the Australian colonies was the culmination of the practical alliance that had been developing since the convict era between the secularised non-Catholic proletariat and small farmers, and the Irish Catholic tribe. A mate of mine, Tony Laffan, has published a wonderful little piece of local history about the Newcastle area called The Freethinker's Picnic. Newcastle's Secular Hall of Science 1884-1893 (Toiler Editions, Singleton, 1998). Two other extraordinarily useful books about the religious and cultural aspects of the foundation and development of the Labor Party, and the conservative mobilisation against it, are Treasure in Earthen Vessels: Protestant Christianity in NSW Society 1900-1914, by Richard Broome (UQP 1980) and The Better Time To Be: Attitudes to Society Among Sydney Anglicans 1885 to 1914, by William James Lawton. These three books between them, along with the Parkes biography mentioned above, describe the social and cultural factors that culminated at the time of the formation of the Labor Party. Tony Laffan's book is a little gem. Using as a case study the Newcastle area, in which he lives, Laffan describes the popular mobilisation that culminated in the formation of the ALP in the 1890s. In the 1880s the old demagogue Parkes developed a system of kicking the Catholic can, so to speak, and mobilising Protestant opinion any time he was in trouble with numbers in the state Parliament. A secularist lecturer from England came to Sydney and was due to give a Sunday night lecture in a hall in Sydney, as was the practice of the quite widespread and popular Sydney secularism. To curry favour for electoral reasons with the Evangelical Protestant interest, who were infuriated by the prospect of an athiest lecture on the "Lord's day", Parkes pushed through the House a very harsh Sunday observance law to preserve the Protestant religious "British Sunday", laws for which the evangelical Anglicans in Sydney had been campaigning for a while, as described in Lawton's book. The secularist lecturer, prevented by the new laws from hiring a hall, ended up holding his anti-God meeting in Moore Park and, incidentally, got a crowd of 10,000 people, which indicates the mood of the times, but unfortunately, the dismal Protestant Sunday was inflicted on NSW for a whole epoch. In the Newcastle area, as Laffan describes, the new law had totally unintended consequences. There were proportionately fewer Catholics in Newcastle than in other areas of NSW. The Hunter region was settled largely from the 1860s to the 1890s by Protestant miners from different British fields, but mainly from Northumberland, who brought with them from Britain a mixed baggage of cultural practices, ideas and religious beliefs. They were often trade unionists, but their trade union branches were called lodges, many of them belonged to dissenting Protestant religious groups like the Primitive Methodistsand the Congregationalists, and some thousands of them were members of institutions like the Royal Orange Lodge. They also carried with them, however, from Britain a long tradition of Sunday relaxation, Sunday sport, pigeon racing and, for many of them, going to the pub on Sunday, in the contradictory way characteristic of human beings. There was already a minority secularist and socialist current among them, of people who had moved over from Primitive Methodists and dissenting Protestant origins, to Secularism and Rationalism of the George Jacob Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh sort. The enforcement of Sunday observance irritated the miners of the Newcastle area intensely. Hundreds of them sent back their "warrants" to the Royal Orange Lodges and resigned, and many of them left their dissenting Protestant churches over the issue. Rationalism and secularism spread like wildfire in the area, culminating in the foundation of the Newcastle Secular Hall of Science, which existed for the next 15 years, and the history of which is of extraordinary cultural interest. Several secularists, one of whom was a former Protestant minister, were elected to Parliament from the Newcastle area and took part in the formation of the new Labor Party, and some other Newcastle MPs shifted over to the new Labor Party, and a durable alliance was formed between the Newcastle section of the non-Catholic proletariat, more recently arrived from Britain, and the Sydney metropolitan and country non-Catholic and ex-Catholic proletariat, secularised since the convict days, along with the Irish Catholic tribe, in the new Party of Labor. Thus did the attempt to enforce the Protestant Sunday unintentionally contribute to the final breaking of the grip of Protestant religion on the whole of the Australian working class, a circumstance that has continued to this day. For the first few years of the Labor Party's existence, while the tendency existed from the start for many Catholics to shift over to the new Labor Party, this did not happen all at once. Many Catholics and Irish people were at the start well entrenched in the Protectionist Party, previously the most radical group in the parliament, and for the first 10 or 15 years of the Labor Party's existence, the allegiance of Catholics was torn between Labor and the Protectionists. Initially the Catholics weren't very influential at the leadership level in the Labor Party, although working class Catholics tended to support the Labor Party from the start. From about 1901, however, the constant conservative mobilisation against the new Labor Party, which more and more assumed an anti-Catholic character, focussing around such issues as liquor and Sunday sport, tended to reinforce the shift of the Catholic population to support of Labor and intervention in the Labor Party. The number of Catholics representing Labor in Parliament, which was minuscule initially, rapidly increased, particularly from the time of the election of the first Labor Government in NSW in 1910. From that year on, the electoral map of NSW, particularly in country areas, started to show a strong correlation between areas of higher than average Catholic population, and Labor parliamentary representation. For the next 50 years Australian conservatives mobilised against "Rum, Romanism, Socialism and Gambling" as expressed in the ALP. From the 1890s on, for the next 50 years, from 1891 to the end of the 1930s, there was, with various ebbs and flows, a more or less constant sectarian Protestant mobilisation against the Labor Party. One high point of this mobilisation was the 1904 election in NSW. Carruthers, a conservative Premier, conducted a bitterly sectarian campaign against the Catholics and mobilised Protestant opinion in favour of banning liquor, gambling and Sunday sport, including even banning art unions and raffles, which were regarded as the devils way of financing the terrible Catholic Church, the "whore of Rome", as sectarian Protestants put it. Carruthers won the election, but in 1907, despite a similar Protestant mobilisation, he almost lost in the last election before the first Labor government was elected in 1910. In Richard Broome's words: The Carruthers ministry was narrowly returned, but with a reduced majority, which the "Methodist" claimed was due to the combined forces of "Rum, Romanism, Socialism and Gambling". The Liberal-Protestant alliance had held, but it had lost some of the impetus of 1904. No doubt Carruthers's deflationary fiscal policy and his piecemeal reformism had lost votes, and on the other hand Labour was becoming more of a viable alternative. Even the Sydney Morning Herald admitted after the election that the suspicion and dislike of Labour was disappearing and "it is gaining the allegiance and the help of temperate, thoughtful men". Also the Liquor Trade Defence Union and the Sporting League, which both supported Labour and virulently opposed Carruthers and the wowsers, had fought hard in some electorates. These two groups claimed to have caused the defeat of some of the militant Protestant Liberals, namely, Booth, Law, Jessep, Anderson and Bruntnell, who had been voted into the previous parliament by temperance and Protestant support. It was ever thus for the next 40 years. The labour movement was a loose alliance of non-religious working class people, socialists, rationalists and secularists, the very large tribe of Irish Catholics, the trade unions and also liquor, gambling and sporting interests. It was opposed by the squatting interest, the metropolitan capitalist interest, finance capital and the British investment interests, wicho mobilised around conservative parties with the reactionary British-Australia rhetoric, and with the support of most Protestant churches. Irish Catholics: a major force in the development of trade unionism If you read carefully the 100 or so histories of Australian trade unions or memoirs of trade union activity, the physical participation at all levels of Irish Catholics in Australian trade unionism, is immediately striking. This stemmed from the class position of the Irish Catholic population at the bottom of the social pyramid in 19th and early 20th century Australia. This is strikingly the case in the more unskilled unions, "the new unions". An unusual, but in a way, typical example of this is revealed in the absorbing and well-illustrated history of the Tobacco Workers Union, published in 1988 by the union just before its amalgamation with the Miscellaneous Workers Union, written by Alleyn Best. It describes the battles of the Female Branch of the union - whose members were the most super-exploited female wage slaves of all - for equal wages and equal treatment in the union, which went on for many years. This battle was led by Maud O'Connell, who worked for 25 years at British Australia Tobacco in Melbourne and was the leading personality in the constant battle of the Female Branch of the union for improvements. After 15 years of trade union and labour movement activity, between the turn of the century and 1915, she became a nun and founded the Grey Sisters, a new order of nuns, caring for mothers and children in the slum areas of Melbourne. Nuns in Australian life Maud O'Connell's interesting and unusual life impinges on another feature of Catholic life in Australia - the explosion of new orders of Catholic nuns founded in Australia, or Irish orders of nuns that set up in Australia. It is not widely known, but the development of orders of nuns in the 19th Century was a new phenomenon in Ireland as well as Australia. During the 300 years of the penal laws against the Catholic church in Ireland (only repealed in the early part of the 19th century) religious orders were suppressed by the British government. The very rapid development of religious orders of nuns in both Ireland and Australia in the latter part of the 19th century, therefore, drew momentum both from the fact that it was now finally legal to become a nun, and that, to a lot of spirited, independent-minded women who were kept down in the misogynist male society in Great Britain and Australia in the 19th century, being part of independently organised orders of women engaged in useful social work like nursing in hospitals and teaching, had a certain appeal, despite the pledge of celibacy. The tough, confident and vigorous nuns who gave many of us Irish Australians our initial education were in a very real sense, early feminists. Anne Henderson's important recent book, Mary MacKillop's Sisters. A Life Unveiled, captures and describes very eloquently the significance of the largest order of nuns, the Brown Josephs, in Australian life. Catholic schools gave their students an alternative view of the British Empire Irish historians, both supporters and critics of Irish nationalism, all say that the Christian Brothers schools of the 19th and early 20th centuries were hothouses of Irish nationalism and the Irish revolution, and helped to give birth to the Rising of 1916 and the partly successful Revolution of 1921. The Christian Brothers and other Catholic schools in Australia had a very similar function. They educated their students in a radically different, more hostile view of British imperialism and the British Empire, than did the state schools. As a student at a Christian Brothers school in Sydney in the 1950s I vividly remember the alternative anti-British imperialist slant on Australian and world history that we were taught during religion lessons as an antidote to the British imperialist views of Roberts' History that we had to study for the external exams. The very useful book, Australian Popular Culture, edited by Spearitt and Walker, Unwin 1979, has a wonderul chapter From Empire Day to Cracker Night by Stewart Firth and Jeanette Horne. This chapter describes the fantastic ideological indoctrination in the public school system associated with the introduction in 1905 of "Empire Day" which eventually became "Cracker Night", and the fierce ideological resistance to "Empire Day" by the Catholic School system. A few extracts from this amusing chapter are worth quoting. At the first Catholic Educational Conference of NSW, held at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney in January 1911, teaching brothers and nuns from all over the state voted to make 24 May "Australia Day" in their schools. Empire Day, said Moran, was discredited and "even the public schools had a difficulty in allowing flags to be unfurled"; many of its supporters were "avowed enemies of the Catholic Church". Father M.J. O'Reilly of St Stanislaus College, Bathurst, thought it was unfortunate that patriotism in Australia seemed to be identified with the British Empire League, which taught children to love England instead of Australia, and pointed out that "everything that was best and noblest in Australia was Irish" ... On the first Australia Day, 24 May 1911, St Mary's Cathedral flew the flags of Ireland and Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald chose the headline "NO UNION JACK FLOWN" and reported Father O'Reilly's appreciation of the Empire builders: ... "They are the men who cruelly oppressed their fellow subjects in Ireland for the sake of an alien oligarchy. They are the land sharks of the world ... Australia not England is our motherland, the flag of Australia comes first with us." ... On May Day 1921, 1000 trade unionists marched to the Domain. A few of them tore up a Union Jack and burnt it. Those who destroyed the flag, said Sir George Fuller, were part of "the same organisation that had been endeavouring to defeat the British Empire, right from the days of the Armada". Empire Day speeches three weeks later were thick with denunciation of the incident, and the State Government was petitioned to counter the insult done to Britain's flag by making school children salute it every morning. The change was duly made, and saluting was made mandatory in NSW state schools, together with the recitation of the pledge: "I honour my God, I serve my King, I salute the flag". The NSW Trades and Labour Council urged all unionists to instruct their children not to attend the ceremony. It was now disloyal, commented the Catholic Freeman's Journal, to raise the Australian flag "and as for speaking on behalf of the oppressed - well the rack and gibbet for men capable of such infamy". On 24 May Catholic children continued to salute the Australian flag and to sing Advance Australia fair. Between the wars Empire Day was celebrated in State and Protestant schools but not in Catholic schools. While State school children learnt that they were part of the greatest empire the world had ever known, Catholic children were taught that May was the month of Mary and 24 May, far from being Empire Day, was Mary's Feast Day under the title Help of Christians, also known as Australasia Day. In the opinion of the Catholic Federation of NSW, K.R. Cramp's Story of the English People, a widely used textbook, was "nothing more that a manual of shameless jingo propaganda" and the section on Men who Made the Empire was in fact about "raiders, buccaneers and land-grabbers". Miriam Dixson's prejudiced Anglophile construction about Irish Catholics, particularly Irish Catholic women As one works through the physical, cultural, religious, ideological and political development of the Irish Catholic community in Australia in the 19th century, it becomes easier to judge the curious construction about the Irish advanced by Miriam Dixson in The Real Matildas and The Imaginary Australian. The actual development and evolution of the Irish Catholic community in all its aspects as revealed in major recent historical works, sharply contradicts Dixson's construction. The Irish women, who she regards as such a retarding influence, are actually revealed by the records as predominantly a vibrant, democratic force, and Irish men and Irish women are actually apparent as strong supporters of democratic and social movements in the Australian colonies. Dixson's rather unpleasant construction is actually a kind of prejudice based on her already existing theoretical view of the Catholic Irish, rather than any empirical inquiry into their actual social influence in Australia. It is another version of a postmodernist approach to history in which so called "theory" is given greater weight than empirical historical evidence. Karl Marx's view of history as "whole cloth" is much more useful than Dixson's "theory" in relation to the history of the Irish in Australia. Daniel Mannix comes to Melbourne In 1913 the most influential rebel Irish Catholic prelate in Australian history arrived in Victoria to become Coajutor Archbishop of Melbourne to Archbishop Carr, and in 1916, after Carr died, he became the Archbishop. Mannix was born in North Cork, in the heart of the Cork-Tipperary-Limerick area, from which many of the Irish immigrants to Australia in the 19th century came, and which was later the heart of the agrarian military rising organised by the IRA in the early 1920s, which succeeded in winning the beginnings of Irish independence. Before he came to Australia, he had a distinguished career as the President of St Patricks College, Maynooth, the main Irish seminary for training priests, and at Maynooth he had conformed fairly carefully to the rather conservative mold set down by Cardinal Cullen. As President of Maynooth he had even represented the Cullen interest, so to speak, in a conflict with Dr Hickey over the use of the Irish language in the seminary. Mannix was a distinguished, tall scholarly man with, like Moran before him, a considerable Irish wit, and like Moran before him, he was rapidly radicalised in Australia by the strong democratic rebel Labor and Irish nationalist spirit that was all-pervasive among his flock in Australia. Significant