On Saint Patrick’s Day 1859 the Yass solicitor George C. Allman addressed a banquet of the town’s most prominent men and women. In his address, Allman, the son of a Protestant Irish settler, Captain Francis Allman, praised his town as a ‘successful experiment’, a place where people ‘of all opinions, grades and religions may meet and remember that they belong to a common country’. His sentiments were echoed by the Reverend Patrick Bermingham, one of the town’s two Roman Catholic priests, who described the evening’s celebration as one ‘calculated to make the inhabitants of the southern districts appreciate the sterling good qualities of each other without reference to race or creed’. [1]
The experience of Yass in the 1850s was not unique. At this time, across much of southeastern Australia, the formation and ‘working out’ of new communities, and the interdependence of those who settled in them, produced striking levels of religious tolerance and inter-denominational cooperation. As Henry Haygarth observed in his account of life in the Australian Bush:
Few places can show so strange a mixture, and yet so complete a ‘fusion’, of the heterogeneous materials of its society, as the ‘Bush’ of Australia. It is curious to see men differing so entirely in birth, education, and habits, and in their whole moral and intellectual nature, thrown into such close contact, united by common interests, engaged under circumstances of perfect equality in the same pursuits, and mutually dependent on each other for all the good offices of civility and neighbourhood. [2]
Mary Durack made a similar point in her celebrated book Kings in Grass Castles when she wrote that her descendants ‘had almost as many friends in the Scottish, English and Jewish sections of the community as among their own. Only the occasional visit of a Church dignitary, such as the pioneer Archbishop Polding, called for a more or less exclusive Irish gathering’. [3]
In the quarter of a century after 1860, however, a good deal of the amity and responsiveness that characterised inter-denominational relations in mid-nineteenth century colonial Australia diminished. In particular, controversies over education and the course and effect of Irish nationalist politics promoted a highly visible fission along religious lines, producing what the historian Mark Lyons described as a ‘consolidation of sectarian subculture’ in Australian life. [4] In this paper, I wish to explore the intensification of religious bigotry in eastern Australia, addressing the questions why did religious bigotry take root so strongly in Australia at this particular time, and in what ways did the new sectarian hostility depart from previous patterns of inter-group relations?
Michael Hogan asserted in his book The Sectarian Strand ‘[t]he great sectarian political issue of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly that of education’. [5] In the Australian colonies, the education question came to the forefront from the 1850s, as the inadequacies of the existing denominational system (state funding to churches to provide schools) became more and more apparent. Inadequate funding, poor facilities, the presence of large numbers of untrained teachers and low levels of pupil attendance prompted reformers to advocate a shift from the denominational system to one that was (in their terms) secular, compulsory, and free. As one advocate of reform asserted, ‘this is with us not a question of sentiment but of political wisdom and prudence … [S]uch education as is thought amply sufficient for the working classes in old countries, where men rarely change their social position, will not do for Australia’. [6] Commencing in South Australia, successive colonial governments moved to diminish funding to denominational schools and exert greater state control over the provision and organisation of education. In New South Wales, Henry Parkes introduced his Public Schools Act in 1866, arguing that reform was urgently required to improve the availability and quality of education. He also proposed (perhaps somewhat disingenuously) that his reforms would help alleviate ‘jealousies and uncharitable feelings among the different sections of society’. [7] Instead, Parkes’s bill provoked new levels of sectarian controversy.
Australia’s Roman Catholic bishops steadfastly denounced the mounting attacks on denominational education. At their 1862 Provincial Council the bishops criticised as ‘persecuting sectarianism’ the tide towards state-controlled education. The pressure of their opposition increased through the 1860s as the character of the Roman Catholic Church in Australia was recast. English Benedictine control gradually weakened as a succession of Irish bishops was appointed: James Quinn to Brisbane in 1859, his brother Matthew to Bathurst in 1866, Daniel Murphy to Hobart in 1866, William Lanigan in Goulburn in 1867, and the Quinns’ cousin, Timothy O’Mahony, to Armidale in 1869. The arrival of these men, ardent supporters of Cardinal Paul Cullen, and deeply influenced by the transformation of the Irish Church following the 1850 Synod of Thurles, ensured not only impressive programs of church construction and parish formation but strident opposition to public schooling. [8] Their presence fanned the sectarian embers in colonial life: Patrick O’Farrell observed, ‘the new bishops were, from their arrival, notably —and censoriously—interested in colonial politics, and disposed towards the adoption of a belligerent Catholic sectarianism’. [9]
In 1869 the Provincial Council of the Australian Catholic bishops reaffirmed its determination to oppose the introduction of secular education and to insist on the teaching of Roman Catholic doctrine in Catholic-run schools. Though Protestant leaders in the colonies were themselves far from acquiescent towards the principle of state-funded secular education, the unwavering Catholic position was easily and quickly represented by its opponents as one of exclusiveness and intransigence—as a demonstration of that Church’s overriding commitment to Roman rather than Australian precepts. The issue came to a head most visibly in Victoria in 1872, when in a bitter election the government of the former Young Irelander, now moderate colonial Irishman, Charles Gavan Duffy, was defeated. The new Victorian government, emboldened with its success at the poll, moved to abolish state aid to denominational schools. The education controversy in Victoria foreshadowed conflicts that would occur across colonial Australia, though with varying degrees of intensity and bitterness. But, the general situation was clear: the worlds of Australia’s Catholic and Protestant populations were becoming more separate and insular ones. [10]
[1] Yass Courier, 19 March 1859. See also Malcolm Campbell, The Kingdom of the Ryans: the Irish in Southwest New South Wales 1816–1890, Sydney, UNSW Press, 1997, pp. 84–6.
[2] Henry Haygarth, Recollections of Bush Life in Australia During a Residence of Eight Years in the Interior, London, Murray, 1861, p. 22; see also Donald Carisbrooke, ‘Immigrants in the Push’, Push from the Bush, 5, Armidale, University of New England, December 1979.
[3] Mary Durack, Kings in Grass Castles, London, Constable, 1959, p. 45. The colonial setting also contributed to this cordiality. Homi Bhaba insightfully observed in an interview that dwelt on his Parsee ancestry that the colonial context could prompt ‘an ethic of cultural tolerance, of the survival of various cultures’, that contrasted markedly with the rigidity and intolerance of the metropolitan center: Homi Bhaba ‘Between Identities’ in R. Benmayor and A. Skotries (eds) Migration and Identity, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 188.
[4] Mark Lyons, Aspects of Sectarianism in New South Wales Circa 1865 to 1880 , PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1972, p. 275.
[5] Michael Hogan, The Sectarian Strand: Religion in Australian History, Ringwood, Vic., Penguin Books, 1987, p. 101.
[6] James Rutledge, quoted in Alan Barcan, Two Centuries of Education in New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, NSW University Press, 1988, p. 75.
[7] Quoted in Barcan, Two Centuries of Education, p. 107.
[8] Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Church and Community: An Australian History, Kensington, NSW, NSW University Press, 1992, pp. 127–29; Frances O’Donoghue, The Bishop of Botany Bay: The Life of John Bede Polding, Australia’s First Catholic Archbishop, London, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1982.
[9] Patrick O’Farrell, Catholic Church, p. 151.
[10] ibid., pp. 160–70; Hogan, Sectarian Strand, pp. 100–27; Ronald Fogarty, Catholic Education in Australia, 1806–1950, 2 vols, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1959, Vol. I, pp. 208–55; Charles Gavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres, 2 vols, London, Unwin, 1898, Vol. II, pp. 321–46; J. S. Gregory, Church and State: Changing Government Policies Towards Religion in Australia, North Melbourne, Cassell Australia, 1973.