Historians have debated the question which group was most responsible for the worsening climate of sectarianism in Australia in the late 1860s and 1870s. In his detailed study of developments in New South Wales, Mark Lyons identified the attitudes and desires of Australia’s Irish Catholic population as the paramount cause of worsening relations: ‘the real impediment to Catholic assimilation came from the Catholics themselves’. On Lyons’s reading of events, the greater politicisation and heightened national consciousness present among Irish immigrants of the ‘“forties” generation’, in conjunction with militant Catholic intransigence on matters such as religious education, terminated the more amicable inter-group relations that had characterised colonial life in the preceding decades. However, others have strenuously contested Lyons’s analysis. Michael Hogan, in a more wide-ranging study of sectarianism in Australia, argued with justification that Lyons’s evidence was equally open to interpretation as demonstrating Protestant culpability for the deterioration in relations, and that the roots of sectarianism in Australia could be identified much sooner than the 1860s. This is of course true, but neither analysis establishes persuasively the specific forces that caused the flame of sectarian hatred to burn so bright in Australia at this time.

Other analysis has focussed on the role of specific issues and events in triggering change. Here the education question and the assassination attempt are identified as primary causes of an upsurge in religious bigotry. Yet, notwithstanding the importance of education and Irish affairs, these causal factors do not in themselves explain adequately the intensity of the sectarian escalation at this time.

Comparison with the eastern United States suggests a much more complicated picture, and provides important insights into the forces that drove Australian tempers to such fevered pitch. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century profound changes affected major American cities such as New York and Philadelphia as early industrialisation displaced the artisan system, urban concentrations expanded to new levels, and immigration reached new peaks. Together these developments engendered deep feelings of insecurity among the native-born population, especially those who Dale Knobel described as ‘middling folk who wanted to get ahead and feared falling behind’. Unsurprisingly, in the midst of their unease, many of these Americans were attracted to fraternal organisations. The agendas of many of these associations corresponded closely with evangelical Protestant concerns including liquor licensing, Sabbath closing and public education. In the 1840s, public education in particular emerged as a key site in American Nativists’ struggle against what they understood to be the deleterious effects of mass immigration. Controversies arose in both New York and Philadelphia where Roman Catholic Church leaders demanded the right to have their preferred Douay bible used in public schools in place of the King James version. To Nativists, this Catholic demand for separate religious instruction provided confirmation of the group’s suspect loyalty and isolation from Republican ideals, contested though these were. In Philadelphia, violent rioting broke out in 1844, its immediate triggers the issue of bible reading. However, as David Montgomery and others have shown, the roots of the crisis lay much deeper, in the conjunction of economic change, class insecurity and fraternal ideology. ^[26]

Though aspects of the Australian scene undoubtedly differed from the United States, important similarities can be suggested between the two sectarian upsurges. In eastern Australia, the 1870s marked the beginning of a wave of major manufacturing expansion. Though statistical data for the decade are limited and imprecise, two major studies point to a virtual doubling in the numbers of Australians employed in manufacturing between 1870 and 1880. Growth was particularly strong in the number of persons engaged in the production of metals (468%), textiles (374%) and clothing (505%). ^[27] With this expansion in manufacturing employment came an increase in the proportion of the population resident in the largest urban centres. Whereas in 1871, 46 per cent of the population of New South Wales were resident in urban areas, by 1881, 58 per cent of the colony’s population lived in the major city or towns. Most of that increase occurred in the capital city, Sydney, where the population increased by nearly 300 per cent between 1861 and 1881 though the population of the colony had increased by only 114 per cent during the same period. In Victoria the proportion of the colonial population resident in urban areas had increased quite substantially in 1860s, and the population of Melbourne continued to increase in the 1870s though some decline occurred in the size of smaller urban centres. The population of smaller Australian cities also rose substantially: Adelaide, for  example, doubled  in  size   between   1861  and 1881. ^[28]

In addition to economic change and early urban concentration, the more feverish sectarian atmosphere in Australia in the 1870s also coincided with significant growth in political movements espousing evangelical demands, a conjunction that occurred in the United States during its earlier period of sectarian animus. Doctrinal differences were subsumed as new, politically active, pan-Protestant organisations emerged. The Protestant Political Association, formed in 1872, provided a forum for Protestant mobilisation against the extent of Roman Catholic influence on colonial life. Social and fraternal organisations also experienced strong growth. Membership of the Orange Order, which had risen sharply in the immediate wake of the 1868 assassination attempt, increased at an extraordinary rate through the 1870s. According to one study, its membership in New South Wales rose from fewer than 3,000 in 1869 to as many as 19,000 members in 1876, while the number of affiliated lodges rose from 28 to 130. By the late 1870s, Lyons estimated, as many as 15 per cent of Protestant males aged over sixteen years were members. ^[29] The expansion in the membership of the Orange Order was accompanied by a diminution in its Irish orientation. Gradually, the movement expanded to become one more reflective of Australian Protestantism at large than of its specific Irish antecedents. For its momentum it drew heavily on evangelical religion and its associated reform campaigns, such as temperance, rather than matters Irish. Though the Orange Order encompassed diverse denominations and social backgrounds, its cornerstone membership in 1870 was clear enough: lower middle-class and respectable working-class men of ambition, frustrated in their yearnings, and often insecure in disposition. Protestant fraternity offered such men security, ritual, prestige, connections, and the hope of social mobility. Some were fortunate to secure that upward movement too, if the gradual elevation in social status among the movement’s leadership by the end of the 1870s is an accurate guide. ^[30]

The mobilisation of Australia’s Protestant population was matched by a new level of discipline and vigour among Australian Catholics, a phenomenon directly attributable to the arrival of Ireland’s ‘Devotional Revolution’ on Australian shores. However, as Patrick O’Farrell argued persuasively, the Australian scene lent a particular urgency and purpose to the introduction of that model of religious reinvigoration. In colonial Australia, notorious for its apathy and indifference to religious matters, a strong institutional framework—particularly one instilled with heavy Irish practice, tone and rhetoric—offered the best hope for the Roman Catholic Church to  consolidate  and  strengthen  its  position. ^[31] The new Irish bishops came to Australia determined to raise the level of devotion and to instil new vigour into the practice of Australian Catholicism. To this end, they were ready and willing to attack or confront their opponents. ^[32] In the more heated, confrontational environment, cooler voices were drowned out. In November 1872 a new newspaper, the Irishman, was founded in Melbourne. Opposed to the maintenance of sectarian predilections and strongly resistant to party allegiances, the newspaper ceased publication within four months. Its blandness and neutrality appear to have won little support in these contentious years. ^[33]