The nature of Irish-Australian identity at the turn of the twentieth century was multifaceted. Irish immigrants and multigenerational settlers could be distinguished from one another on intersecting lines of demarcation, such as politics, religion, gender and class. Generational change between 1880 and 1916 had further impacts. Australia’s Irish-born population peaked during the 1880s and declined sharply following the 1890s depression. By 1916, the Irish-Australian community was largely Australian-born, far removed from their immigrant ancestors who had arrived several generations prior.Footnote 1 Identification with Ireland thus became gradually attenuated after 1880 by the deaths of the immigrant generation and the passage of time, creating the circumstances by which Catholics could more readily identify with the culture of Britishness in Australia.
Historians have generally concluded that Catholics were less receptive to the fervour of British race patriotism in Anglo-Australia than were Protestants.Footnote 2 The extent to which Catholics’ willingness to engage with the British identikit was contingent on class has not yet, however, been adequately examined. Bob Reece pointed to this deficiency in 1991, arguing that few historians of Irish and Catholic Australia have considered the effect of class consciousness in defining the ethnic identity of that broader community.Footnote 3 Since then, scholars such as Val Noone have investigated the role of working-class identity in relation to Irishness, Catholicism and labour politics in Australia.Footnote 4 Such studies reflect a long tradition of research directed towards those themes in Australian historiography.Footnote 5 It is only in recent years that scholarship has been directed towards the Catholic middle class, with historians such as Sophie Cooper, Martin Kerby and Margaret Baguley examining the agency of that socio-economic group in urban Australia.Footnote 6 But there remains room for further exploration of that community as it operated within a broader cultural space defined by British values and forms. In those studies, the intrinsic Britishness of Australia’s Catholic middle class has been largely incidental, rather than central, to the analysis.
This article will argue that middle-class status, or its pursuit, encouraged Irish-Australian Catholics to mitigate the extent of their Irishness as the ideology of Britishness assumed greater power between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this, affluent or otherwise mobile Catholics tied themselves to the British elements of Australian nationalism to nearly the same degree as did the Protestant majority. This article will explore these ambiguities in the nature of Catholic identity in Australia and the tensions inherent within them, by first examining how middle-class Catholic individuals and groups sought to distinguish themselves from working-class Irish Australians. In so doing, the article will consider elite boys’ colleges in Melbourne and Sydney, as well as the attitudes of Catholic professionals, politicians and clergymen. It will then examine the forms of Britishness that arose in that segment of Irish Australia, with emphasis on the eastern states of Victoria and New South Wales.
Certain of the ethnic- and class-based anxieties examined in this article are attributable to migration patterns. Up until the 1880s, Irish emigration to Australia was primarily sourced from Catholic Munster.Footnote 7 As a predominantly Catholic community, the Irish in Australia were confronted with the pressures of conforming to the social and cultural norms of a white settler society in which British Protestants formed an overwhelming majority. That is, although Irish Australians were white subjects ‘with full access to racial citizenship’, their Catholicism positioned them as outsiders to a culture of Britishness to which Protestantism was central.Footnote 8 That culture was imported primarily from England, from where most of Australia’s immigrants between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came.Footnote 9 But it was also influenced by the Scots who, between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1930s, formed the third largest immigrant group in Australia after the English and Irish.Footnote 10 The Scots in Australia were largely Presbyterian and actively reflected and reinforced an imperial project centred upon such core ideological tenets of Britishness as Protestantism, whiteness, economic expansionism, militarism and monarchism.Footnote 11 Although a small percentage of Scottish Australians were Catholic, historians have pointed out that the discursive association of Scotland with the empire protected those Catholics from the prejudices invariably levelled at their Irish-Australian co-religionists.Footnote 12 Australia’s Welsh community was decidedly smaller than the Irish, English and Scottish, and was drawn more to North America than to Australia through this period.Footnote 13
Britishness in Australia was thus a conglomeration of white ethnic identities that were overwhelmingly Protestant and ‘preponderantly English in character’, due in large part to England’s status as the crux of the empire.Footnote 14 Collectively, the English, Scottish and Welsh in Australia formed a British composite that marked Irish-Australian Catholics as cultural others. That this alienation was based largely on religious lines could be seen in the comparative ease with which Irish-Australian Protestants assimilated within Australian social and political power structures.Footnote 15 Those developments mirrored circumstances in Britain and Ireland, in which the Welsh, Scottish, and English regarded the Catholic Irish ‘as alien in a way that they did not regard each other as alien’.Footnote 16 Such attitudes, imported to the colonies, complicated the behaviours and self-conception of Irish immigrants and their descendants. The result was an Irish-Australian community that was heterogeneous in its make-up, at a time in which the Australian state sought to inculcate an ideological imagining of national sameness.Footnote 17
Australian civic identity was, in this same period, in a critical phase of nationalist formation and consolidation. Nationalism emerged in the late nineteenth century as the primary ideology with which the Australian people identified, defining themselves as part of a ‘Greater Britain’.Footnote 18 Such an identification adhered closely to specifically English forms. From Australian federation in 1901 through to the 1960s, nationalism in Australia ‘was most often expressed in speeches by English governors and English generals … and through endless playings of the British National Anthem’.Footnote 19 Historians have even argued that the construct of Britishness held greater sway over the Australian people than the British themselves.Footnote 20 A corollary of this was the identification of Australia as a culturally Protestant state, in spite of the religious pluralism, if not secularism, rhetorically advocated by the proponents of Australian federation.Footnote 21 In this, the broader white-Australian community could identify as British and Australian with neither reservation nor contradiction. This was particularly the case for middle-class society, which looked to British traditions and values to uphold their status in pre- and post-federation Australia.Footnote 22 This was the case throughout the wider Anglosphere, and Cecilia Morgan thus argues that ‘working-class men and women were often excluded from the groups and processes that produced the most dominant narratives of empire and nation’.Footnote 23 Given the prominence of racial thought in this period of Australian nationhood, whiteness was thus deemed a virtue alongside such supposedly traditional Anglo-Protestant values as temperance, thrift and respectability. As aspirant members of the middle class, Irish-Australians’ ambitions mirrored those of their counterparts in countries with significant Irish-Catholic diasporic populations, such as North America.Footnote 24
Of course, Irishness was not incongruent with such values. Notions of respectability and temperance formed a significant part of Irish-Australian identity in Melbourne’s working-class suburbs in the early twentieth century.Footnote 25 Public displays of ethno-religious identity, such as annual St Patrick’s Day celebrations, were considered by most Irish Australians to be consistent with their status as loyal subjects of the British Empire.Footnote 26 The over-representation of Catholics within the working class often led, however, to the conflation of Irishness with negative stereotypes of working-class life, such as poverty, drunkenness and crime in the minds of many English- and Scottish-Australian Protestants.Footnote 27 The Irish could thus be construed as ‘an existential threat to Australia’s British Protestant identity’, implicitly at odds with the hegemonic values of Anglo-Australia.Footnote 28 The near-exclusive application of such prejudices towards Irish-Australian Catholics rather than their Protestant counterparts relied on the conflation of Irishness with Catholicism in the Australian popular consciousness. That process had been in motion since the earliest period of colonisation but was entrenched by the clerical takeover of Irish-nationalist endeavours in Australia, completed by the 1890s.Footnote 29 Melbourne’s Archbishop Daniel Mannix thus asserted, in mid 1917, ‘that in common speech the words Catholic and Irish have come to be synonymous in Australia. It is a rough generalisation of the facts.’Footnote 30
Historians have observed that this did not translate to Irish-Australian ghettoisation. Irish Australians, both Protestant and Catholic, were, in spite of reservations that varied in intensity, ‘generally receptive to the myth of Britishness’.Footnote 31 Although the Irishness of Australia’s Catholic population relied upon insular celebrations of their heritage, traditions and cultural memories, that identikit was tempered by the realpolitik of living in a newly formed state in which social and cultural norms, along with the labour market, were shaped by the Anglo-Protestant majority. This, then, was the tension within Catholic identity during this period in Australia: Catholics straddled twin, oft-antithetical, urges to maintain their ethno-religious relationship with Ireland and seek socio-economic advancement within an Anglo-Protestant Australia ideologically opposed to Irishness in its disparate forms.Footnote 32 Thus, there was an inherent ‘in-betweenness’ that defined Irish-Australian Catholics but particularly those who aspired to upward mobility.
Although the Australian middle class was dominated by British Protestantism, Catholics had begun gradually to enter its ranks from the late nineteenth century onwards, mostly through politics, commerce and the professions, but also through profitable land ownership. Social mobility was further aided by the expansion of education and the public service, which increased the viability of professional careers from the early twentieth century onwards.Footnote 33 It remained the case, however, that middle-class Catholics were a deviation from the otherwise proletarian nature of that broader community.Footnote 34 The Irish-Catholic barrister and politician Patrick Glynn commented in an 1882 letter home to Gort, County Galway that in South Australia, ‘The Catholics as usual are the poorer class — the Protestants the wealthy and fashionable’.Footnote 35 That sectarian imbalance subsequently improved, but not drastically enough to destroy either its broader reality or the stereotypes it conjured in the popular consciousness. Hence, the Catholic middle class necessarily occupied social, cultural and economic power structures that were innately British and Protestant. Such contexts intensified assimilatory pressures for that socio-economic group to a greater degree than was experienced by working-class Catholics, whose class environment was heavily influenced by Irish immigration and culture.Footnote 36 This article’s analysis of middle-class Catholic individuals, families and institutions will, thus, provide greater insight into the nature of Irish-Australian identity and ambition at a critical juncture in Australian nationhood.
I
The Catholic middle class in Australia could be defined as such by parallel metrics. Those who fell within that socio-economic group were mostly non-manual workers, whose occupations generally fell within the categories delineated by Australian census data as ‘Professional’ or ‘Commercial’.Footnote 37 Such categories included within their scope those working in property, finance and education; those working for the government, the military and the church; and those practicing law and medicine.Footnote 38 By standards imported from Britain, other markers included patterns of residence and adherence to values of moral conservatism, social respectability and imperial patriotism.Footnote 39 Members of the urban Catholic middle class in Victoria and New South Wales tended to reside in affluent suburbs such as, in Melbourne, Kew and Hawthorn, and, in Sydney, Lane Cove and Hunter’s Hill.Footnote 40 These residential patterns were reinforced by the location of elite Catholic colleges in those same areas, which has contributed to the broader argument that elite education ‘has always been an important part of being “middle-class”’ in Australia.Footnote 41 Residing in such areas distinguished those Catholics from many of their co-religionists. Richard Broome has shown that, in 1900, Catholics were proportionally over-represented by approximately 10 per cent in Sydney’s poorer, inner-city suburbs, and under-represented by approximately 15 per cent in the more desirable late-Victorian and Edwardian suburbs, and Oliver MacDonagh has demonstrated similar findings in Victoria for 1851–1891.Footnote 42
Among those attending elite Catholic colleges, and their families, class consciousness generally conformed to broader standards of white, imperial, Christian normativity.Footnote 43 The middle-class Australian male was, by the early twentieth century, increasingly judged by his ‘physical strength, patriotism, military usefulness, and ultimately, his worthiness as a member of the nation and empire’.Footnote 44 These standards were expressed by the leadership of elite Catholic boys’ schools in Victoria and New South Wales, and with particular energy during the Great War.
Elite Catholic girls’ schools, such as Melbourne’s Genazzano convent and Sydney’s Convent of the Sacred Heart, run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus and the Sacred Heart sisters respectively, projected different, less military expectations. At Genazzano, standards of feminine domesticity, expressed via the girls’ dress and physical appearance, were primary concerns. Connie Gorman, a boarder at the college through the period 1915–18, later recalled the college’s emphasis upon appropriate dresswear, particularly for prize days and formal occasions, and that ‘the nuns, far from being averse to the decorative side of life, positively encouraged us to look pretty when we went, as we sometimes did, to sell sweets at [Xavier College, the nearby Jesuit boys’ school]’.Footnote 45 Despite their promotion of marriage, these girls’ colleges were not focussed wholly on producing pious and dutiful Catholic wives. The first Catholic woman to graduate from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Science degree, Lucy Verdon, was a graduate of the Convent of Mercy’s St Aloysius College in North Melbourne, for instance.Footnote 46 Australia’s Catholic press also regularly reported the inroads Catholic women were making in the fields of education, finance, law and medicine, both in Australia and in the wider world.Footnote 47 Those developments were often tempered, however, by a reticence to push Catholic girls towards the kinds of professional careers expected of their male peers. Connie Gorman later wrote, for instance, that: ‘To be a nun, or to be a wife and mother, were, of course, the two main vocations put before us. [Genazzano] was not an especially academic school.’Footnote 48 The elite Catholic boys’ colleges of Victoria and New South Wales more actively prepared their students for careers in the professions and thus more actively facilitated those students’ integration within Australian power structures into adulthood.
Prestigious Jesuit colleges in Melbourne and Sydney fostered a sense of elitism though alumni associations based on English-Protestant models.Footnote 49 In Sydney, the inaugural meeting of St Ignatius’ College’s Old Boys’ Union in 1897 hosted an address from Thomas Kelly, a fellow of St John’s College (a male, Catholic residential college attached to the University of Sydney). Kelly asserted that the students’ status as Ignatians ‘should not be a mere accidental circumstance; it should be entitled to the name something to be proud of, a hall-mark of integrity, of honesty, of character’.Footnote 50 Such associations distinguished members from the much larger population of parish and state schools, associating them instead with such bastions of Protestant privilege as Melbourne Grammar and Geelong Grammar in Victoria, and The King’s School and Newington College in New South Wales. The desire to accentuate that distinctiveness was evident in the rhetoric of those colleges’ past pupils, many of whom had embarked on professional careers. At a 1912 meeting of Xavier College’s old boys’ association in Melbourne, the solicitor Thomas King suggested that Xaverians spearhead the formation of a ‘Public Schools’ Club’ that would bring them into closer camaraderie with the Protestant college network.Footnote 51 King reminded those gathered that the proposed club ‘should not in any way be fettered or trammelled by the possibility of any undesirables becoming members thereof’.Footnote 52 Implicit within such statements was the appeal not only to a closer relationship with the Anglo-Protestant schools, but an inherent rejection of, and distinction from, such ‘undesirables’ as were found outside the public-school milieu.
High-status girls’ convents demonstrated a similar urge to distinguish themselves from the working class. At the opening in 1882 of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, in Rose Bay, Sydney, Mother Mabel Digby, the society’s English-born superior general, expressed concern over exclusivity in student enrolments. In a letter to the convent’s founder, the Belgian-born Mother Febronie Vercruysse, Digby suggested that Vercruysse be guided ‘by the respectability and Catholic spirit of the families and by the personal qualities of the children received’.Footnote 53 This path led, in 1883, to Mother Vercruysse’s complaints that Sydney’s priests, ‘almost all Irish, and even the Jesuits, find us too “aristocratic”’.Footnote 54 Certain Jesuit schools developed a similar reputation. Letters to the Catholic Press — the clerically-owned competitor of Sydney’s mainstream Catholic weekly, the Freeman’s Journal — denigrated students of St Ignatius’ College, in Riverview, Sydney, as ‘“Cawtholic” snobs’ raised by ‘shoneen parents’.Footnote 55 Indeed, that same paper editorialised, with regards to the college’s 1908 speech day, that: ‘For all the stranger could know, the report might have been that of a subsidised Wesleyan or Anglican college instead of one our greatest Catholic high schools.’Footnote 56
Notions of class consciousness and superiority were also fostered by college leaders and patrons. In Melbourne, Dr Edward Ryan, a past pupil of Xavier College, implored students there to remember that the phrase noblesse oblige — ‘privilege entails responsibility’ — ‘might well be the special boast and proud privilege of all Public School boys’.Footnote 57 The Jesuit colleges attempted to harness that sense of privilege partly through charitable works, led predominantly by branches of the Society of St Vincent de Paul that sprung up at Xavier College and St Ignatius’ College in the early twentieth century. Participation was part of a broader effort to ‘discover ways in which boys of middle class background could find objects for their social and religious conscience’.Footnote 58 That such boys often did not recognise their obligation to those outside their socio-economic sphere was expressed by a Xaverian, Maurice Cussen, who wrote to his father Leo, a judge in Victoria’s Supreme Court, that the students involved with the society ‘seem to think that it is a great joke’.Footnote 59
Class distinctions were reinforced by the growth of the professions and the public service. The corresponding increase in the importance of education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the number of university enrolments grow rapidly in the years separating Australian federation from the Great War, ‘from 2,695 in 1904 to 4,172 in 1914’.Footnote 60 Such advancements made the prospects of a professional career all the more viable. The debating societies at Xavier College and St Ignatius’ College held sessions about whether law or medicine was best suited for those graduating the college, the presumption being that those in attendance would pursue one or the other.Footnote 61 On the other side of Sydney’s Lane Cove River, at Hunter’s Hill, the Marist Brothers’ St. Joseph’s College, also a member of Sydney’s Great Public Schools association, pushed that argument further. A past pupil wrote in the college journal in 1915 that: ‘There are thousands who will never see a secondary school. These will fill the poorly-paid servile positions. Our students should aim at leadership.’Footnote 62 The article, thus, concluded that ‘every student of St. Joseph’s who has passed his Leaving Certificate Examination should regard it as a duty to enter on a professional career’.Footnote 63 Privileged Catholic men often viewed their favourable position within the labour market as it related to the working class from which they could now distinguish themselves. When Lux Meagher, an alumnus of Xavier College, earned a well-paid position as a journalist in Western Australia, his father John, a Melbourne barrister, wrote to him: ‘Just think of it, you will have nearly twice as much to keep yourself as a Bendigo miner has upon which to keep himself a wife and family!’Footnote 64
Any qualms at such inequalities were waved away by the church’s hierarchy, particularly in Sydney. Michael Kelly, coadjutor-archbishop in 1904, told Riverview students and families attending the college speech day that:
No person in reason can take offence at the principle that all men are not equal, that all men are not called on to lead. Let anyone say, “All may be leaders,” and he will soon find the application of that principle “If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the pit.” We look to those who are favoured particularly as are the students of Riverview and similar colleges throughout Australia, whether Catholic or non-Catholic.Footnote 65
Since they sought to raise the stature of the wider lay community, this explicit favouring of middle-class leadership might be understood as the church’s engaging in realpolitik. That this was the case could be inferred from Kelly’s claims at a Riverview gathering in 1910 that ‘the working classes in Australia … were not amenable to religious influence’.Footnote 66 But it was also owed to the growth in the size and confidence of the Catholic middle class in this period, a development which encouraged the clergy — many of whom, but by no means all, came from privileged backgrounds — to broaden their appeal beyond their working-class following. Hence, Sydney’s Cardinal Patrick Moran boasted to the Irish-born Labor politician Hugh Mahon in 1907 that: ‘In the City Corporation out of 24 members 10 are Catholics and the Lord Mayor [Thomas Hughes] is Catholic.’Footnote 67 The cardinal declared that ‘in the middle-class, who are the bone and sinew of a nation, we hold our own’.Footnote 68
II
Middle-class society in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century was defined in explicitly non-Irish terms, with most of its norms and institutions deriving from English exemplars. Public-school associations played a critical role in maintaining the Britishness of this broader cultural space, and the elite Catholic colleges in Victoria and New South Wales readily conformed to the standards set by their Protestant peers.Footnote 69 Indeed, as Greg Dening has written of Xavier College, ‘[b]eing recognised as a public school whitewashed the green of being Irish’.Footnote 70 In Sydney, old Ignatians often referred to their alma mater as ‘the Eton of Australia’, and this characterisation was replicated even by the church’s hierarchy.Footnote 71 Such equations were also made in Ireland, with reference to elite Catholic colleges there, from the mid nineteenth century onwards. Ciaran O’Neill argues that, depending on who described a school as an ‘Irish Eton’, the label could carry ‘either a great deal of pride or an implied accusation of disloyalty and West-Britonism, of embodied elitism and a commitment to reproducing an unfair and hierarchical social structure’.Footnote 72 At St Ignatius’ College, the self-identification as the ‘Eton of Australia’ reflected more the former than the latter, in spite of its drawing the ire of defensive elements of the Irish-Australian community, such as the Catholic Press, which editorialised its disdain for ‘Riverview, and its Anti-Irish Spirit’ in 1908.Footnote 73 Indeed, the discourse surrounding such equations with English public schools shaped the reputation, rightly or wrongly, of the Jesuits ‘producing “West Britons”, Irishmen aping Englishmen’, a perception derived in part from the pronounced Britishness of Australia’s public-school community.Footnote 74
The veracity of this imagery manifested in a strong emphasis upon imperial loyalty in and around the colleges. Riverview’s first rector, Joseph Dalton, S.J., born in County Waterford, recounted to a gathering of old boys in 1897 that ‘you were taught that loyalty to the sovereign was a duty, and disloyalty a crime’.Footnote 75 Similar sentiments were echoed by Catholic professionals attentive to the college’s reputation. Louis Heydon, a Catholic solicitor of English descent and benefactor of St Ignatius’ College, wrote to Patrick Keating, S.J., a native of County Tipperary, that one of his excuses for not donating ‘some thousands to the college’ was that ‘on Mafeking Day [a short-lived celebration of a Boer War siege] the College had been the only house on the river flagless’.Footnote 76 The colleges’ Jesuit leadership thus tended to echo the sympathies of the privileged community they served. As rector of Xavier College in 1905, Father Keating was involved with the League of the Empire, an organisation concerned with boosting imperial sentiment in Australia.Footnote 77 On Keating’s membership, Melbourne’s Archbishop Thomas Carr wrote reassuringly: ‘I think it would do good if you were to attend the proposed Empire meeting. They are a little mad but it is a good natural madness.’Footnote 78
One of the primary results of this emphasis upon British, imperial values in otherwise Irish cultural spaces was the fracturing of middle-class Catholic students’ sense of Irishness, an ethnic tie that otherwise defined much of Australian Catholicism’s public displays of community and collective identity. The student population at elite Catholic boys’ colleges in this period contained a small percentage of students of British or European descent, though the majority came from Irish backgrounds. The likelihood of boys belonging to the former group had increased by the 1910s. At elite girls’ convents such as Genazzano and Sacred Heart, the students and staff were also in no way homogenously Irish. At Genazzano, nuns were often European (including French, English and German women), while at Sacred Heart, there was a decidedly French influence, reflecting the society’s continental origins and leadership. Indeed, certain girls were sent to these convents by parents who felt estranged from the Irish influence that dominated Australian-Catholic culture at this time.Footnote 79
The Jesuits who staffed the boys’ colleges, however, were predominantly Irish. Gerard Windsor has noted that past pupils and former masters of Ireland’s Clongowes College were ‘the life blood’ of St Ignatius’ College from its opening in 1880 through its first several decades, and an Australian-born rector was not introduced to Xavier College until 1952.Footnote 80 Both St Ignatius’ College and Xavier College thus projected their Irishness to varying extents, hosting annual St Patrick’s Day concerts and extending hospitality to Irish-nationalist envoys and Australian sympathisers. But such sentiment at the colleges was countered by an Anglophilia that was, if not more pervasive, then certainly more comfortably reproduced within the environs of public-school normativity. College debating societies found that motions regarding Britain had the potential for leaving debaters ‘wildly indignant at the bare idea of a word of disloyalty spoken against England’.Footnote 81 A young Charles Gavan Duffy, grandson of the Irish statesman of the same name, debated Arthur Makinson, a relative of the Heydon family, at St Ignatius’ College’s 1898 speech day in opposition to the motion:
That it is of supreme importance in the interests of civilisation that the British Empire should be extended, strengthened, and consolidated, and therefore it is the duty of the colonies to foster a spirit of loyalty to the British throne, and to check all movements, sentiments or agitation that might tend to lessen that spirit of loyalty.Footnote 82
Gavan Duffy acknowledged at the outset that ‘Addressing an audience … which was for the most part English in sympathy, he spoke at a disadvantage’: he was indeed promptly defeated.Footnote 83 A debate contested along similar lines in 1908 saw a young Ignatian appeal to his audience to side with England rather than act as ‘maddened Fenians’.Footnote 84
This fealty to Britain — often expressed as fealty to England — could be implicitly anti-Irish. A son of the Catholic solicitor John Lane Mullins, Brendan, wrote home to Sydney from England’s Beaumont College in 1909 that one of the Jesuits there, Father Melling, had called him Irish, which led to him receiving the nickname ‘Mulligan’. The nickname was deemed acceptable only on the grounds that ‘Father Melling is called “the Rat”, so my name is better than his’.Footnote 85 In Hawthorn, the young Cussen boys had similarly ambiguous feelings towards their Irish roots. As a boarder in Xavier College, Maurice wrote to his parents in 1911, explaining that his younger brother, Kevin, ‘says he’s not Irish now. He used to be once; but now he’s English, and repudiates the Irishman with scorn.’Footnote 86 Maurice’s sister, Alice, a student at Genazzano, also referred to herself as English as a child, citing as explanation her parents, who did the same in spite of their father, Leo’s, County Kerry heritage.Footnote 87
This fracturing of Catholic identity was equally evident in middle-class society beyond the environs of the colleges. At the time of federation, high-status Catholic men articulated their Britishness by advocating the assimilation of Irishness within the British Empire. At a meeting of the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society (H.A.C.B.S.) in early 1900, the Catholic protectionist politician Edward O’Sullivan argued that:
the Irish and the British people were now too closely woven together commercially and in colonization to be separated, and it was better for the sons and daughters of Erin to recognise that fact than to listen to the teachings of revengeful, distempered men, who would excite them to mutiny.Footnote 88
Though the majority of the society’s members were working-class Catholics who benefitted from its sickness and death benefits, H.A.C.B.S. leaders tended to be middle class.Footnote 89 That O’Sullivan’s remarks were representative of the sympathies of that leadership could be seen in the report that his remarks ‘were loyally received by everyone present’.Footnote 90 Catholic professionals otherwise disaffected with the Irish elements of Australian Catholicism agreed with such arguments. Charles Heydon, a Sydney judge and the brother of Louis Heydon, wrote to O’Sullivan after the H.A.C.B.S. meeting: ‘The thing to get hot headed men, influenced (only too naturally) by the memory of ancient wrongs, to see is that in hurting the Empire they are hurting themselves. It is theirs; they won it, they manage it, they profit by it.’Footnote 91 That conceptual framing drew strength from the federation of the Australian colonies and the consequent tightening of Australia’s cultural and political ties to Britain. In the same letter, Heydon argued that federation would increase Australia’s stature within the empire, and Catholics would share in the prosperities of Australia’s future, so that ‘the memories of old bitterness, and even the sense of existing injustice, will melt away’.Footnote 92 A later meeting of the society in 1902 allowed O’Sullivan to expound the same sentiment. The Irish in Australia, O’Sullivan argued, resided within ‘an Anglo-Celtic Empire, and we had the same right to protect that Empire as we had to protect our own native land’.Footnote 93 It was the duty of the Irish-Australian community, and particularly its wealthy, educated leaders, ‘not to promote disintegration, but to strive for the perfect consolidation of the race from which we have sprung’.Footnote 94 In this, Irishness could be absorbed within the British race patriotism inherent within the nationalist underpinnings of Anglo-Australia. Such perceptions of Ireland’s place in the empire made it easier for Catholics, and particularly those situated within Australian power structures, to outwardly adopt Britishness as part of their identity. Adhering to this logic, John Nash, a medical doctor based in Sydney and the son of Irish emigrants, wrote to one of the architects of Australian federation, Alfred Deakin, on the eve of Deakin’s third prime ministership in 1909, that ‘the blood that flows in our veins is derived from the best, in that it is of the same strain that has made the British Empire’.Footnote 95
The ideology of Anglo-Australian nationalism gained even greater currency with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. In the context of the heightened imperial patriotism that war induced, middle-class Catholics could express their imperialism with fewer reservations, should any have existed. Irish-Australian Catholics aligned themselves with the wartime enthusiasm of their Anglo-Protestant countrymen in joint operations defined generally along socio-economic lines. Brian Lewis, a pupil of Wesley College (one of Victoria’s six elite public schools) during the war, later reflected that enlistment for the imperial war effort ‘was accepted as a middle-class duty’.Footnote 96 The free-trade politician John Gavan Duffy, son of the Irish statesman, could agree. Duffy shared the platform at patriotic demonstrations with such Protestant-loyalist agitators as Oswald Snowball, the grand master of Victoria’s Loyal Orange Institution, and declared that ‘[i]n this hour of Great Britain’s need, Irishmen forgot all injustices of the past’.Footnote 97
The broader front of unity in Australia during the early period of the war was compromised, however, by the Irish rising of Easter 1916. The event, and its fallout, were particularly disruptive to a Catholic community in Australia that had thought the Irish question settled on the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill in May 1914. This was specifically the case for the middle-class leaders of Australia’s home rule movement, which was especially active in Melbourne and Sydney in the decade prior to 1916.Footnote 98 The fallout from the rising split the Catholic middle class into those who saw the execution of the Dublin insurrectionists as a grave exemplar of English tyranny and those who recoiled from the embarrassment of Ireland’s supposed treachery.
The initial response to the rising in Irish Australia was typified by denunciation from the church and its laity. Denouncing the rising was, particularly for middle-class Catholics, a necessary function of maintaining their status and perceptions of their imperial loyalty. John Fitzgerald, a barrister and politician in Sydney, deplored the rebels’ ‘egregious folly in thinking that the Irish nation and the greater Ireland in the Dominions would give up their partnership in a big democratic empire’.Footnote 99 Christopher Brennan, a poet and academic based at the University of Sydney whose parents were Irish immigrants, condemned the rising in a poem titled, fittingly, ‘Irish to English’, published in the conservative Sydney Morning Herald. The poem contained the lines: ‘I am not of your blood;/I never loved your ways.’Footnote 100 There is some ambiguity as to whether Brennan’s piece indicated dialogue or transformation, though his abhorrence of Irish republicanism suggests the latter.Footnote 101 In this denunciation of his heritage, Brennan was supported by other Irish Australians of comparable socio-economic status. Peter Murphy, an Irish-born member of Queensland’s legislative council, congratulated Brennan on his ‘forceful condemnation of the stupid tactics resorted to by a few tools of the terrible Teuton in the dear “Ould sod”’, and wondered ‘Why in the name of all that’s noble and beautiful on earth can’t Erin’s children cease complaining about their unhappy past?’Footnote 102 Non-sectarian diasporic organisations such as Melbourne’s Celtic Club echoed such sentiment by cabling their disapproval of the rebels to John Redmond, an act perhaps explained by the club’s membership being composed of ‘a mixed group of Protestants and climbing Catholics’.Footnote 103 Such responses were further complicated by the news in May that Irish rebel leaders had been tried, convicted and executed by British military courts.
Organisations such as Victoria’s H.A.C.B.S. explicitly reflected the shift in Catholic opinion once news of the executions reached the Australian press. The society’s annual meeting in April 1917 declared that, although their gathering a year prior had condemned the rising in Dublin, things had now changed: ‘Since then the world has received information of all the circumstances connected therewith, and, in consequence of that information, we enter our emphatic protest against the cruel treatment that had been inflicted on those unfortunate Irish men and women.’Footnote 104 But the implicit Britishness of many middle-class or elite Catholics proved impervious even to evidence of British wrongdoings in Ireland. This was particularly so for Catholic men who had enlisted as officers in the war and who were thus more inclined to view the rebellion as a deliberate attempt to sabotage the war effort. Geoffrey Hughes — an old Ignatian and a commissioned flying officer in the Royal Flying Corps, as well as the son of Sydney’s first lord mayor, Thomas Hughes — wrote home to Sydney soon after the executions had begun, reasoning: ‘It is a good thing they have shot the leaders of the Sinn Féin.’Footnote 105 Although he later noted that ‘no one is prouder of [his] Irish ancestors than I am’, that pride in his heritage was tempered by the belief that ‘the great majority [of them] are today bitter, bigoted, and disloyal’.Footnote 106 Eden Coghlan, the daughter of New South Wales’s agent general, Timothy Coghlan, himself the son of Irish immigrants, articulated this broader ethnic anxiety clearest in a letter to her father, written soon after the executions:
Daddy, I have decided not to be Irish till after the war, or till we see how they behave under Home Rule. It seems to me so difficult to judge and so safe to be English with England so splendid. But do write and convince me one way or t’other.Footnote 107
Indeed, as Irishness became an increasingly problematic element within the composite of Anglo-Australian nationalism during the Great War, the normativity of Britishness as an ideological principle with which to identify meant that many Catholics remained committed to a British, even anti-Irish, worldview throughout that period. That this commitment was largely predicated along class lines could be gauged from the shift towards Irish-republican and anti-British sentiment in the Catholic working class elsewhere, famously led by Archbishop Mannix.Footnote 108 Regarding Sydney’s Irish National Association, for instance, which openly approved of the 1916 Rising and the Irish republican cause, Father Patrick Twomey wrote, in a mid-1916 letter to Archbishop Kelly, that although the association’s members are ‘mainly of the working class and not much in the councils of the great, they are Irish, and have no ambition to be anything better’.Footnote 109
III
Irish-Australian identity was, thus, a heterogeneous phenomenon, simultaneously at odds with, and assimilable within, the explicit Britishness of Australian nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. The extent to which Irishness could be absorbed within the national myth of Anglo-Australia was highly contingent on class and religion. Though Irish-Australian Protestants generally identified with the cultural hegemony of Britishness in Australia, upwardly mobile and established Catholics were forced to negotiate the dual markers of otherness that variously excluded them from middle-class value systems.
Such Catholics navigated the ethno-religious pressures implicit within Australian nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century by adopting outward expressions of Britishness and by mitigating the extent of their Irishness. These tendencies were expressed most overtly by the elite Catholic colleges that shared in the British race patriotism synonymous with their Protestant counterparts and the respective public-school associations of Victoria and New South Wales. The extent of Britishness, even anti-Irishness, in those settings was reproduced by certain Catholic professionals and politicians outside of that sphere. Such tendencies were not entirely problematic around the time of Australian federation, when many in Australia saw Ireland’s future as firmly rooted within the British Empire. The outbreak of the Great War, coinciding with the passing of home rule through the British parliament, only reinforced that sentiment. But the Easter Rising problematised the ethnic liminality of the Catholic middle class. It threatened a broader framing of white identity as a binary opposition between Irishness and Britishness, in which the dominant forces of Australian politics and society demanded a complete jettisoning of the former. The persistence of Britishness as the primary ideology with which certain established Catholics identified, even in the face of these tensions, reflected the hold that ideology had over Australia’s urban middle class at the turn of the twentieth century.
Ambiguity was, therefore, an inevitable part of Catholic identity in Australia in this period. While that identity was contestable along multiple lines, this article has shown that upwardly mobile Irish-Australian Catholics sought inclusion rather than exclusion and tended to act accordingly. The willingness of that socio-economic group to assimilate within the Britishness of the Australian state was largely contingent on those individuals’ temporal successes in their new country. Patrick Glynn reflected in his diary in early 1903 on the potential for disappointment offered to Irish Australians by the prospect of returning to Ireland, particularly for those who, like him, had advanced their social status and financial prospects in Australia. Regarding his brother Eugene’s return to ‘the old country’, he wrote:
Two of the lanes, or streets in which the working classes live, of ‘Gort’, my native town, are half in ruins, the river, by which I spent so many pleasant hours with rod and line, useless for sport now, as the trout have been destroyed by liming, and a strange generation in place of the old familiar faces. But life is chiefly a matter of youth and expectation, and our successors take up our shattered ideals.Footnote 110
It was this understanding — that Ireland and Irishness could be at once familiar to and entirely alien from the lives of immigrants and multigenerational settlers in Australia — that animated Catholics to engage with the Britishness of Australian life at the turn of the twentieth century. Ambition further incentivised assimilation. For the prosperous Catholic middle class, fealty to a circumscribed memory of Ireland was supplanted by the realities of life in a culturally British state. As Glynn sombrely concluded: ‘We go back to, but never find, the past.’Footnote 111
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and the National Library of Australia’s Shanks Scholarship.
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