earnest and consistent Christian’(Hayward and Nutt 2014, p. 66). However,
by the 1920s, one of this group, the Rev C. T. Forscutt, had become a some-
what ferocious cultural warrior, going into bat for the Protestant religion, the
British Empire, and Australian democracy against what he saw as the twin
evils of Irish Catholicism and bolshevism (Melleuish, 2015a). By this time
Britishness was on the retreat.
Why was Catholicism seen to be the enemy? One of things which Forscutt
attacked was the Catholic school system. The problem was that the introduc-
tion of a public school system had led to the creation of a separate and distinct
Catholic school system; Protestants and Catholics were, by and large, social-
ized in quite distinct educational environments. This had occurred because
the Catholic Church had refused to accept the sorts of ideas about religion
which Wilkins had expressed so forcefully. It could not accept that there was
an easy divide between religion and dogma. There was also the scandal of the
Bible used as a textbook by students without the supervision of clergy (Polding
cited in Legislative Council of New South Wales 1844, p. 49). The Catholic
Church did not accept what was essentially the Protestant view of religion and
theology. In part this reflected a Catholic hostility to the liberalism of the age,
which was taken for granted to be part of the British Protestant identity. In
1864 Pope Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors, an attack on those liberal
principles. In part it also reflected an Irish hostility to what they saw as their
English oppressors back in Ireland.
There clearly was a fundamental divide between the attitudes and outlook
of the Protestant British and the Catholic Irish. Advocates of public education,
such as Parkes and Wilkins, had hoped that it would create a common culture
but, in reality, it helped to entrench differences in that culture. To press the
idea of Australia being 98 per cent‘British’, as W. K. Hancock does inAustralia
(1930, p. 53), was illusionary. And at the heart of this division was education;
more than anything else it kept the festering sore of sectarianism raw. Cath-
olics resented the fact that they did not receive any support from the state for
the education of their children. In fact, Catholic education could not have
survived without the existence of the various teaching orders, and this meant
Catholic women. It was tough, but a heroic achievement. There were hopes
that Labor state governments would do something in this matter, but those
hopes never led anywhere. When Labor gained power in NSW in 1910, the
education minister was a Scottish Presbyterian, as was the head of the Educa-
tion Department (Kildea 2002, chs 3 and 4).
Could it have been otherwise? The answer would have to be no. It could
only have worked if the Irish Catholics had been willing to accept the British
Protestant worldview, including its theological presuppositions, acquiesce in
the universality of liberal principles, and accept its understanding of the place
of religion in a wider secular world. Catholics were happy to live in, and
Greg Melleuish and Stephen A. Chavura