generation, also the generation of Menzies and H. V. Evatt, Labor leader in the
1950s, was the last of that particular type of Australian. It was Manning Clark,
another‘independent Australian Briton’but born some twenty years later,
who spent much of his life attempting to consign such people to the dustbin
of history.
The decline of Protestantism in Australia, the process of‘secularization’,
happened alongside a change in the relationship between religion and the
broader public culture. As Protestantism was increasingly separated from the
culture with which it had danced for so long, it no longer felt itself to be part of
it, and came to take an adversarial role towards it. To be a Christian increas-
ingly meant being part of a counterculture, and one’s role was to bear witness
to the failings of the mainstream (Chilton 2014). It was as if Protestants were
back in the times of Perpetua, the second-century martyr.
As Green argues in relation to Britain, the role and place of Catholicism in
Australia has to be considered quite separately to that of Protestantism. For
one thing, Catholicism was never intimately linked to Britishness and always
stood at one remove from the dominant culture of Australia. In this sense
there was an‘Ascendancy’, a hegemonic culture for a long time in Australia of
which Catholicism was not part. Part of this was because of the latter’s
connection with Ireland. This meant that the fate of Catholicism has been
somewhat different to that of Protestantism. While Catholicism has been
affected by the‘age of comfort’, it has not had to deal with the adverse effects
of the decline of Britishness and empire.
This has meant that while Protestants have had to contend with the decline
of both Britishness as a social and political ideal and Protestantism as a living
faith in the form of puritanism, Catholics have retained an intellectual vigour
which has helped to maintain a faith in themselves and their mission. This
can be seen by comparing Robert Menzies with the Catholic intellectual and
political activist, B. A. Santamaria. Menzies, with his Burkean faith in British-
ness and its ideals of liberty and decency, was an avuncularfigure in whom
one could see embodied the ideals of British reasonableness. Santamaria, on
the other hand, could be considered as the embodiment of unreasonableness;
he most certainly would have been considered with disdain by David Hume.
Santamaria (1997) went into politics armed with a philosophy based on quite
clear principles. He may have tended towards fanaticism, but then so did the
Protestant activists of the early twentieth century. The point remains that
Catholics formed the backbone of thefight against communism in Australia
because their intellectual formation provided them with a set of coherent
principles. With the waning of empire, Protestant Britishness declined into
either secularism or incoherence. There is a certain irony in the fact that, since
1990, the heirs of the Free Trade Party, once the natural home of Protestant-
ism, are generally Catholic leaders, especially in NSW.
Greg Melleuish and Stephen A. Chavura