A SCHOLAR AND A GENTLEMAN
|
 |
 |
 |
Sometime in 1973, when the Archbishop of Can-berra-Goulburn, Dr Eris O’Brien, was dying slowly in Sydney, a telegram came for him to the Sydney cathedral: I THINK OF YOU OFTEN OLD FRIEND – MANNING CLARK.
When O’Brien went to live in Canberra, in 1955, he soon met Manning Clark, who had already been there for half a dozen years. In those days, the national capital was a small town, where people with similar interests relied on each other for companionship. Clark knew the archbishop’s historical work well, for his The Foundations of Australia, 1786-1800, published in 1937, was a rare and necessary text in Australian historiography. In the small world of Canberra half a century ago the two historians became friends.
Their friendship was an epitome of the archbishop’s easy style. Honoured by his fellow historians, he mixed companionably with poets and novelists. As a parish priest in Sydney, he had often invited them to his presbytery for a meal. A curate complained that he had seen plenty of famous people at the dinner table but had never heard his parish priest urge one of them to become a Catholic.
Eris O’Brien’s generation of priests shared an intense love of Australia and its possibilities. From seminary days they read Australian writers and collected their works. Taking up their pens, many of them tried to emulate their literary contemporaries. Their magazine, Manly, is a valuable archive of this nationalist strain in the priesthood.
As a young priest, Eris O’Brien published a life of Father Therry, the pioneer priest, following it with the story of the maverick Father Jeremiah O’Flynn. The information contained in both books remains useful and later authors still draw material from them. But modern readers find their tone somewhat inflamed, as if the author were trying to score points off contemporary adversaries. With justice, Archbishop O’Brien’s biographer, Elizabeth Johnston, says that today these books ‘are considered uncritical’.
Yet Father O’Brien’s argumentative tone is historically revealing, for it is a reminder of how bruised Catholics felt a century ago. Thus he writes of St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, as a symbol of ‘the glorious exit from the catacombs of persecution and sorrow’ of Father Therry’s time. The denial of state aid to Catholic schools was a constant goad to that generation, a reminder of their inferior status, as they felt. Resentment at the refusal of state aid throbs through the pages of the early books. It seasons the pride the author feels in the Australian church, which he calls ‘the wonder of the Christian world’.
There is a big difference between these early books and O’Brien’s masterpiece, The Foundations of Australia. Reading it after the others, you feel that he had worked resentment out of his system and thus was able to produce an objective, calm, scholarly book. That book was the product of his tertiary studies at Louvain University in Belgium, which culminated in a PhD.
He went to Louvain with a commission from the NSW bishops to research a biography of Cardinal Moran, the nineteenth century churchman whose motto, Omnia Omnibus, and mantle Dr Mannix was to assume. But by the time he went to Canberra, the archbishop had lost interest in the Moran project, as he told an inquisitive seminarian. It is understood that the current Archbishop of Sydney has commissioned a Melbourne biographer to write Moran’s life.
If the quotidian demands of his archdiocese had swept scholarly pursuits aside, that is understandable. For in those post-war years the government was trying to make Canberra a real national capital. To effect this, major departments were moved from Melbourne and Sydney—the move made more palatable by the government’s provision of sporting facilities and domestic trees and shrubs. They did not want a disgruntled public service.
Many of these relocated public servants were Catholics; and these Catholics expected to find Catholic schools in Canberra for their children. What could the government do? State aid for church schools had been the hot potato of Australian politics for nearly a century, evoking fierce emotions for and against. By 1955, however, public opinion was beginning to favour some form of state aid.
It was in this volatile atmosphere that Archbishop O’Brien’s civilised presence became decisive for change. Moving urbanely among politicians, intellectuals and senior public servants, he talked up a measure of local state aid. The archdiocese would build the secondary schools made necessary by the government’s relocation policies—but would the Commonwealth subsidise interest payments? Done.
In the lengthy battle for -educational justice this agreement was a significant first step forward. When Prime Minister R. G. Menzies wrote his memoirs, years later, he paid tribute to Archbishop O’Brien’s personal contribution to this historic development, calling him ‘one of the best-informed, mildest-mannered and persuasive of advocates’.
