Writing the Irish in Australia
PATRICK O’FARRELL

Patrick O’Farrell changed the way Australians and Australian Catholics think about themselves. The Union Jack on the national flag proclaimed our British origins, while orators never tired of applauding our Britishness and our delight in belonging to the British Empire, whose wars our men were happy to fight. Yet since 1788 there had been a large bloc of people here who did not go all the way with such Empire loyalism. These were the Irish.

Patrick O’Farrell’s work as a historian showed how the Irish transferred their love of Ireland to love of Australia and thereby created a separate Australian identity. Australia was not ‘made in England’, as a recent essay by David Malouf contends; it is a home-made construct, as distinct as bush carpentry. By refusing to submit to English/British hegemony, the Irish opened the way to today’s pluralist and multicultural society. The Irish were our first ethnics.

Not that they were all Catholics—a fact O’Farrell carefully underlined. But the great majority of them were. Here O’Farrell’s Irish interests coalesced with his achievement as historian of the Catholic community. Beginning just after Vatican II, he instructed generations of would-be Catholic leaders in their own history, enabling them not only to read history but also to make history.
A reviewer in an American historical journal wrote that ‘to him, more than to any other individual, is owed the fact that Catholic intellectual life in Australia is noticeably historical, rather than theological, philosophical or biblical’.

He came to Catholic history almost by chance. His early work was in labour history, his first book a biography of a socialist leader. At the same time he was active in university Catholic circles, both at home in New Zealand and also in Australia.

Indeed, when he applied for a teaching position at the University of NSW, one of the selectors opposed him because he was a known Catholic. (O’Farrell got the job; and stayed at UNSW all his life, writing its history as his last book—when he discovered in the archives this antique antagonism towards himself as a Catholic.)

Casting about to find gaps in our written history, O’Farrell and his constant confidant, his wife Deirdre, saw that there was no general history of Catholics in Australia. They agreed to give it a go; and in six months produced a compact paperback, The Catholic Church in Australia: A Short History 1788-1967. The original 1968 book sold 10,000 copies before it was expanded and renamed in 1977, and again in 1986 and 1993.

Impressive sales figures do not tell the full importance of O’Farrell’s work, for single copies were passed around and read in discussion groups, convents and teachers’ colleges. In the turbulent years after Vatican II, O’Farrell gave Catholics something solid to hang on to—their history. This was of large pastoral significance because Catholic identity and spirituality is deep rooted in our history, which we see as salvation history linking us to the saving actions of Jesus Christ.

Not that he wrote triumphalist history. Far from it. While saluting the sacrifices and achievements of Australian Catholicism, he did not shut his eyes to its defects, especially the defects of the clergy. The laity were, he wrote, ‘a pretty inert and servile lot’; but he reserved his harshest strictures for their clerical leaders. Content to maintain the Irish church down under, they had failed to create anything authentically Australian here.

His decennial updates of the general history were increasingly gloomy, with words like ‘sour’ and ‘fragmentation’ becoming more noticeable as he watched the frustration of Vatican II hopes. The constructive work of two centuries seemed to have stopped, exhausted; and what came after its magnificence was gimcrack and shoddy. Among such devastation, he cried, where was leadership to be found?

The historian had already observed the corruptions of clerical power at first hand, for soon after coming to Sydney he had been appointed to an archdiocesan schools board – as is often the case, a sham ‘consultation’ with the real decisions being taken elsewhere. He saw the same mentality at work when histories of church institutions were commissioned: the jobs given to insiders, hobbyists and old mates, and normal selection processes ignored. So the students he had trained as church historians were denied work. He himself was never asked to write such histories.

Nevertheless, he did not become disaffected. Although disabled by a stroke at the age of 43 and regularly in hospital for a congenital illness, he soldiered on with the help of Deidre and their five children, a profitable servant to the end. Patrick O’Farrell died on Christmas Day 2003, aged 70.

Stephen Crittendon spoke with Patrick O’Farrell’s long-time friend, author Gerard Windsor, on the Religion Report on ABC Radio National. For the transcript, click here.

Edmund Campion’s latest book is Lines of my life: Journal of a year.