Historian, scholar – altar boy - Edmund Campion

Oliver Macdonagh

When Oliver MacDonagh died, in 2002, they put a short description of the man on his tombstone: historian and scholar. Had they thought of it, they might have added an extra description—altar server—because all his life Oliver was happy to serve Mass for a stray priest who turned up at a conference or on holidays.

His experience ‘on the altar’ (as we used to say) began in the west of Ireland at the age of seven. Rising early and walking through a waking world, he would do duty in the parish church at morning Mass. On Sunday evenings he would be back there for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, a rite that spoke strongly to his unfolding senses: golden monstrance, pungent incense, flowers, candles, rich vestments, Latin hymns.

As he grew up, his service extended—from answering the responses, to lighting the candles and later extinguishing them, striking the altar gong, holding the incense boat or swinging the thurible and on to the eminence of carrying the processional crucifix. He didn’t mangle the Latin for a joke nor did he steal sips from the altar wine, as other altar boys were known to do, and he never experienced the ultimate humiliation of dropping the heavy Missal as he carried it from the ‘Epistle’ side of the altar to the ‘Gospel’ side. The priests came to rely on him.

As a very new altar boy, however, he was pushed into a confrontation that could have seen him sacked then and there. What happened was this. The senior curate, an irascible man dedicated to the strict observance of ecclesiastical ritual, was very hard on the altar boys. He kept a cane in a drawer in the sacristy, though Oliver never saw him use it.

One day, the senior boys wrote a joint letter of complaint about this priest, making everyone sign it and ordering little Oliver to deliver it to the parish priest, a remote and minatory monsignor—whose explosion was inevitable. Oliver was in disgrace at home and in the presbytery. But Monsignor was too knowledgeable not to be aware that the big boys had put Oliver up to it. So when Oliver made his First Holy Communion, two months later, Monsignor visited his home with two presents for him, copies of Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland. And by then the cane had disappeared from the drawer in the sacristy.

After this came school with the Jesuits and university studies in Dublin and Cambridge. Life as an historian stretched before him. At Cambridge he began to make his mark with serious articles and books, so much so that when South Australia was establishing Flinders University they invited him to be its first professor of history, a post he filled for four years. Then family reasons took him back to Ireland, to Cork University, before the Australian National University in Canberra secured him as professor of history in 1973.

Looking ahead, Professor MacDonagh saw the 1988 Australian bicentenary as a challenge to the nation’s historians. What could they do? A colleague, K. S. Inglis, came up with the idea of slicing through Australia’s story every fifty years to show how its people had changed over time. The joint project grew and grew, eventually making eleven volumes, which everyone agreed would not have been possible without Oliver’s tact and persuasive powers as chairman of the management committee.

Meanwhile, he was getting on with his own writing. The bicentennial year, 1988, saw the publication of the first volume of his life of Daniel O’Connell, its second volume coming a year later. Here was the story of the man who had won for Catholics the right to participate fully in the public life of the British Empire, Australia included. Oliver said that his own Catholicism had given him a sympathetic understanding of O’Connell’s world.

He was never shy of pointing to his religion as an element that had helped make him an historian. When he retired, his colleagues honoured him with a collection of essays, to which he responded with an essay on John Henry Newman’s Apologia, a central influence on him as a writer. He argued that Catholicism might protect an historian from relativism (which suggests there are no permanent truths), from thinking his own times superior to other times and from disregarding the continuing influence in history of the Fall.

In the vast field of Newman studies this essay is a stand-out, alone justifying a claim made years ago in Eureka Street that Oliver MacDonagh was ‘the finest writer among Australian historians’. It has now been republished in a collection of his writing, Looking Back, which happily includes his memories of being an altar boy.