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Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society Volume 40 2019 The Faith in remote and rural Australia Saint Michael the Archangel Church, Wollombi Australian Catholic Historical Society Contacts General Correspondence, including membership applications and renewals, and Journal submissions should be addressed to The Secretary ACHS PO Box A621 Sydney South, NSW, 1235 Enquiries may also be directed to: [email protected] http://australiancatholichistoricalsociety.com.au/ Executive members of the Society President: Dr John Carmody Vice Presidents: Prof James Franklin Mr Howard Murray Secretary: Ms Helen Scanlon Treasurer: Dr Lesley Hughes ACHS Chaplain: Sr Helen Simpson OLSH Cover image: Saint Michael the Archangel Church, Wollombi, photograph John Harrison. See article page 62. Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society JACHS ISSN: 0084-7259 JACHS 40 2019 soft cover ISBN: 978-1-925612-11-0 JACHS 40 2019 hard cover ISBN: 978-1-925612-12-7 JACHS 40 2019 epub ISBN: 978-1-925612-13-4 JACHS 40 2019 pdf ISBN: 978-1-925612-14-1 Editor: James Franklin Published by ATF Press Publishing Group under its ATF Theology imprint PO Box 234 Brompton SA 5007 www.atfpress.com Editorial control and subscriptions remain with the Australian Catholic Historical Society www.atfpress.com Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society vol 40 2019 Contents Mark McKenna, Father Angelo Confalonieri and the view from Port Essington, 1838–1845 . 1 Janice Tranter, Father Julian Tenison Woods, 130 years on… . .16 Colin Fowler, Disentangling the McGirrs of colonial New South Wales 23 James Franklin, Catholic rural virtue in Australia: ideal and reality. 39 Gael Winnick, Saint Michael the Archangel, Wollombi: The church that moved—and was paid for—three times. 62 John McLaughlin, ‘Humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God’: Patrick McMahon Glynn—from Irish lawyer to Australian statesman. 74 Anne-Maree Whitaker, The Irish Women’s Club: Cumann na mBan in Sydney 1919–1935. 90 Christine Choo, Daughters of Our Lady, Queen of the Apostles – the first and only order of Aboriginal sisters in Australia, 1938–1951: history, context and outcomes. .103 Jeff Kildea, Absence or amnesia: Was the Golden West really free of ‘the noxious weed of sectarianism’ that blighted early twentieth-century Australia?. 131 Edmund Campion, Newman’s female friends: Celebrating John Henry Newman’s canonisation . 144 Maxwell J Coleman, Moira O’Sullivan and Sandra I Coleman, Julia Matilda Cater (Sister of Charity) revisited. .152 Book reviews Colin Fowler, ed, At Sea with John Bede Polding, reviewed by Terence Kavenagh . 155 Joanna Vials, The Indomitable Mr Cotham, reviewed by Colin Fowler 157 Moira O’Sullivan, A Cause of Trouble? 2nd ed, reviewed by Irene Franklin. .159 Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society Max Coleman, The Doers: A Surgical History of St. Vincent’s Hospital Sydney 1857–2007, reviewed by Anne Thoeming . .161 Jaynie Anderson, Max Vodola, Shane Carmody, eds., The Invention of Melbourne: A Baroque Archbishop and a Gothic Architect (Melbourne University Publishing, 2019), reviewed by Patrick Morgan . 164 Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall, A New History of the Irish in Australia, reviewed by John Carmody . .167 Wanda Skowronska, Angels, Incense and Revolution: Catholic Schooldays of the 1960s, reviewed by Catherine Thom. .169 Val Noone, ed, Fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 papal ban on birth control: Celebrating Freedom of Speech, reviewed by Helen Scanlon . .171 Maureen McKeown, The Extraordinary Case of Sister Liguori, reviewed by Jeff Kildea . .173 Jocelyn Hedley, Hidden in the Shadow of Love: The story of Mother Theresa McLaughlin and Our Lady’s Nurses for the Poor, reviewed by Anne Power. .176 Adrian Pabst, The Story of Our Country: Labor’s Vision for Australia, reviewed by Michael Easson. .178 Book note: Richard Leonard, Hatch, Match and Dispatch, note by Helen Scanlon. 183 In Memoriam Memories of Fr Paul Stenhouse (1935–2019), by Robert Stove. .184 Fr Paul Stenhouse: Scholar, writer, hero for God, by Wanda Skowronska. .187 Obituary Errol James Lea-Scarlett, by John J Kenny. 190 Sr Rosa MacGinley pbvm, by Sophia McGrath . .191 Father Angelo Confalonieri and the view from Port Essington, 1838–1849 Mark McKenna* At Port Essington, 4000 km from Sydney, between 1838, when Captain Gordon Bremer and second in command, Captain John McArthur, established Victoria Settlement and 1849, when the colony was finally abandoned, the British government conducted a relatively short-lived attempt to settle Australia’s tropical north. The naval garrison, which consisted initially of over 200 Royal Marines, was named after the young Queen Victoria. Predating the settlement of Darwin by three decades, Victoria Settlement was actually the third attempt to secure British settlement in Australia’s north. Fort Dundas (1824–9) and Fort Wellington, in Raffles Bay (1827– 9) had already failed, when the British government finally decided to take the advice of Phillip Parker King, who, in 1818, had first identified Port Essington as the perfect site for British settlement in northern Australia. Why Port Essington was established The British rationale in establishing Victoria Settlement was three-fold. Although Captain Bremer had formally claimed British sovereignty over northern Australia in 1824, throughout the 1820s and 1830s, there was considerable discussion in both London and Sydney as to whether foreign powers were entitled to take possession of points on the north coast of Australia. Henry Ennis described the fragility of Bremer’s 1824 claim of sovereignty wonderfully. ‘Transported by the feelings associated with Bremer taking possession’, Ennis reflected on how this was achieved. Imagine, he said, a small party of Englishmen ‘placed at a distance of nearly nineteen thousand miles from home, in a part of the world which had hitherto never been visited by civilized man, and turned, as it were by magic, into a British settlement.’ It was precisely this magic—the raising of the British flag, the reading of an incantation, the toast to the King—which left Bremer’s claim to sovereignty exposed. Without the existence of British marines and officials on the ground, that is without permanent British settlement, British sovereignty in the north was * Mark McKenna is Professor of History at the University of Sydney. His books include From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (2016), ch. 2 of which contains a footnoted version of similar material to the present article. This is the edited text of his talk to the ACHS on 15 Sept 2019. Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society 40 2019, 1–15 1 Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society General view of Port Essington, N.T., Australia, 1839, John McArthur Source: the National Library of Australia vulnerable. From a great distance, sovereignty could be asserted, but it could not be easily enforced. As a result, partly to thwart any chance of the Dutch or French settling in the north of Australia, it was decided to establish the naval garrison at Port Essington, which, it was imagined, would soon be followed by waves of settlers taking up land as the settlement expanded. To bolster arguments for planting out the Dutch and the French, Victoria Settlement was imagined as Australia’s new Singapore. These dreams of a settlement that would be a hub for British trade in South-East Asia, would later be transferred to Darwin and they have more recent echoes in the many wild and preposterous schemes to develop Australia’s north. As early as the 1820s one Dutch naval officer had argued that any British settlement on the north-coast of Australia would become ‘the emporium of the Archipelago of [the] Arafura [Sea]’. The eyes of this British settlement would be focused not on Sydney but on the far more immediate environment of Singapore, China, India and of course, London. Captain John McArthur, commandant at Port Essington from 1839, after Bremer’s departure, perceptively observed that the settlement was established partly to take advantage of the many ‘busy pushing capitalists, who are searching every quarter of the globe’. Given that more than half the ships leaving Sydney in the first four decades of settlement were destined for Asian ports, the idea of a large British trading port thousands of kilometres closer to those trade networks made perfect sense at the time. The execution of this idea, however, was another matter. 2 Father Angelo Confalonieri and the view from Port Essington, 1838–1849 From the outset, the settlement was plagued by a number of challenges, poor planning and inadequate support, isolation reinforced by a poorly chosen site for the settlement that was more than 20 kilometres along the harbour from the open sea, rampant disease and the travails of a tropical climate, a hurricane that flattened the settlement only one year after it began, and any number of visitors who wasted no time in spreading their damning and negative conclusions about the settlement. One such visitor was the scientist Thomas Huxley, who arrived onboard Owen Stanley’s Rattlesnake in 1848, already bored with his voyage at sea. Victoria Settlement, Huxley proclaimed, is the most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole in Her Majesty’s dominions, it deserves all the abuse that has ever been heaped upon it. It is fit for neither man nor beast. Day and night there is the same fearful damp depressing heat, producing an inconquerable languor and rendering the unhappy resident a prey to ennui and cold brandy- and-water… I can’t say more for Port Essington than that it is worse than a ship, and it is no small comfort to know that this is possible. During its short ten year existence, an impressive cast of visitors passed through, some even taking up residence—shipwrecked priests, artists, scientists, surgeons, naturalists, adventurers and explorers—all of whom kept extensive journals. Despite the settlement’s failure, it constitutes one of the most thoroughly documented and neatly encapsulated experiments in the history of British colonization.

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