CCH Seminar – 24 September – Scott McCarthy

Join us online or in person for our last seminar for 2025 with Scott McCarthy

The Catholic Elite and the Construction of Irishness in Victoria and New South Wales, 1878–1923

The emergence of a Catholic elite in Victoria and New South Wales was facilitated by the improvement of Catholic educational facilities in the late nineteenth century and the rapid growth of the professions and state bureaucracy in the early twentieth century. Those developments produced a generation of Catholics capable of attaining high-status positions in the expanding labour market, and accorded social legitimacy to a preceding generation already integrated within those spaces. This paper argues that these mechanisms of class and elite formation were critical in defining the nature of Irish identity and Catholic mobility in a British settler colony. It contends further that Irishness was a fluid set of identity markers deferential to the dominant cultural force of British Protestantism in Australia, and that the extent of that deference was determined largely by class. This process of elite formation was fraught with tension that derived less from Catholic-Protestant sectarianism than from contestation within the Catholic community itself. That contestation climaxed during the latter part of the Great War, however the elite’s primary identification with class metrics endured beyond that crisis and was ultimately legitimated by the end of the Irish Civil War. This paper will show that the fluctuating meanings of Irish and Catholic identity in Australia were shaped by a continuous dialogue that intersected transnational systems of class, gender, and politics.

24 September 2025, 11am AEST

Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here

Scott McCarthy recently completed his PhD thesis, examining the Australian-Catholic middle class in Victoria and New South Wales through the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, at Deakin University. He is an Associate Teaching Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin.