My PhD research examines the Australian-Catholic middle class in Victoria and New South Wales through the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I am particularly interested in how that class functioned amidst sectarian tensions in the wider community, and how social relations between affluent Catholics and the Anglo-Protestant ascendancy were shaped by those tensions and their expressions. This research is thus less concerned with the theological history of the church than it is with the cultural history of Catholics in the Australian community.