Faith, family, and self-understanding in a different Australia (2024)
PUBLISHED BY KAPUNDA PRESS, AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY
A century ago, Christianity was the dominant religion of Australia and indelibly coloured its social, cultural, and political fabric. Catholicism was the faith of the Irish working classes; Anglicanism and Presbyterianism were the faiths of the elite, the powerful, the establishment.
Catherine Mackerras — best remembered as the mother of unusually accomplished children, including conductor Charles Mackerras — was a member of that establishment in Sydney. But in 1933, to the shock of family and friends, she crossed the religious and social divide to convert to Catholicism.
Her posthumously published memoirs, Divided Heart, offered a heartfelt account of this decision. Yet they also left an enormous amount unsaid.
In this volume, Patrick Mullins sheds light on the gaps and silences in Mackerras’s account. He explores how she approached faith, family, and self-understanding in an Australia now long vanished. He reflects on how she reckoned with the decision to embrace Catholicism, and the influences that coloured the portrayal of her conversion.
The Divided Heart of Catherine Mackerras traces the contemporary parallels of Mackerras’s story and its resonances in a country that, a century on, sees itself as determinedly secular — yet continues to ask similar questions and experience the same deep yearnings.
Reviews and commentary
‘Australia’s Catholic history is often told in the manner set out above: as institutional and demographic. Think of Patrick O’Farrell’s celebrated history, The Catholic Church and Community in Australia, published in 1977. How refreshing it is, then, to encounter two authors who eschew such formal focus on politics or hierarchy and instead take up Edmund Campion’s exhortation to examine what being Catholic meant to Australian inner lives (Australian Catholics, 1988). That Patrick Mullins and Sarah Gilbert do so in these two books by interrogating the experiences of women – typically a neglected group in this sort of historiography – is all the more invigorating.’
— Miles Pattenden, Sydney Review of Books
‘As Patrick Mullins has written in his new book, The Divided Heart of Catherine Mackerras, the Protestant faiths that were the foundation of the new colonies in Australia underpinned notions of class and status and relied on “a jingoistic faith in the British Empire”…
— Anne Henderson, Catholic Weekly
‘Through Mackerras’ story, Dr Mullins’ book provides insights into Australia’s history, the role of women in society, changes to education and explores the dimensions of class, belonging, religion and values in the life of one convert…’
Patrick Mullins 