General History
It is salutary to remind ourselves that only about 15 years elapsed between the southern journey of Major Mitchell through the Campaspe district (1836) and the beginning of the Gold Rushes. During this short period huge numbers of migrants came to rural Victoria and when the ‘Rushes’ subsided, many of these people settled on the land or in small villages. It is no less salutary to reflect that , over this same short period of time, the population of First Australians had dwindled enormously, decimated by disease and conflict and often translocated against their will.
For the new settlers (after the squatting era) there was ample land for farming enterprises, but the availability of water was often a limiting factor. The phrase ‘water is life’ is, no doubt, a well-worn truism, but in our own era, when the vast majority of us need only turn a tap to access clean and potable water, the importance of water in our everyday lives is often overlooked or, at least, underestimated. This was not the case for those of our ancestors who, following in the footsteps of the early squatters and ‘overlanders’, established their small farms and set out to provide for their families. For them, the availability of easily accessible water was a prime consideration—a matter of day to day survival. Not surprisingly then, most of the early European settlement in central and norther Victoria tended to be along the major rivers or their tributaries. With the exception of the ‘gold-rush’ towns and cities, most of the small villages and towns were close to permanent water.
As for the individual farming families, it was not just they who needed the water. Consideration had to be given for livestock watering, and the watering of those fruits and vegetables needed for the table. Later, with the advent of large-scale irrigation projects, farming settlements could move out well beyond the immediate vicinity of the natural watercourse but this option, in general, was only available on parts of the vast northern plains.
Soon after the initial gold-rushes of the 1850s, and certainly by the last quarter of the 19th C, farming settlements along the Campaspe Valley had expanded beyond what we might call the ‘pioneering’ stage, and now coalesced into distinct communities, often centred about a small town or village. It is quite remarkable that, for nearly all these newly formed rural communities, one of their first joint enterprises was to build churches. Water may have been essential for life, but so too was the need to worship their God. They knew their Scripture and that verse in John 27—’Let anyone who is thirsty come to me’, provided the impulse needed to build their churches within which they could access that ‘living water’.
In the Campaspe Valley, all of the major Christian denominations were prominent in this development but, in this little book, we have confined our interest to the Catholic communities along the Valley. We are mindful though, that what we present here is but part of the story of the establishment of communities of Christian Faith along the Valley. So, too, are we mindful that the Christian Faith was not the earliest system of spiritual belief in the Campaspe Valley. For tens of thousands of years, the First Australians relied on the Campaspe and its tributaries, no less than we do today, for their material needs. In their case though, the river and its tributaries no doubt had a direct spiritual significance too. And thus, we could properly call the river itself (as well as many of the geological features accompanying it) a type of church for them. Even though they had virtually disappeared from the Valley by the time our own account begins, we ought not forget that they too, worshipped along the Campaspe.
When the prospective historian delves into the history of Catholicism in regional Australia, it is often the case that one finds the establishment of a local church is preceded by a Catholic school with the latter then serving as a church on Sundays or important feast days. This is understandable enough, since small children had to walk to school in the main, whereas on Sundays, the whole family could travel further afield to attend Mass in a gig or buggy. Very often, these first buildings were fairly simple weatherboard structures whose life as a church was quite short. Even so, we have attempted to include all of these in our survey.
There are many other instances where, in pioneering days, the priest often said Mass in a local home or even a large shed. This was a temporary arrangement until such time that a properly dedicated building could be made available. We have omitted most instances of such ‘temporary’ sites from our survey as they cannot really be said to constitute a ‘church’ in the normally accepted sense.
At a more general level, in putting this account together, it has been our aim to concentrate on the parishioners and priests rather than the physical edifice of the church since, as we have already stated, it is the people who really constitute ‘the church’ and the physical edifice is but one aspect of the Christian presence. Accordingly, the reader will find short ‘snapshot’ pages scattered through our account. The attempt here is to convey to the reader, some sense of what is was like to be a practising Catholic in rural Victoria in times past. Like us, our forebears had hopes and aspirations, setbacks, triumphs, joys and sorrows, hardships and times of relative prosperity. In telling their story, perhaps we can obtain some better appreciation of what it really means to believe in The Communion of Saints.
Some Background on Demographics
One of the difficulties in attempting to trace the history of the Catholic presence in Victoria relates to the huge demographic changes consequent upon the Gold Rushes and, to a lesser extent, on the early and rapid expansion of small farms after what we might call the ‘Squatting Phase’. Small centres of population grew so quickly that those charged with ministering to the people (the early ‘Missions’) had difficulty in supplying both priests and places of worship. As an example, the early residents of the settlement known as Majors Line, near Heathcote, finally decided to build their own church and fund the construction themselves – a case of ‘build it and they will come’!
Part of the solution adopted was to first supply these little settlements with a school building and then to use that building as a church when required. In these early times, Catholic lay teachers were paid by the government in those situations where alternative schooling (government school) was not available. And so we find a large number of small wooden school-churches (they were often called chapels) springing up in the 1860’s through to the time of Federation or even later. When we reflect that the children attending these schools probably had to walk from their homes, it is not surprising to find that there were large numbers of tiny schools in areas which, today, are quite sparsely populated. However, for these small church/schools in some of the ‘gold’ districts, the fairly rapid exhaustion of ‘easy’ gold, saw a massive exodus of people such that the congregation for the churches dwindled to a point where it was simply not practical to keep the church open.
In many of the farming districts too, the advent of the motor car meant that parishioners could now travel much further to attend Masses, parish social events, etc. At the same time, the average size of farm holdings was rapidly increasing due to improvements in farm machinery, animal husbandry, the nature of agricultural markets, etc. This meant that there were fewer farming families in the district.
And so we find that many of these smaller churches had a relatively short life and we have but scant records of their existence. For some, it is uncertain whether they were used regularly for Mass, or more likely, only at intervals -perhaps monthly or bi-monthly.
A Note on Sectarianism1
It is impossible, in giving some reasonable account of the history of Catholic churches in the Campaspe Valley (or anywhere else in Australia for that matter), to do so without making some mention of sectarianism. This, we might loosely define (for our purposes here) as the general distrust or outright dislike of Catholics, most especially Catholic clergy, not so much by other Christian communions, but by those administrative arms of government in colonial and post-colonial Australia. Two historical factors are at play here. The first is what is often referred to as ‘The Troubles’ in Ireland, and the second a general attitude stemming from the ‘English Enlightenment’ (so called).
Let us deal with the ‘Irish Question’ first, keeping in mind that the majority of early Catholic settlers were Irish or of Irish descent. We can trace the English presence in Ireland (as a military invasion) back to the Earl of Strongbow in 1170 (Anglo-Norman) although one must be careful here since some of the early incursions were actually supported by the Catholic Church. The conflicts continued over the centuries but were particularly brutal with the Cromwellian invasion (1649-1651) where huge tracts of land were confiscated, and churches and monasteries destroyed. The infamous Penal Laws outlawed the Catholic clergy and precluded Catholics in Ireland from owning or leasing land above a certain value, accessing higher education and certain professions, and gave primacy to the established church, the Church of Ireland. While these laws were later eased somewhat, by 1778 Catholics still held only around 5% of land in Ireland. Not surprisingly, unrest and uprisings continued with one of the more notable uprisings in 1898 by ‘The United Irishmen’. It is important to understand that not all the resistance came from Catholics as Nonconformist Protestants also held many grievances.
But, from our point of view, the Great Famine (1845-52) is perhaps the most important marker because it was the direct and indirect cause of so much of the Irish emigration to Australia in the 1850s and 1860s. The English authorities did relatively little to diminish the terrible suffering and starvation (over one million died and a much greater number emigrated). This further embittered the Irish.
Understandably then, the early Irish immigrants in Australia were not enamoured of the British Empire and, by association, many of the Colonial authorities. For their part, the Colonial authorities looked upon the new immigrants with a great deal of suspicion and distrust. The settlers’ open support of the Irish Home Rule movement was one point of irritation. Another was the establishment of The Hibernian Australian Catholic Benefit Society. The authorities felt that the Catholic Church was seeking to dominate the political arena in the Colonies and to lay an axe at the trunk of the secular order.
Let us now deal with this second factor fuelling sectarianism – the fear that Catholics and (to a lesser extent) ‘non-Conformists (basically all of the other Christian Communions except the Church of England), would destroy a secular system of political and administrative order which had its roots in the philosophy of John Locke, J.S. Mill, and other English philosophers. For these philosophers, the memory of ‘The Wars of Religion’, fought between the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries, was still strong. Ostensibly wars between Catholics and Protestants, they were just as much about political and territorial ambitions. Indeed, at one stage, Catholic France had allied with the Protestant forces against the Catholic Hapsburg monarchy.
Another and earlier factor informing this official dislike of Catholicism can be traced back to the Reformation and, in particular, to what the new reformers saw as the ‘superstitions’ and pagan influences (Plato and Aristotle!) which, they believed, suffused medieval Scholastic philosophy and detracted from the simple Christian message of the Bible. Later, in the mid 19thC, came a movement in Catholic circles called Neo-Scholasticism and this too, was taken by its enemies as a regression to medievalism. Soon after came a reaction in the Catholic Church to what we now call the Modernist Movement. Pope Leo XIII gave impetus to this reaction with the Papal Encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879. This sought to counter the influence of the very secular philosophies which had helped to inform modern liberalism. These developments were looked upon by the colonial/state authorities as regressive at best, and dangerous at worst.
The upshot was a decision to establish a secular order of government and to ensure that religion was, for all intents and purposes, kept as a private matter with little or no input to the affairs of state. Whilst such a move may have been noble in its intentions, as a matter of fact, the Protestantism of the Church of England became (more or less) the official State-sanctioned religion since the authorities abhorred atheism much more than they did ‘religious enthusiasm’. But a note of caution is needed here. This ‘state-sanctioned’ religion is perhaps better described as a form of Deism rather than of Theism. That is to say, many in the political and administrative class in the Colonies were ‘religious’ in a somewhat diminished way. They may have believed in God, but he was a rather remote entity, called upon occasionally to bolster moral standards or reinforce some general desire in secular governance, but otherwise leaving us to get along with our business in ‘getting and spending’. The phrase ‘God’s in His Heaven, all’s well with the world’, summarises it rather nicely. It was a ‘Clayton’s’ religion. This characterisation, of course, applies only at the ‘official’ level. Out in the towns and villages, the Church of England had a much more spiritual and devotional emphasis.
What we might then call ‘official sectarianism’ manifested itself in many ways but none so important and so obvious as in the provision of education for children. Time and again, when we have investigated the history of the early ‘school chapels’, we find that the then Education Department would deliberately site new State schools as close as possible to the existing Catholic schools in an attempt to force the latter to close. Usually, the opposite happened! Here it is worth quoting from an official history of Catholic Education in Australia:
Catholic education faced opposition from those who thought it promoted superstition. The Rev Samuel Marsden about 1807 hoped that Catholicism would soon die out if children were all educated at non-Catholic schools, while Henry Parkes in 1851 called for action against the “grovelling superstition which seeks to fetter and degrade.” In turn Archbishop Vaughan called state schools “seedplots of future immorality, infidelity and lawlessness.”
Each Australian state passed laws to create “free, secular and compulsory” schools and withdrew state aid from church schools – Victoria in 1872, the Parkes’ government in New South Wales in 1880, and all states by 1893.
To give the reader some sense of the intensity of the feelings against Catholics in the early Colony, it is worth quoting Marsden directly:
It is more than probable that if the Catholic religion was once allowed to be celebrated by authority, that the colony would be lost to the British Empire in less than one year…. They are extremely superstitious, artful and treacherous which renders it impossible for the most watchful and active government to discover their real intentions. They have no true concern whatever for any religion nor fear of the supreme being: that are fond of riot, drunkenness and cabals; and was the Catholic religion tolerated they would assemble together from every quarter, not so much from a desire of celebrating Mass, as to recite the miseries an injustice of their banishment, the hardships they suffer, and to enflame one anther’s minds with some wild scheme of revenge…. If none but the Protestant religion should continue to be established or tolerated, in a few years there will be very few Catholics … the rising generation will be Protestants.
Finally, and in light of the above, it is important to emphasise that much of the sectarianism which was evident in an earlier Australia was much more subdued at the local community level. To be sure, there were instances on display, but we need to remember that each of these small communities could only survive and prosper when its members cooperated with each other for the good of all. Indeed, the reader will find, throughout our account, examples where the non-Catholic community actively supported local Catholics in their endeavours to establish churches and schools.
A Note on Funding for Early Catholic Schools/chapels
Because the establishment of early churches along the Campaspe valley was intimately associated with the establishment of schools (early schools often serving as ‘chapels’ on Sundays), it is important to understand why this occurred. When Victoria became an independent colony in 1851, it inherited a dual system of publicly funded schools from New South Wales. This system can be traced back to the ‘Church Act ‘of 1836 which stated, inter alia:
WHEREAS for the advancement of the Christian Religion and the promotion of good morals in the Colony of New South Wales it is expedient to encourage the observance of Public Worship and for this purpose to authorise the issue from the Revenue of the said Colony of sums to be applied in aid of the building of Churches and Chapels and of the maintenance of Ministers of Religion.
For church-based schools, funding was administered by the Denominational School Board. This was superseded by the Board of Education in 1862 and, in Victoria (which had now become a separate Colony), a new Education Act in 1872 set up a central public school system of free, secular and compulsory education. The immediate aftermath (1874) was to cease financial aid to church schools. For the next eight decades, Catholic education in Victoria relied heavily on the teaching orders of nuns and brothers. This very early system of government funding allowed the fledgling Catholic Church in Victoria to set up small schools in rural areas and supply them with government-funded teachers. These small schools, in turn, could then be used as places of worship on Sundays and important Feast Days.
- A useful account is given in: Hogan, M., 2021, The Sectarian Strand, Untapped (publisher). Digital Edition. See also https://australiancatholichistoricalsociety.com.au/history-resources/australian-catholic-education/ Interestingly, the ‘Church Act’ was introduced by Governor Richard Bourke an Irish-born Anglican who had witnessed the religious inequalities in Ireland. ↩︎
