Truth Is Trouble by Malcolm Knox

Author:Malcolm Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2020-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Is there any previous model that could help a cultural institution, such as a football code, navigate its way out of this? For decades, the dominant religious-ethnic-class schism running through Australian sports was Christian sectarianism. We Protestant private-school boys were conditioned to think of our Catholic rivals as rough, morally as well as physically dirty, kids of not only Irish background but also, shock-horror, Italian. They usually flogged us, but we felt they enjoyed an unfair advantage in having reached puberty earlier. We thought they were basically rugby league toughs beating us up in their spare time.

That the tentacles of sectarianism had reached into so many corners of life really only became evident to my generation as we discovered their vestiges. Decades after it happened, I discovered that an entire branch of our family had been cut off because someone had committed the crime of marrying a Catholic. This strongest of social divisions overrode all others.

Sectarianism meant everything until suddenly it meant nothing at all. In my generation, marrying a Catholic – as I have done – is not even worthy of comment. Professor Jeff Kildea, a historian of sectarianism, saw signs that sectarianism had more or less vanished by the 1990s, when he attended a debate between my school and the Christian Brothers’ Waverley College over whether Guy Fawkes was right to attempt to blow up the British parliament in 1605. ‘Given that Guy Fawkes was part of a Catholic plot in 1605 to blow up the Protestant King and parliament,’ Professor Kildea wrote, ‘I thought this could be a very interesting debate indeed.’ As it turned out, not one speaker raised the sectarian issue. The professor was ‘pleased to think that the boys were either unaware of the topic’s implication or were too sensitive to the feelings of the other side to raise it’.

But in the generations preceding ours, it had been as difficult in Australia for a Catholic to be made captain of a sporting team containing Protestants as it was for a professional cricketer in England to lead a team that also contained ‘gentlemen’. Indeed, it seemed as difficult as it is today for an Islander to be captain or coach of a national team. Then as now, the prejudice went largely unadmitted.

The most-discussed sectarian divide in Australian sport was in cricket. During the 1930s, Australian cricket was dominated by Don Bradman, who, as a Freemason, was suspected by his Catholic teammates of holding a prejudice against them. Inconveniently, many of the best players in the Australian team, such as Bill O’Reilly, Jack Fingleton, Stan McCabe, Leo O’Brien and Chuck Fleetwood-Smith, were Catholics. O’Reilly and Fingleton, who both became journalists, went on to write at length about Bradman’s anti-Catholic bias, which culminated in the summer of 1936–37, when Bradman, captaining the Australian team for the first time, sought to discipline players who stayed out drinking in bars too late for his liking. All of his targets happened to be Catholic. Fingleton believed he was

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