Sectarianism in Australia

[2] The settlement was perpetually on high alert in case of risings led by exiled Irish political prisoners[3][4] – there were rebellions in Ireland in 1798 and 1803 and many involved had been transported to Australia[5] – in the context of war with republican France.

Nonetheless, it is recorded that predominantly Catholic Irish-speaking prisoners were frequently singled out for physical maltreatment by the authorities[10] and occasionally murdered by British convicts for speaking Irish who believed they were secretly conspiring against them in a language which only they spoke.

[14] Irish Catholics were a greater proportion of the population in Australia than they had been in Ireland,[15] and they enjoyed an ostensibly more level playing field when it came to community relations and national influence.

Prominent Irish Catholic campaigners against the war and conscription such as Archbishop Daniel Mannix were widely denounced in public as traitors by Protestants.

[21] Anglo-Australian Protestant ex-serviceman formed loyalist paramilitary organisations[26] in preparation for a final confrontation with Irish Australian Catholics in an atmosphere of severe sectarian and ethnic suspicion.

One commentator considers that anti-Catholic sectarianism in Australia expired in the 1950s when the predominantly Protestant conservative government of the time agreed to state aid for Catholic schools.

This was enabled in part by the mass migration in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s of large numbers of non-British and non-Irish immigrants, primarily from Italy, Greece, Malta, and Eastern Europe.