Proddies and Micks.(History)(Protestants and Catholics)(Sectarianism)

"WHAT'S A CATHOLIC?" I asked my grandmother, on hearing a neighbour being described as such. "It's like, I go to one bootmaker and she goes to another," Grandma replied quickly, unaccustomed awkwardness in her voice. I was perhaps four, but the message came across that this was not a subject to be explored too far.

Apart from the German over the road and the Italians in the fruit shop, it was clear by about that time that the slightly suspect minorities in our suburban street were Pommies and Catholics, the first referred to with slight irritation, the second with a slight awe.

Until the 1960s, Australia had a famous sectarian divide. This is an attempt to describe and analyse what the "problem" was all about, from a combination of my memory, the memories or research of others and a little documentation. It requires squeezing centuries of history rather tightly.

The proportion of the population identifying as Cathotic has fluctuated around 25 per cent since 1788, down to around 20 per cent in the 1930s and back to the present level of about 27 per cent. The proportion does not vary much around the country, apart from minor regional clustering. Geographically and socially it has rarely been outside the proportion of a tenth to a third Catholic, with most of the rest identifying as Protestant. Immigration patterns have been the chief influence.

The nuances are elusive, since they varied greatly from one person to another. There was sensitivity, prickliness, irritability, defensiveness, whispering and awkwardness all round, but not much hate. Normal friendship existed along with banter ("Micks" and "Proddies") and school rivalry. ("Catholic/Protestant/ State school dogs, sitting on logs, eating maggots out of frogs" was traditionally the cry, though I question how common or serious it was.) But there was nevertheless a deep communal divide and a large component of pervasive rivalry, if not jealousy. Each side thought the other to be organised and overbearing. Some people hardly noticed any of it, others were obsessive.

Nor was there any single great issue, but rather a mixed bag of middling, practical issues, which together proved formidable. They also varied greatly from time to time and were easily roused, but fell away again. "Sectarian" feelings were fairly strong in the early 1920s, for example, in the aftermath of the First World War, when Australia was shell-shocked from 60,000 war dead and 150,000 wounded out of a population of only 6 million, in a conflict which was victorious but otherwise made little sense.

Feelings had hardly begun to relax when the Depression of the early 1930s again tightened up every prejudice and conspiratorial theory. Things generally improved from then on, though the ALP Split interspersed another period of tension and suspicion from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties.