Among a pile of old family letters is one from my Great-Great-Aunt Mary Ann Madden to my Great-Grandmother Elizabeth Gibson telling her how to prepare lunch for Archbishop Daniel Mannix. This was a curious find to say the least. These women were born, lived and died in Casino. Daniel Mannix was the Archbishop of Melbourne, a good 1,500 kilometres from Casino. What was he doing in Casino and why was my Great-Grandmother organising his dinner? And more the point, why did my Great-Great-Aunt feel the need to stick her nose into the arrangements?
While the letter is undated, it did not take too long searching old newspapers on Trove (the amazing collection of Australia’s old newspapers digitised by the National Library of Australia) to find that Mannix was in Casino as the guest of honour at the opening of the Casino Sisters of Mercy Convent in 1924. It was also a fundraising event and an occasion to gather a large crowd of the Catholic faithful from across the Richmond River and beyond. Mannix brought with him a whole phalanx of important Catholic clergy—several bishops and monseigneurs and the Pope’s representative in Australia, the Papal Nuncio. These were the men who were to sit down to the dinner organised by my Great-Grandmother.
My Great-Great-Aunt Mary Madden had skin in the game. Not only was she a devout Catholic but for the thirty years prior to the opening of the Convent she had been a leading fundraiser for the building of the Catholic school, church, presbytery and convent in Casino. She had run more balls and dances and fancy stalls at fetes than you could poke a stick at. Her instructions about the lunch that she sent to her sister show that there was a lot more going on than a simple checklist.
Mary’s instructions to Elizabeth tell us a lot about the manners, tastes and social pretensions of the time. There had to be a lot of hock (white wine) in the soup, potted palms on the table, and the girls (Elizabeth’s four daughters) had to make sure they served the guests from the right. Mary was determined that Mannix would leave Casino knowing that the Irish Catholics had climbed out of the poverty of their origins.
And what was in it for Mannix? When he spoke at the opening of the convent he spent most of his time railing against plans to partition Ireland into its British-controlled north and republican south. For Mannix was a staunch Irish Nationalist and bitterly opposed to the continuing presence of the British in Ireland. He knew he had a sympathetic audience on the Richmond. It had become a place where Irish Catholics, like the Maddens, had flourished and were leaving behind the shame of their poverty and humiliation as convicts and poor farm-labouring immigrants. Mannix didn’t just speak at Casino but travelled from Grafton to Lismore and Murwillumbah and many places in between. At each location her spoke about how the Richmond was ‘the Promised Land’ for Catholics and contrasted it to the continuing oppression of the Irish in their homeland.
At the end of Mary’s letter is the key that connects her anxiety about the lunch with Daniel Mannix’s energetic speechifying. Mary writes that ‘I understand that it [the dinner] is in good hands, but she has had no experience with our people so you will have the responsibility of it all and I am sure that it will be a success.’ The nub of Mary Madden’s anxiety comes from her concern that the woman organising the dinner is not of Irish Catholic identity and can’t be trusted to understand ‘our people.’ I do not know who the ‘she’ is but Mary has made her point and knows that Elizabeth will understand.
Irish Catholic nationalism was deeply rooted in the culture of the Catholics of the Richmond in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mary Madden’s letter to her sister Elizabeth provides a window on that culture.
Read Why Mary Madden Rescued Daniel Mannix’s Dinner
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