Since the social factors which had stimulated the growth of the Melbourne Campion Society were common to all States of the Commonwealth, it might be expected that they would have produced a common response among Australian Catholic young people. However, a scrutiny of the nation-wide situation will reveal that this was not the case; and that while the new Catholic social idealism was not confined to Victoria, its popularity and importance varied considerably from one State to another. In New South Wales, to begin with, the movement had a slow and unspectacular beginning.
The outlook of the Sydney Catholic Press during the early ’thirties appears to have been indicative of the perspectives of Sydney Catholicism generally. Whereas the Advocate had been severely shaken by the failure of the Scullin government, P. S. Cleary had remained calm; while the Melbourne paper had been noticeably disorientated by the effects of the Depression, its Sydney equivalent had been superficially unruffled; where the former publication had broadened its horizons to set Australia’s troubles in a cosmopolitan context, the latter had remained comfortably parochial. The Sydney Catholic ‘establishment’ – Archbishop Kelly, his inner circle of clerical administrators, his lay notables from the Knights of the Southern Cross – had evinced no alarm at the course which national and world events had taken. A Pastoral Letter of the N.S.W. Hierarchy issued on 11 May 1931, and titled, ‘On the Present Economic Distress’, bore the style of Dr. Kelly, and was little more than an assemblage of pedestrian observations and pious sentiments.1
Despite this, Sydney Catholicism was not altogether insensible to the need for intellectual reinforcement at a time of ideological unrest. In mid-1930 the K.S.C.-organised Catholic Evidence lectures departed from their usual apologetical themes, and were directed to the topic, ‘The Catholic Church and Industrial Problems’.2 A year later, on 15 May 1931, ‘an audience of several thousand’ assembled in St. Mary’s Basilica to hear a number of addresses in commemoration of Rerum Novarum, released forty years before. Speakers included Father William J. Lockington, S.J., Rector of St. Ignatius’ College, Riverview, and Catholic social activist of the Catholic Federation era; Dr. Cyril Fallon, one-time Catholic Federation and Democratic Party leader; and Peter Gallagher, co-founder and Master of the Catholic Speakers.3 The Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, which was released in Rome that same day, was printed as an eight-page supplement to the Catholic Press on 23 July.
Quadragesimo Anno appears to have made some Sydney Catholics conscious of the term ‘Catholic Action’, and of the importance which the Pope attached to it. From 20 August to 24 December 1931 the Catholic Press ran a series of twelve articles on Catholic Action by ‘Sacerdos’, presumably a pseudonym for Father Aubrey Goodman, a member of the Sacred Heart Order, and the only Sydney priest who appears to have been well versed in the subject at the time. The articles were competent and informative; and, although they stressed the pastoral role of Catholic Action, they made clear that the Pope had prescribed as its most important modem function the Christianising of the social order.4
About September of 1931 a small group of men and women in Sydney formed the ‘Waverley Lay Apostolate’, under the guidance of Father Fidelis Griffin, the Commissary-Provincial of the Franciscan Order. Their first practical activity was ‘instruction given to the Catholic children attending State schools’, a form of pastoral work already being performed by the Theresian Club (Sydney’s equivalent of Victoria’s Catholic Women’s Social Guild), and subsequently to become the most notable kind of lay action in Sydney. A second group of the ‘Lay Apostolate’ was formed on 5 February 1932, under the direction of Father A. Smith, a Sacred Heart priest. Its first meeting was addressed by Father Aubrey Goodman on the subject of Catholic Action.5
At the end of 1931 Archbishop Kelly apparently decided that the urgency of the Pope’s calls for Catholic Action warranted a more positive response from Sydney. He called a meeting for 1 December of the Principals of all Catholic secondary schools; delegates from the religious orders; representatives of schools’ ex-pupils’ associations; and other individuals whom he nominated. The purpose of the assembly was to inaugurate an Association of Catholic Action. Dr. Kelly himself appointed the first Executive of the Association, making Thomas J. Purcell, a young lawyer, the President,4 and Father Austin Kelly, S.J., Rector of St. Aloysius’ College, Milson’s Point, the Secretary. The Executive, in co-operation with parish priests, was to set up ‘centres of Catholic Action’ in the parishes; and ordinary laymen could become members of the Association ‘by joining a centre and giving their names and addresses to the Secretary of such centre? ’
It is obvious that the Archbishop set up the A.C.A. without having any but the vaguest notion of what Catholic Action involved. Then aged eighty-one, Kelly was a deeply pious man and a dedicated pastor, but he was no intellectual, and was unable to conceive of the Church’s role as extending beyond the traditional pastoral and pedagogical preoccupations of Irish Catholicism. This limitation of vision was evident in a lecture he gave to 4,000 Catholic school children in St. Mary’s Basilica on Sunday 30 February 1932, at a rally intended to assist the A.C.A. He exhorted those present to greater personal piety and good works; and in answer to the question, ‘What was Catholic Action?’ he declared:
It was Catholics living exemplary lives, joining together in hearing the word of God and keeping it.*
The aims of the Association of Catholic Action, as detailed in 1932 faithfully reflected the Archbishop’s outlook. No mention was made of the social apostolate, and only a hint was given of the need for intellectual formation. The objectives were listed as:
(1) The personal sanctification of the members by a more intense practice of their Holy Faith; e.g., the assisting at daily Mass, frequent communion, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, etc.
(2) The instruction (religious) of Catholic children not attending Catholic schools.
(3) The dissemination of Catholic literature.
(4) Study groups for the study of Catholic principles. The conducting of clubs, instruction classes, circles and reading clubs.
(5) Work for the Foreign Missions.
(6) Praying for and aiding conversions to the Church.
(7) The visitations of hospitals, hostels, lodging-houses; and institutions frequented by the needy or outcast.
(8) The making of a Catholic census, promoting sodality membership, and for this co-operating with sodality prefects.
(9) Any work whatsoever of a spiritual nature for the love and glory of God, and for the help and enlightenment of ourselves and our neighbours.*
Within the sphere of operations prescribed for it, the Association of Catholic Action worked enthusiastically and with notable success. In its first year it organised catechists’ groups to take religious lessons in about forty Government schools, and was able to record ‘about 1500 children withdrawn from State Schools and placed in Catholic Schools’.10 In 1933 the State education authorities banned lay catechists from their schools; but the A.C.A. conducted fifteen catechetical classes outside school hours, and had ‘about 500’ children transfer to Catholic schools.11 Other of its activities included the dissemination of Catholic literature; the organisation of instruction classes for non-Catholics; the formation of three Reading Clubs; the collection of contributions for the overseas Missions; the visitation of hospitals; the promotion of sodality membership; and the operation of correspondence catechetical courses for Catholic children in Outback areas.11
For all its good work, the A.C.A. had been founded on a false conception of Catholic Action. In February 1933, however, this difficult subject was much elucidated for Sydney Catholics with the publication of Father Aubrey Goodman’s A Handbook of Catholic Action. The first text of its kind to appear in Australia, it was essentially an explanation of the theory and structure of the Italian form of Catholic Action. Its immediate practical impact was negligible, however, as no organisation existed within the Sydney Church which could have utilised the knowledge it presented.
The absence of any Catholic intellectual movement in New South Wales left a void which, in the restless conditions of the times, demanded to be filled. In Melbourne this service had been performed by the University- based Campion Society. In Sydney, however, the state of Catholicism at the University gave little ground for hope of a comparable movement emerging there.
Sydney University in the ’thirties was by no means a duplicate of its Melbourne sister academy. Its campus was much more conservative, with the University Union, a semi-private club, serving as both the centre of under-
The New Catholic Idealism in New South Wales and Other States 55 graduate social life, and the guardian of established traditions and values. Unlike Melbourne, Sydney University had no debating society, and debates were conducted instead by the Union at its regular fortnightly formal-dress- and-dinner ‘Union Nights’. The event of the year was the awarding of the Rhodes Scholarship, a matter to which the student newspaper Honi Sort, unlike Farrago! devoted a great deal of attention.
The ideological conflict which raged so fiercely at Melbourne was absent from the Sydney campus. Only in May of 1931 was a Labour Club formed, and although initially conservative opposition was intense, this soon died down when it became apparent that in practice the Club was neither Marxist nor militant. It simply functioned quietly, indeed, almost inconspicuously, as (from 1932) the affiliated University branch of the Lang-dominated N.S.W. Labor Party.13
The development of any Communist or Marxist movement on campus would have been difficult in view of the hostility to such of Professor John Anderson, the renowned Scottish-born occupant of the Chair of Philosophy. Anderson, whose personal influence among undergraduates has possibly exceeded that of any other Australian academic, had flirted briefly with Communism before reacting against its methods. He remained a radical in many of his social attitudes, but rejected Marxism.
The most sustained conflict on the Sydney campus was not ideological but philosophical, and was more reminescent of the nineteenth century than of the Great Depression era. It was the old controversy of rationalism- versus-religion, with the chief protagonists being the Christian Union (from 1933, the Student Christian Movement) and Anderson’s Freethought Society (formed in September 1930). The Christian Union, which was well entrenched at the University, steered a theological course somewhere between traditional Protestantism and the more liberal or Modernist religious philosophies which were gaining ground overseas.14
Despite the comparative stability and conservatism of the Sydney campus, the Depression had a marked effect in stirring into life a student social conscience. This became evident in the statements of Professor John Anderson, as in the proceedings of the Freethought Society and of the older-type liberal clubs such as the League of Nations Union and the Public Questions Society. It was the Christian Union, however, which took the lead in preaching the new gospel of social concern. In July of 1930 it sponsored a series of talks by G. V. Portus on ‘Christianity and Communism’, the response being sufficiently encouraging for the Christian Union to have them published in book form.15 At the end of 1930 it initiated a fund-drive among students to help the unemployed;14 and during 1931 it organised several lectures on social issues. Subsequently two future Anglican bishops, David Gamsey and the Reverend E. H. Burgmann, were among those who counselled it on the duties of Christians in respect of the social order.13
From all this undergraduate activity the Catholics were conspicuously absent. Indeed, University Catholicism was unhappily situated in relation both to the local Church and to general campus life. Archbishop Kelly, according to O’Farrell, was ‘suspicious of the University of Sydney, believ that it endangered the souls of Catholic students’.’* Furthermore non* relations had subsisted between St. John’s, the Catholic University College and the Sydney Hierarchy, almost continuously since the College’s foundation in 1859.” Thus, in contrast to Melbourne, Sydney University Catholics were estranged from their own archdiocese. The converse of this was that a fear of the University grew within the Sydney Church, a fear which focussed on Professor John Anderson, who was invested in the popular Catholic imagination with almost demonic powers for destroying the faith of the young.20
In Melbourne, Father Jeremiah Murphy had broken down the isolation of Newman College residents from general undergraduate life; however, in Sydney this isolation was still very much in evidence. The Rector of St. John’s, Dr. Maurice O’Reilly, a witty, cultured, and somewhat pretentious Vincentian priest, had his own select circle of friends, and cared little about what was happening at the University proper. The St. John’s residents participated in the general round of inter-College activities, but not in campus affairs. The Newman Society, founded late in 1928, sponsored a number of lectures and discussions during its first year,21 but subsequently did little other than organise occasional social activities. It rarely rated a mention in Honi Soit, and was in no sense a force at the University. A women’s equivalent, the University Catholic Women’s Society, which centred on Sancta Sophia College, was a little more intellectually alive. However, it displayed no interest in social questions; and in a lecture series which it began in July 1933! it dealt only with perennial scriptural, doctrinal and philosophical issues.22 The Catholic societies compared ill with the vigorous Student Christian Movement, the spearhead of social activism at the University.
The depressed state of Catholic undergraduate life moved the Newman Society Committee early in 1934 to write to Father H. B. Loughnan, S.J., Dean of Newman College, enquiring how the Victorian Newman Society was faring. Loughnan’s reply, which was read out at a Committee meeting, was unenthusiastic concerning the Newman, but portrayed in glowing terms the work of the Campion Society. It suggested that, if they were interested, they should write to Frank Maher, and get in touch with Father Richard Murphy, S.J., in Sydney. The latter priest had visited Melbourne shortly before, and had been much impressed by the Campions. Desmond O’Connor, an Arts/Law student and St. John’s College resident who was on the Newman Committee, was intrigued by what Loughnan had to say, and the following evening on his own initiative called on Father Murphy.”
Father Richard Murphy was a Catholic activist of long standing. In 1912 he had helped launch the N.S.W. Catholic Federation;” in 1933 he assisted Dr. Herbert Moran to found the Catholic Medical Guild of St. Luke1 and later he was to collaborate with Dr. Horace Nowland to bring Alcoholics Anonymous to Australia.25 He had a nimble mind, a broad range of interests, and a warm personality which appealed to young and old alike. He had first heard of the Campion Society when he was stationed in Brisbane and had met Murray McInerney during the Intervarsity debating visit of 1932.“ On his visit to Melbourne early in 1934 he had met Kevin Kelly, and had subsequently been in correspondence with him.® He had since attempted to begin a Sydney Campion group from among a few members of the Sydney University Newman Society, but had dropped the project after one uninspiring meeting.® However, O’Connor’s unexpected call revived his interest, and the two agreed to seek out a number of suitable young colleagues and to launch a Campion group.
An initial meeting of prospective members was held on the evening of 30 April, with O’Connor, Father Murphy, and seven others being present. A fortnight later the Sydney Campion Society formally began, with its first discussion being on the topic, ‘The Culture of Europe’. The conversation was lively, but did not proceed beyond the question: What is culture?” O’Connor early observed that the historical/cultural approach favoured by Melbourne would have to be introduced gradually, and that ‘some of the members would like to do a little in the Apologetics line’.® As a bridge between apologetics and cultural history, several meetings were given to a study of early Christianity and the Fathers of the Church.11 In the Melbourne Society, by contrast, study-programmes began with the Fall of the Roman Empire.
As with the early Melbourne Campion, most of the initial Sydney members were studying or practising law. Cyril Walsh, one of the first to join, numbered six legal men among the eight whom he could recall as being early members.”
For tactical reasons, the Sydney Campion for a time functioned as a semi-autonomous group within the Sydney University Newman Society. O’Connor explained in a letter to Maher that,
We cannot however (on Fr. Murphy’s advice) form a new Society. We who are interested in lay work have more to contend with in Sydney than you have in Melbourne by way of Archiepiscopal obstruction.33
O’Connor, a leading member of the Sydney Newman Society since its foundation, was well aware that Dr. Kelly liked to keep a tight rein on his lay societies, and most particularly on societies of an intellectual nature.1* He had come to the opinion that Kelly ‘regards Catholic Action as a 20th century heresy’.15 By operating within the Newman, the Sydney Campion Society was able to conceal its existence and thus safeguard its autonomy. On the other hand, it had to resist the pressures of certain enthusiastic Newman Committee members who wished to make it an open discussion group.36
A further difficulty which the group had to face was the absence in their city of any equivalent of Father Hackett’s Central Catholic Library. The K.S.C.-controlled Southern Cross Library was available to them, but O’Connor regarded it as ‘nothing more than a safe collection for shop girls’.17 He was able, however, to obtain permission to build up a special Campion section within the Library.®
With regard to outside action, an early opportunity presented itself to the Sydney Campions in the form of the Catholic Fireside. This was the organ of the Catholic Club, a social club founded in 1905, which by the 1930s was a favoured gathering-place of Catholic Labour movement activists. In tone, the magazine transcended its origins, in that it sought to be not only popular but moderately intellectual. First appearing in July of 1934, its early issues featured articles by Chesterton, Belloc, Knox, Lunn and Martindale; and its editor, Edward Bennetts, was on the alert for local talent. O’Connor, who recognised the Fireside’s potential as an avenue for Campion influence, early enquired about the possibility of University articles being published. He was immediately offered ‘8, 12, or 16 pages’ monthly- whatever he desired. On Father Murphy’s advice, however, the Campions decided not to commit themselves to regular writing at this stage, feeling that it could impede their development and restrict their independence.3* It was to be over a year before the first Campion article was to appear in the magazine.
Thus in the years from 1931 to 1934 two new Catholic lay organisations, quite different in kind, had appeared in Sydney. The larger and more active, and the one which accorded the better with the established traditions of Sydney Catholicism, was the Association of Catholic Action, with its pastoral and catechetical orientation. The other was the Campion Society, which had begun in an almost clandestine fashion in a University where Catholics did not count, and in a local Church where intellectuals were not welcome. The situation could scarcely have been more diametrically opposed to that which existed in Victoria. However, in the third southern State, South Australia, the new Catholic intellectual and social movements were progressing much more smoothly.
In Adelaide a Newman-type organisation for Catholic graduates and undergraduates, the Aquinas Society, had been founded in October of 1928. By coincidence, its inaugural meeting had been attended by Father C. C. Martindale, S.J., who at the time was visiting the city on his lecture-tour of Southern Australia. An independent Aquinas Society of South Australia, Women’s Branch, had subsequently been established.40
As in Victoria and New South Wales, however, the most important intellectual organisation within the Catholic community was not the official University society, but an independent body, in this case the Catholic Guild for Social Studies. In conception and influence, the Guild approximated closely to the Victorian Campion Society. Its founder was Dominic Paul McGuire, then in his early thirties, a University lecturer, novelist, and correspondent for overseas Catholic periodicals. Within the Guild McGuire worked in close association with his wife, Margaret.
The Catholic Guild for Social Studies had been launched in February of 1932, and had adopted a programme of activities similar to, but more extensive than, that of the Campion Society. It operated several social studies groups, arranged public lectures, and held summer-schools. A 1934 Catholic Evidence lecture-series in the Adelaide Town Hall, which the Guild conducted jointly with the C.Y.M.S., attracted ‘ail average attendance of at least 500’. Before the end of 1934 it had taken steps towards establishing an Adelaide Central Catholic Library; was investigating the possibility of doing catechetical work; and was planning to form a Catholic Land Association to promote far-reaching schemes of rural reform.4’
The Guild contained a strain of Catholic rural romanticism which at this stage was absent from the Campion Society, but in other ways the perspectives of the two organisations were similar. The study-topics of the Guild included: ‘Rerum Novarum’; ‘Quadragesimo Anno’; ‘The Church’s teaching regarding Property and Ownership’; ‘The rise and nature of Capitalism’; ‘Communism’; ‘The Rights and Duties of the Individual’; ‘The Origin and Functions of the State’; ‘The Christian Family’; ‘The Medieval Guilds’; ‘The Just Price’; and ‘The Just Wage’.*’ More attention was given to the examination in detail of Catholic social theory, and less to historical and cultural studies, than was the case with the Campion.
Again like the Campion Society in Victoria, the Catholic Guild for Social Studies was by 1934 performing a catalytic function in transforming the attitudes of South Australian Catholics on the implications of Christian belief for the ordering of society.
In Queensland the Catholic University organisation was known as the Leonian Society, and was closely connected with St. Leo’s College, the Catholic college on the Brisbane campus. As in the other States, however, the Catholic intellectual stirrings emanated from another body, the Christian Brothers’ Old Boys’ Association.
Formed in the 1890s and re-activated after the World War, the C.B.O.B.A. was open to all ex-pupils of Christian Brothers’ schools, and in 1934 had a numerical strength of 2,000. In 1932 it had launched a monthly magazine, The Risen Sun, ‘to encourage young Catholic writers to develop literary expression’; and it had also been responsible for the opening the following year of Brisbane’s Aquinas Library. It operated a Dramatic Society and a Debating Society; and it had ambitions to form a Catholic Workers’ Educational Association, a Catholic Debating Societies’ Union, and ‘a quarterly of definitely intellectual appeal’. During 1934 it had at least one study-group operating.43 Much of its vitality was attributable to the drive and energy of its President, John P. Kelly, a young lawyer.
As a result of a visit by Murray McInerney and Frank Quaine to Brisbane for the 1932 Intervarsity debating, a Campion group had been formed in that city by Dr. John English, ‘the then intellectual leader of the Brisbane clergy’. This, however, had been short-lived.44 During 1934 Frank Maher was corresponding with Arthur S. Hegerty, a leading member of the C.B.O.B.A., in the hope of inspiring another such effort.45 It was to be another two years, however, before a successful Brisbane Campion Society was to be established.
The organisation operated in Brisbane by Father Adrian J. Mills, ‘The Lay Apostolate’, and its magazine Australia, have already been discussed in reference to the Melbourne Campion Society. Mills had a great zeal for Catholic Action, but his personality was such as to make sustained co-operation with others difficult. His most memorable work was his organisation of extensive relief operations to assist the destitute and unemployed.
In Western Australia, a Newman Society had been inaugurated at a meeting in the Archbishop’s Residence in September 1924. The second such society to appear in Australia, it had adopted ‘the aims of the Newman Society of Victoria’.44
Late in 1932 Mr. Keith Spruhan had been in touch with the Melbourne Campion Society from Perth, having assisted in the formation of a Pian Club * Pian Clubs had proliferated in Europe in the early part of the century as semi-secret anti-Modernist societies, but had dwindled as the Modernist heresy had been successfully suppressed. Modernism had not penetrated to Australia: and it seems that the Perth Pian Club was simply a small Catholic intellectual group. Later in the decade Spruhan was to help found the Chesterton Club, the Western Australian equivalent of the Campion Society.
In Tasmania, a Newman Society had been in existence since 1931. It had persevered in a semi-dormant state, and had done little of note besides organise occasional lectures at the University of Tasmania ‘on subjects of Catholic and cultural interest’. During 1934 an attempt was made to form a study-circle, ‘but lack of sufficient well informed members rendered this impossible’.44
During 1932 Kevin Kelly had been ‘in touch with several Catholics’ in Tasmania in an attempt to stimulate the formation of a Campion group,4’ but nothing had come of it.
The Australia-wide picture which emerges is one of general Catholic intellectual revitalisation, with the strength and influence of the new intellectual movements varying considerably from one State to another. Catholic social idealism had taken firm root in Victoria and South Australia, was making solid headway in Queensland, existed in vestigial form in New South Wales and Western Australia, and was unknown in Tasmania. Everywhere on the mainland the psychological impact of the Depression had produced some discernible changes in Catholic social attitudes.
Initially these Catholic intellectual movements had grown independently of one another, and lacked any sense of unity. This isolation was to be broken down, however, and a spirit of national solidarity was to emerge, as a result of an important Catholic celebration which was planned for December of 1934 – Melbourne’s National Eucharistic Congress.
NOTES
1 See the Catholic Press, 28 May 1931, p. 13.
2 Printed as The Catholic Church and Industrial Problems, Catholic Evidence Guild, Sydney, 1931 (a copy is held’in the National Library, Canberra).
3 C.P. 21 May 1931, pp. 14-15.
4 See ‘The Social Crusade*, by ‘Sacerdos’, C.P. 3 December 1931.
5 C.P. 3 March 1932; p. 6.
6 The basis of Purcell’s selection was apparently purely personal: he was not a member of the Knights of the Southern Cross, nor was he prominent in other Catholic bodies. However, Archbishop Kelly had valued the friendship of his father, also T. J. Purcell (died 1927). Interview with Mr; T. J. Purcell, 28 March 1972.
7 See 1932 schemata of the A.C.A., 1934 Newman Convention box, M.A.A.
8 C.P. 3 March 1932, p. 19.
91932 A.C.A. schemata, 1934 Newman Convention box, M.A.A.
10 A.C.A. Report, 1934 Newman Convention box, M.AA.
11 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
13 See in particular Honi Soit 29 April, 6 May 1931; 6 April 1932.
14 An indication of the S.C.M.’s theological complexion might be found in its reactions to the controversy sparked off by the publication of Truth and Tradition (Angus. & Robertson, 1933), an examination of traditional Christian beliefs by the Presbyterian Modernist Dr. Angus, Professor of Theology at St. Andrew’s College at the University of Sydney.
15 Honi Suit, 16 July 1930, 11 November 1931.
16 Ibid., 12 November 1930.
Ibid., 6 July 1932, 10 October 1934.
18 O’Farrell, Short History, p. 214.
19 Ibid., pp. 81, 125, 214.
20 Vestiges of the ‘black Anderson* legend can still be found among Sydney Catholics today.
21 CF. 21 November 1929, p. 21.
22 Honi Soit, 5 July 1933.
23 ‘Campion History’, The Campion, Sydney, September 1954. A copy is in the possession of Mr. L. G. O’Sullivan, Canberra.
24 See ‘The Catholic Story’, Catholic Weekly, 12 April 1951, p. 8 (a chronology).
25 See I’ll Cry Tomorrow, by Lillian Roth (Barker, London, 1956), chs. 25-26 (re Murphy, see pp. 272-3, 278).
26 Memorandum, Mr. Justice McInerney to author, September 1967.
27 R. Murphy, S.J., to Maher, 17 May 1934, H/B.
28 ‘Campion History’.
29 O’Connor to Maher, 15 May 1934; O’Connor to Murphy, 15 May 1934, H/B.
30 O’Connor to Maher, 11 May 1934, H/B.
31 O’Connor to Maher, 12 June, 26 June, 14 July, 26 July 1934, H/B.
32 They were himself, O’Connor, Tom McNevin (later to become a priest), Len Lochrin, Clarrie Cullen, and Des Ryan. The other two were Patrick Moran, a talented mathematics student, son of Dr. Herbert Moran; and Bert Swan, a Classics coach: C. A. Walsh, ‘The Campion Society’, The Campion, Sydney, December 1954. A copy is in the possession of Mr. L. G. O’Sullivan, Canberra.
33 O’Connor to Maher, 11 May 1934, H/B.
34 Interviews with Father Desmond O’Connor, S.J., 8 February 1967, 1 April 1972.
35 O’Connor to Maher, 12 June 1934, H/B.
34 O’Connor to Maher, 1 May, 11 May 1934; O’Connor to R. Murphy, S.J., 15 May 1934, H/B.
37 O’Connor to Maher, 1 May 1934, H/B.
38 Ibid.; cf. O’Connor to Murphy, 15 May 1934, H/B.
39 O’Connor to Maher, 26 July 1934, H/B.
40 Aquinas Society Report, 1934 Newman Convention box, M.A.A.
41 Catholic Guild for Social Studies Report, 1934 Newman Convention box, M.A.A.
43 Ibid.
43 C.B.O.B.A. Report, 1934 Newman Convention box, M.A.A.; A. S. Hegerty to Maher, 13 June 1934, H/B.
44 Memorandum, Mr. Justice McInerney to author, September 1967.
45 See correspondence, H/B.
46 Adv. 6 November 1924, p. 11; cf. J. T. McMahon, College, Campus Cloister (University of W.A. Press, 1969), Part II, Ch. 1, passim.
47 Minutes, Q.M., 14 September 1932, H/B.
48 Newman Society of Tasmania Report, 1934 Newman Convention box, MAA
49 Minutes, Q.M., 14 September 1932, H/B.