The Divided Heart of Catherine Mackerras

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there” - So L. P. Hartley famously wrote in his novel, The Go-Between. A century ago, Christianity was the dominant religion of Australia and indelibly coloured its social, cultural, and political fabric. Catholicism was the faith of the Irish working classes; Anglicanism and Presbyterianism were the faiths of the elite, the powerful, the establishment. Catherine Mackerras - best remembered as the mother of unusually accomplished chil…