Jan 28 2008
Daniel Mannix
Daniel Mannix
When Dan Mannix died, the bell ringer at St. Patrick’s Cathedral struck the passing bell, 99 tolls at one minute intervals.
An estimated 200,000 people filed past the coffin of the longtime Archbishop of Melbourne who died in 1963, just four months short of his centenary. It was rumoured that he deliberately died young in order to avoid a telegram from the English Queen for his 100th birthday.
Political manouvering in the Irish church resulted in Bishop Daniel Mannix from County Cork arriving in Melbourne in 1913. Four years later he was the Archbishop of Melbourne for life.
Mannix is remembered for three major reasons, his campaign against conscription for World War 1, his radical republicanism on Ireland and his support for, and subsequent betrayal of, the Labour movement.
And I remember him as an overwhelming presence in my childhood.
He was always there, like part of the landscape. On St Patrick’s Day I would be on the back of a float with other little girls, dressed up in green and gold, hair scraped into tight sausage curls (mine never lasted long enough for the Archbishop to see them) dancing our reels as the procession moved up the hill of Bourke St, up to the very top of the city. The truck would swing round the corner and there he was! Standing on the steps of Parliament and acknowledging the cheers and salutes as we went past. Like a King.
Mannix toured the USA with Irish independence leader Eamon de Valera, in England he took a leading role in funeral rites for hunger striker Terence MacSwinney and was subsequently taken off a ship on the high seas by the British Navy to stop him going to Ireland. Oh my word, the rage that erupted here in Melbourne then!
The fiery Archbishop lived at Raheen, little fort, a mansion on Studley Park Road in Kew, bequeathed to the Catholic Church by the notorious underworld figure John Wren.
These days I can see Raheen from the creek at the back of my house. A mysterious castle-like apparition appearing over the treetops, a palace without a king. The present owner is a millionaire cardboard box manufacturer, who coincidentally happens to be a convicted criminal.
In 1942, Mannix funded and gave moral backing to a secret Catholic organisation known as the Movement which played a central role in the 1954-5 split in the Australian Labour Party. It resulted in the Conservative elements in Australian politics running the country for 23 years. In his latter years Mannix broke with his old labour movement friends, and supported the early days of the American War in Vietnam.
My devout Great Aunt Sadie, shocked into hysteria at his betrayal, never went to Mass again.
Like to shout me a cold beer?
