The Divided Heart of Catherine Mackerras
Faith, family & self-understanding in a different Australia
Patrick Mullins
Foreword by Dallas McInerney, CEO, Catholic Schools NSW
Kapunda Press
Paperback 100 pages, $24.95
August 2024 release
ISBN 9781923224247
“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
children, including conductor Charles Mackerras — was a member of that
establishment in Sydney. But in 1933, to the shock of family and
friends, she crossed the religious and social divide to convert to
Catholicism.
Her posthumously published memoirs, Divided Heart, offered a
heartfelt account of this decision. Yet they also left an enormous
amount unsaid.
In this volume, Patrick Mullins sheds light on the gaps and silences
in Mackerras’s account. He explores how she approached faith, family,
and self-understanding in an Australia now long vanished. He reflects on
how she reckoned with the decision to embrace Catholicism, and the
influences that coloured the portrayal of her conversion. The Divided Heart of Catherine Mackerras
traces the contemporary parallels of Mackerras’s story and its
resonances in a country that, a century on, sees itself as determinedly
secular — yet continues to ask similar questions and experience the same
deep yearnings.
Patrick Mullins is the award-winning author of Tiberius with a Telephone (2018), The Trials of Portnoy
(2020), and Who Needs the ABC? (2022). He wrote The Divided Heart of
Catherine Mackerras while a Visiting Fellow of the PM Glynn Institute at
Australian Catholic University.
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