The collective history of Patricia’s forebears is representative of the Koroit Irish generally. Like so many other immigrants, Bridget McNamara, Daniel Bowman, and Hugh Reilly all arrived in the district during the mid-1850s. Bridget Dwyer most likely also arrived in these years. The migrants shared the experience of leaving home and enduring months at sea aboard an immigrant ship. The culture shock and phycological dislocation must have been substantial. The voyage out and the first few years of adaption to the new colony would have been a common bond at Tower Hill.
A degree of Irish solidarity is evident even from this early period and likely grew stronger as the community became more organised and established. There were links between certain families that predated their arrival in the Southwest. Some families and individuals came from locations in Ireland where people had long known each other. Additionally, there was a great propensity for Irish assisted immigrants to marry among themselves. Family groups that arrived at Tower Hill included young women who found partners among immigrant families and men of their own background. The Church and the Irish Catholic congregation began to network and to establish a structures to support the community.
The immigrants of the 1850s were supported by those who had arrived earlier during the 1840s. Conditions in Ireland had changed through the famine years and the trauma of the great hunger must have affected the newer emigrants to the Southwest. It is difficult to say just how this impacted the community as there is a great silence about those times in terms of how people actually felt about what had befallen them.
The sheer struggle to survive in the new colony likely produced a degree of wariness and circumspection. Immigrants needed time to adjust and to establish themselves within the system that was on offer. Life in the Southwest was similar in some ways to that of Ireland. In other ways life was quite different. Apart from the Irish, there were also many recently arrived immigrants from Scotland and England. There were others living at Tower Hill with long experience of the colonies dating back to previous decades and the penal settlements of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.
The were also First Nations people in the Southwest and there was a range of views regarding them. The newly arrived noted the racism and the prejudices of the colony and they themselves may have been receptive to this, or at least felt it unwise to question what was going on. There were a marginalised group that had been displaced from their homeland.
Patricia’s Irish forebears arrived in the years just prior to the establishment of the Koroit township. It was not until the 1860s that people relocated in greater numbers to the town following its survey in 1856 and first land sales in 1857. In its first decades Koroit was not the Irish Catholic hub of later years.
Irish assisted immigrants lived and worked where the principal proprietors and other employers had their land. Some landholdings were quite extensive, such as the Farnham Survey or estates such as Yangery Park. Landless immigrants could rent strips of land on the estates or work as laborers on farms. There were also middle-sized farms in operation, largely run by settler immigrants who could afford to buy freehold blocks following parish surveys. Most of the mid-sized farms were in the hands of Protestant settlers from Ulster, Scotland or England. Some Irish Catholics managed to purchase farms by the mid-1850s.
One example of a Catholic family that managed to obtain a freehold farming property was that of Mary and William Mahony. The couple had arrived in the early 1840s from Tipperary. By the mid-1850s they owned a farm at Killarney on which they built a homestead they called Ballyhurst. After William Mahony died in 1858, Mary ran the farm with the assistance of her children and farm laborers hired from the new wave of assisted immigrants. Another example of an Irish Catholic farming family of that period is that of Ellen and Patrick Conrick. They also employed farm laborers from the newly arrived wave of immigrants.
Over time, more and more farmland was purchased by Irish immigrant families. In time, a group of Catholic landowners emerged and so the Irish developed their own hierarchies based on landownership and labor relations.
Koroit sits on the northern banks of the lake. As a town, Koroit dates from 1856 when construction of the Tower Hill Lake Common School was commenced. The town survey was completed that year and the following year the initial land sales were held at Belfast. Most of the first lots sold were on High Street and by the early 1860s a strip of houses, shops and hotels were standing along High Street.
The history of Koroit has been outlined in “A Green and Pleasant Land – A history of Koroit”. Peter Yule, a respected and qualified historian from Warrnambool, was commissioned in the late 1990s by the Council to undertake an updated edition of “A Green and Pleasant Land”. This second edition is excellent and incorporates most of Harry McCorkell’s first edition. Peter Yule studied and taught history at the University of Melbourne before moving to Warrnambool where he worked in business while also writing histories of Warrnambool, Koroit and the Shire of Minhamite.
Another valuable source of information is the heritage study undertaken by the Moyne Shire, written by Helen Doyle and published in 2006 with an excellent bibliography. Doyle has a strong interest in local heritage and is the author of numerous publications. She wrote a wonderful history of Saint Brigid’s Crossley, for example.
David Turland’s history of Woodford and Yangery and Mary Bennett’s history of Woolsthorpe are also informative and evocative accounts, as is a Shamrock Beneath the Southern Cross by Pamela Marriot. The work of Local history groups such as the Koroit Historical Society and the Warrnambool Historical Society and Family History Group are great resources for local history.
Thousands of Europeans lived in the Southwest even before Koroit was established as a town. In 1850 there were nine hundred Europeans at Belfast and three hundred and fifty Europeans at the new town of Warrnambool. In addition, the European population of the rural districts around Tower Hill and on the coast included an additional six hundred people in 1850, with further people living in more outlying areas. The total population of the Southwest between Port Fairy and Warrnambool in 1850 was in excess of two thousand. Some of these people left for the goldfields but soon additional people arrived on the immigrant vessels.
The Indigenous population of the Belfast and Portland regions was counted separately and was considered to be in rapid decline. In most population statistics of the time, the Indigenous population is omitted entirely or noted only in passing reference. Population estimates were attempted but Aboriginal people were not considered part of the community and were not enumerated the same way.
The European population around Tower Hill in the 1850s came primarily from England, Scotland, Ireland, Tasmania and Sydney. In 1850, the Irish in the district were a minority, but by the end of the 1860s they were a majority. The Irish Catholics were mostly agricultural laborers and servants. Most of the larger landlords in the Koroit area in the 1850s were Protestants but most of the Protestants in the Southwest were neither large landowners nor gentry proprietors. The number of large proprietors was relatively small, despite their prominence.
Most Protestants were ordinary working people engaged in laboring of one kind or another. Assisted emigrants were all loaded indiscriminately onto the ships irrespective of religion, and while the religion of assisted immigrants was noted, this had little bearing on the experience of those at sea or in the employment market upon arrival. Once at Portland or Geelong, immigrants were disembarked collectively through a similar indiscriminate process. Most assisted immigrants were part of the working class despite their differences. While there were differences between the various sectarian communities, there was also much in common.
Levels of literacy and education were generally higher in the Protestant community, although this was uneven. The Protestant ethos in general placed a high regard on formal education and stressed individually directed self-improvement. The Temperance Movement held a greater hold over the Protestant community. Whereas Catholics were prominent as hoteliers, more Protestants became shop keepers and business owners than Catholics.
At the time Koroit was surveyed, William Rutledge owned substantial freehold in the area, including one hundred and ninety acres of semi-cleared farmland on the northern edge of the new town of Koroit. In 1862, following the Rutledge Company’s insolvency, this land on the northern edge of Koroit was purchased by Samuel McGregor, a prominent Scottish born local businessman and district politician who also had interests in squatter runs at Macarthur.
McGregor’s uncle was Samuel Gorrie, who was an overseer and manager on the Eumeralla river country in the early 1840s at the time of the Eumeralla wars. Gorrie emerged as a pastoral leaseholder in his own right in the Eumeralla district from 1846, when he took over Eumeralla West from Benjamin Boyd and subsequently the adjacent Ardonachie Run.
Samuel McGregor was a canny businessman and proprietor who always had his eye out for a profitable deal. He worked as an agent for several of the more prominent squatters of the district, and was in partnership with William Rutledge for a time in the late 1850s. McGregor subdivided his land at Koroit into farm blocks of a few acres and into smaller town blocks along the northern side of what is now Commercial Road. These blocks in the new town of Koroit were all sold by 1865. The building surge on Commercial Road permanently moved the commercial center of the town away from High Street.
David McLaws was yet another prominent Scottish businessmen and proprietor who arrived in Belfast during the early 1840s. He initially worked for John Cox at his station near Mount Napier. McLaws owned most of the land along the southern side of Commercial Road in Koroit, which he purchased from the Crown at the first land sales in 1857. From the late 1860s he began to lease or sell his blocks along the road, which was becoming the main thoroughfare.
Men such as McLaws and McGregor were personally committed to a regime of thrift, industry and individual responsibility. They tended not to drink alcohol and encouraged others to do the same. They were able to take advantage of the labor of former convicts and recently arrived immigrants, and they both associated with squatters in the Southwest during some of the most intense episodes of frontier conflict.
By the mid-1870s, shops and business premises lined virtually the entire length of Commercial Road. It was then that most of the churches, schools, and government buildings were built.
There were more houses dotted around the countryside than in the town of Koroit itself. Rural dwellings sat on small lots of a few acres. From the 1870s most houses were simple four-room weatherboard cottages. Weatherboards became more available as the saw-milling trade developed and replaced the rough cut slab huts and the rubble and earth dwellings of earlier days. The small weatherboard houses were on blocks which had vegetable gardens, milking cows, and chickens. A central passageway ran from the front door to the backdoor with two rooms on each side. Semi-detached kitchens and outhouses were at the rear of each house.
There were so many houses in the countryside that it was hard to know where the town began and where the countryside ended. Koroit in its early days was more of a rural village set amid closely settled farmland. This was not typical of most Australian towns, which tended to have a clearer delineation between rural and township areas.
Most of the original vegetation of the area had been cleared by the 1870s, replaced by a denuded agricultural landscapes. Shelter belts of pine trees were planted along fence lines as windbreaks. This newly created denuded landscape was much less attractive than what had existed previously under the Indigenous regime. The landscape has changed again from those less enlightened days and the Southwest is now part of one of the most extensive and productive agricultural landscapes in Australia, beautiful in its own way.
In the 1860s Potatoes replaced wheat as the staple crop grown around Tower Hill. Wheat farming moved to newly opened areas in the Wimmera which were less susceptible to rust disease. The price of wheat fell sharply at the end of the gold rushes, while potato prices remained steady. In any case, many of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the 1850s and 1860s were accustomed to growing potatoes, which suited the soils and the climate of the district very well.
The change from wheat to potatoes allowed small acreages and close rural settlement to flourish. As Peter Yule writes, “On the fertile soil around Tower Hill, it was possible to support a family on a farm of ten acres or even less. Twenty or thirty acres was enough to live very comfortably. The potato growing economy led to a very distinctive pattern of development in early Koroit. The whole district from Crossley to Yangery was very closely settled with hundreds of small cottages dotting the countryside. Within the town of Koroit, settlement was not much closer than in the surrounding countryside. Only the churches and shops marked the town. Koroit blended into the countryside.”
Visitors noted the distinctiveness of the Tower Hill district in comparison to other parts of Victoria. Many of the Irish came from a pre-modern rural society, where both agricultural traditions and customary religion centred on the family’s collective farming endeavours. A common ambition was to own farmland of one’s own.
Many of the Irish migrants brought with them a strong sense of kinship based upon a social network of extended-family connections. This tradition rests upon the metaphor of the family writ large and in this clannish outlook the Irish were somewhat similar to immigrants from the Scottish Highlands.
Both the Presbyterian and the Catholic traditions sat side by side around Koroit. To an extent, both traditions played off each other, as was the case in Ireland and Scotland. People were well aware of the sectarian divisions in society and mostly followed the well-established rules for social interaction across the divides. They sought to negotiate change and to fit in with neighbors from other communities using well-known patterns. People sought to recreate something of the old world in the new land as best they could. There was a tendency to be nostalgic for a romanticised representation of the old ways of living, sanctified in memory despite the reality of the very different situation of the Western District.
In Koroit the prevalence of the conacre leasing system, borrowed directly from Ireland, lent a certain distinctiveness to the rural economy. Some landowners rented out strips of their farmland to farmers who did not generally own their own land or who owned just a small block. It made sense for many of the larger landowners to rent out strips of their farmland to laboring men who could employ family labor and inherited skills to the task of cultivating potatoes. This system of agricultural production was one reason the desired family size was large.
Under the con-acre system, the lease on the land was for one crop only for a pre-established price. While the conacre renters took on the risk of crop failure due to bad seasons or poor markets, in most years the returns from potato crops around Tower Hill would cover the rents. In particularly good seasons a nice profit could be made. Much depended on the skill of the farmer and the capacity of his extended family to do the work. As in all farming, the weather and the markets were also important factors in determining profitability.
Land was leased in strips ranging from two to twelve acres. Often the plots a family worked were not adjacent to each other and so farmers would have to walk from one strip to another, which facilitated interactions in the fields and lanes.
Hugh Reilly and his family worked for years as leasehold farmers and by the 1880s he was particularly associated with farmland owned by Patrick Conrick. From the early 1880s, the Conrick family were leasing their land rather than farming it themselves. Hugh Reilly worked on parts of Patrick Conrick’s farmland before purchasing a section of it in 1903. From that time Hugh became a successful farm owner in his own right.
Hugh was perhaps typical of the class of Irish farmer who managed to eventually buy freehold farmland. Some successful farmers consolidated their holdings by buying out neighbours. In this way some Irish Catholic laborers became landholders in their own right.
The emergent Catholic landowning class of farmers could in turn rent out land to others through various conacre or sharecropping arrangements. In this way they employed farm laborers from within their own community but they also employed laborers from across the sectarian divides. In this way a Catholic elite arose over time.
By the twentieth century many of the former Protestant landowners had been replaced by Catholic farm owners, although Protestant farmers remained in the district. Many children of successful Protestant farming families moved to take up occupations in other locations. In time this tendency for a proportion of the young people to move to the city for work or educational opportunities became widespread, but initially it served to increase the proportion of Catholics in the district.
Hugh Reilly was able to purchase a section of the Conrick property but not all Irish families were successful leasehold farmers who then became landowners. Many people continued to rely on seasonal work for wages. In the fields around Koroit, potato picking paid by the bag was a tradition that persisted well into the 1970s. This was hard and competitive work.
According to Peter Yule, “The uncertainties and dependencies of the con-acre system naturally led to an almost insatiable desire for freehold land on the part of local farmers.” Land ownership was the primary way in which status could be accrued in a farming community. Over time, the land held by a cohesive group of largely Protestant landowners was re-distributed among a network of Irish Catholic farming families. Poorer families, of whatever religious background, provided the labor pool for the more successful farmers, of whatever background.
Unlike in some other parts of the Western District, the redistribution of land ownership around Tower Hill was largely market driven, and did not rely on state intervention via the various Selection Acts. These legislative acts had a great impact on patterns of landownership in the pastoral districts, but did not really influence ownership of agricultural land at Tower Hill, which had been surveyed quite early in comparison to many other places.
In this regard, the situation around Tower Hill was also different to that of Ireland, where widespread government legislated land reform initiatives were put in place in a political environment of significant social agitation for land reform. The Land Acts in Ireland from 1870 to the early years of the twentieth century greatly reduced the concentration of land ownership there. Some large estates were broken up or reduced in size.
In Ireland the greatest beneficiaries of land reform was an emergent Catholic middle class of mid-sized farmers who consolidated land holding into their own hands often at the expense of smallholders and former tenants. The rural Catholic middle class in Ireland was closely aligned with the growing influence of the Church in rural districts and tended to be socially conservative in its values and interests. This was replicated at Koroit to some extent.
By the start of the twentieth century Koroit was essentially the market town for the surrounding farming districts. According to Peter Yule, at this time the town was at the center of “the richest and most closely settled rural area in Victoria. Many dozens of small wooden cottages were scattered among the potato fields. The shops, hotels and other business in Koroit depended entirely on the farmers between Illowa, Killarney, Kirkstall and Woolsthorpe for their survival and prosperity.”
The township was an integrated part of the rural landscape and depended entirely on the primary production carried out in the surrounding fields. People gathered on Saturdays and Sundays to play sport and pray together. Local dances, with live musical performers, were part of the lives of many residents. The pubs were busy, convivial places, especially on market days and holidays. According to Yule, “Koroit was fully self-sufficient in shops and had a solid manufacturing sector based on food processing, agricultural implements, and horse drawn vehicles. The town had its own newspaper, electricity supply, power station, as well as a full and varied cultural and social life.”
The first world war, conscription, and Irish Independence
Koroit’s idiosyncratic response to the First World War serves to highlight some of the things that set the Tower Hill district apart. This political distinctiveness became an issue of some national prominence. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 and subsequent runup to the Irish War of Independence had a profound impact on the Koroit district. The initial coolness to the war and then the emergence of feelings of hostility towards the proposal for national conscription were virtually unknown anywhere else in Australia.
The district’s response to the war was unusual even in relation to the response of Catholics in other localities. Catholics in Koroit were firmly against the proposal whereas Protestants in the town were generally supportive of the government’s plan for national conscription. The overwhelming vote of the Irish community against the government’s preferred outcome in the referenda of 1916 and 1917 highlighted deep fissures in district society. The war years provides an example of the distinctiveness of a large section of the Koroit community at that time.
The response of the Koroit Irish with regard to the war and the plan for conscription in Australia should be understood within its international context. At the time of the First World War, Ireland was still entirely part of the United Kingdom. As war in Europe and in the Middle East raged on, the struggles in Ireland against British rule escalated, particularly in the wake of the Easter Rising in Dublin during 1916. The Rising in Dublin was put down by British forces, but the harsh response of the authorities in the aftermath of the rebellion turned many ordinary Irish people firmly against British rule and fanned support for republicanism. The leaders of the rebellion were ruthlessly executed by firing squad over a period of ten days and the secret nature and steady pace of the executions deeply shocked the Irish public and re-traumatized the population.
The events in Ireland of 1916, which in Australia coincided with the referendum campaign, saw a hardening of opinion in Koroit against conscription. Even prior to 1916 the Catholic population of Koroit was growing impatient with the ever-increasing demands of the war, a conflict they never embraced with any enthusiasm. The Australian and British governments were demanding an ever-increasing contribution in terms of servicemen to go to the front and financial commitment from the public.
Many in the Koroit Irish community felt that this was not their war to fight, especially when they identified much more closely with the struggles being waged in Ireland against the same British government that was demanding more and more of Australia. Such sentiment only increased as the conflict in Ireland intensified through 1916 and as the Australian losses in Europe mounted.
Generally, at the start of the war in Europe, the leadership of the Irish Catholic community in the capital cities of Australia supported the federal government’s war effort, or at least they gave lip service to their support for the war. At the outbreak of war, the Catholic leadership in Australia did not want to rock the national boat, given that the Catholic community was a minority of generally more disadvantaged people. There would have been many negative repercussions in opposing the war at a time of national crisis.
The Catholic leadership did not want to antagonize the dominant power holders in Australia, largely comprised of loyalist Protestants and empire nationalists at the time. The senior clergy followed a gradualist strategy aimed at securing an equal seat at the table. It was felt that considerable progress had already been made by the Irish in Australia, an achievement which seemed foolish to jeopardize. The bishops were pursuing social and political advancement and wished to retain hard-won freedoms in worship and education for their congregations. They did not seek nationalist or religious confrontation, especially on issues which might threaten the accommodation they sought with the Protestant power holders in this country.
This mirrored the bishops’ strategy in Ireland prior to the Easter Rising, where the top levels of the church sought to avoid showing support for republican and radically nationalist causes in the community. The Irish church leadership did not want to jeopardize the hard fought gains the church had negotiated with the British administration in the decades running up to the war.
However, this attitude of accommodation and quiescence was not necessarily reflective of the feelings of most Catholic laypeople in Koroit. From the outset many did not support the war, and some made no secret of their ever-increasing indifference or downright opposition. Later, as the war progressed, especially once Bishop Daniel Mannix rose to prominence in Victoria, the position of the Church hierarchy in Melbourne became more complicated and generally less well disposed to Britain’s war effort. This coincided with the rising tide of nationalist and republican resistance in Ireland, especially following the Easter Rising. News of the rebellion in Dublin in 1916 and its deadly aftermath quickly made its way to the Southwest.
Just why this isolated example of divergent community response to the war was manifested in Koroit and not in other places is a matter of conjecture. It likely reflected the stronger community-based bonds of Irish national feeling and an allegiance with the struggles of relatives and friends in Ireland. In Koroit, the Irish were a majority of the population, unlike virtually anywhere else in Australia, and by that stage they were socially and economically assertive to some extent, with their own well developed social institutions linked to the dominant Church in the town. By the time of the First World War, younger Irish people in Koroit were Australian born, but there remained a strong tendency for people to marry within their cultural group and there remained firm communal and religious links with Ireland.
People in the district maintained family connections to Ireland through correspondence and visits back and forth. James and Daniel Bowman, for example, regularly wrote to their sister in Ireland and both men visited Ireland towards the end of their lives. Charlie Reilly, Hugh’s brother, returned to Ireland after many years in Australia and the brothers and their families kept in touch by letter. The links were on-going and personal, and the news from Ireland was shared within the Koroit community.
There was still a steady though dwindling stream of Irish immigration to Koroit until the turn of the twentieth century. Among the lower levels of the Catholic clergy, links between Southwest Victoria and Ireland were especially strong, given that some religious orders such as the Christian Brothers, the Redemptorists, and the Sisters of Mercy were headquartered in the motherland and there was an exchange of people, ideas and practices, not all commendable.
The Koroit Irish were in many ways not well integrated with mainstream society at the time of the First World War. The majority were of rural background. An aspect of the transplanted culture was pre-modern in orientation. Most people had not spent much time in large cities either in Ireland or Australia. The significant conflicts in Ireland associated with land reform there meant that antipathy to British policy persisted.
Appeals to the Empire and to King and Country did not make much sense to many in Koroit. They were not English so why should they feel loyalty to England, particularly given all that had happened between the two countries. Obituaries in the Koroit Sentinel in the period running up to the war frequently referred to the deceased as being an Irish patriot or taking a keen interest in Irish nationalist politics. Irish politics and culture were a constant theme of most of the Catholic social groups in the district. Lectures and presentations on Irish nationalist themes were well attended.
When commentators accused some in Koroit of being disloyal to the Crown in Australia, the response seems to have been indifference. One’s loyalty to Australia could lie beyond the Crown’s remit and loyalty to Australia did not have to orbit around the British Empire. This alternative conception of Australian nationalism was quite challenging to some people of Loyalist and Unionist backgrounds.
The Immigration Agent and other colonial officials had argued in the 1850s against allowing too much migration from southern Ireland into Victoria. The Empire Loyalists of the nineteenth century had no real reason to fret. Republican disloyalty in the body politic, supposedly manifest in Koroit during the First World War, was localized to one small and remote rural district and was mostly temporary. Once the Republic of Ireland was on the road to independence from the mid-1920s, a lot of the local heat went out of the nationalist issue. By the time of the Second World War, most of Ireland was an independent republic, free from British rule, and people here had moved on.
The complicating factor in Koroit in the First World War in terms of community and social cohesion was the perspective of the Protestant minority of Koroit. Naturally, they were neither Irish Nationalists nor Republicans. They mostly shared the same British imperial loyalties common to much of the rest of Australia. Sectarian divisions in the community became unusually heated, based around differing responses to the war.
This inflamed and openly sectarian rift in the community was actually very unusual. For the most part, before and after the war, overt sectarian frictions were not particularly to the fore, although sectarian strains were certainly present at some level. The differing national and religious communities in the district generally managed to get along without undue open discord, even if relations were not completely harmonious. It may well be that the leaderships of various fraternal brotherhoods and other social organisations shared a general desire to keep relations peaceful and respectful where possible. However, the World War, the independence movement in Ireland, and the issue of conscription in Australia, upset the boundaries of social harmony in the district.
The issue of compulsory overseas military service through conscription was especially contentious because it impinged on people directly. It was one thing for those so interested to go to the war voluntarily, quite another for people to be forced to go to war when they might not support significant aspects of the conflict. People felt they were being asked to publicly declare their attitude to the war and it became an issue that defined where one’s personal loyalties to the Empire lay. The series of events commencing with the outbreak of war in 1914, followed by the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, and the conscription referenda in Australia caused an emotionally charged rift between Koroit’s Catholic and Protestant communities.
Unlike in other towns, the young men of Koroit did not rush to enlist when war broke out. This was in strong contrast to the rest of Australia. In January 1915, Robert Nairn, the pro-war Presbyterian minister in Koroit, made the point that there were only six young men recruited from the town, all Protestants. A large recruiting meeting was held in the Mechanics Hall in Koroit in July 1915. This resulted in an upsurge in recruitment in Koroit with forty-five new volunteers, but only three were Catholics. The Catholic Young Men’s Society of Koroit and Crossley had over four hundred members, but only one joined the army, and that was not until mid-1916. This was all very unusual in the context of mainstream Australian society of the time.
In April 1916, a recruiting train toured Victoria. Senior politicians, military officers, and Protestant clergy made recruiting appeals at each stop. Many young men stepped forward to sign up. When the train came to Koroit, the speakers tried to show why the Irish should enlist. Some of the local men responded with a hail of eggs. Just one recruit stepped forward. The Premier of Victoria said he was ashamed of the people of Koroit.
The situation in Koroit started to attract comment in the metropolitan press and the fact that the people of the district were less than enthusiastic for the war became increasingly recognised. The Melbourne Argus, for example, described the area as “the neutral zone.” By 1916, there were frequent complaints within social networks such as the Red Cross that the Catholic women of Koroit were not contributing their share to the war effort. In most country towns, the Red Cross was the organization where women’s efforts in support of the war was concentrated. In Koroit, the local Red Cross group was entirely comprised of Protestants and was informally boycotted by Catholics. The boycott was a tactic which had been developed in Ireland during the period of the Land War there.
The Koroit Sentinel was both Protestant and pro-war and it always tried to maintain enthusiasm for the war. However, despite its best efforts, the Sentinel could not change the active indifference or hostility felt by many citizens of Koroit. As the campaign in favor of conscription got under way, the newspaper ran many articles and editorials promoting a “yes” vote and gave no space at all to any opposing views. The Sentinel waged a fervent campaign for compulsory military service. It published letters and advertisements in favor of conscription. These concerted efforts were all to no avail in persuading the Catholic community to modify its views.
The Easter Rising in Dublin and its bloody aftermath made support for Irish independence a more disloyal position than it had been before. To support the Irish independence movement was to be openly treacherous to the Empire at a time of war.
The Australian government was led by a pro-war faction of the ALP that had split from the main body of the party. The pro-war group in the ALP then joined the Conservative parties in a coalition. Billy Hughes, the Australian prime minister in this coalition government, was under British pressure to supply more troops. However the most enthusiastic young men had already enlisted. There had already been many casualties at Gallipoli during 1915 and then on the Western Front.
The coalition government of Billy Hughes was confident it would win the referendum to have the policy of compulsory overseas military service approved. A majority of the ALP rank and file was opposed to conscription but a significant minority supported the measure. Conservative political parties were strongly in favour of compulsory military service and advocated a “yes” vote. Australia’s conservative political parties were traditionally wary of Catholics. Some were not at all enthusiastic about having Irish Catholics as members and certainly not in leadership positions. The majority of working class Irish Australians supported the Labor Party.
For many Protestants in Australia, the conflict in Europe was not a foreign war and they genuinely felt the fate of the Empire was at stake. This was an important issue for them but not for Irish Catholics. Many Catholics were of the view that if a young man wanted to enlist for war service that was his business, but enlistment should not be made compulsory.
Most Irish Catholics in the Koroit district were aligned with the section of the ALP which opposed conscription. ALP membership was strong in Koroit. Peter Yule notes that “the ALP had grown rapidly around Koroit, and for many years the Koroit branch was the largest ALP branch in rural Victoria.” The district had for years returned Labor candidates in most elections.
In the run-up to the referendum, the Catholic Church cemented its alliance with the anti-conscription section of the ALP to mount a campaign to oppose conscription. Inexorably, the loyalty of the Catholic Church came to be questioned, especially once Daniel Mannix rose to prominence. Some conservatives were of the view that to be a loyal Australian entailed being loyal to Britain and to the Empire.
Archbishop Daniel Mannix became a pivotal factor in these events. He was an Irish-born clergyman and unlike many of the senior clergy, Mannix was an ardent Irish nationalist. He was quite open in his support for Irish independence. Mannix effectively led the pro-Irish, anti-conscription forces in Australia.
Mannix came to Australia from Ireland in 1913 and he always had close ties to Koroit. Mannix visited Koroit frequently. He first visited in 1914 when he preached at the opening of Saint Brigid’s Church at Crossley. For many years he took his annual holidays in the town and he was often seen strolling in his archbishop’s regalia through the streets or along the beach at Killarney.
The archbishop was revered in Koroit by many of its Catholic majority. In some Koroit families there was a doctrinaire acceptance of his conservative Catholic teaching. Most Catholics in the district strongly supported his overtly pro-Irish sentiments and his legacy still loomed large in Koroit throughout the 1960s. Lionel expressed skepticism about his influence over the Koroit Irish community. Lionel considered Mannix to be at the apex of a local personality cult.
A large section of the town developed a personal loyalty to Mannix. Helen Doyle in her history of Crossley describes Mannix as follows: “Dr Mannix was a Cork man with a formidable intellect and a passionate affection for his native land. As an Irishman, he was a product of his time, his views shaped by the Gaelic Revival and Irish nationalist movement of the 1880s and 1890s.” Doyle goes onto describe how Mannix was drawn to Koroit due to the fact that it was physically and culturally reminiscent of his homeland. Daniel Mannix became Archbishop of Melbourne in 1917, a position he held for more than forty years, and from this high office he progressively strengthened the district’s Catholic school system.
During the First World War, the most dramatic incident of the conscription referendum campaign came when the federal member for Wannon, Arthur Rodgers, attempted to speak in favour of conscription at a meeting held in the Crossley schoolroom. Although he had been raised a Catholic, Rodgers was a Conservative rural politician who later served as a government minister under Billy Hughes. At the time, this was somewhat unusual.
The meeting at Crossley turned very ugly and attracted a lot of unfavorable press coverage. The Melbourne Age of 28 October 1916 reported the event of three days earlier as follows: “Mr. A. S. Rodgers, M.P., attempted to address a large number of men at Crossley Roman Catholic schoolroom on Wednesday evening in favor of the referendum. No local person being willing to do so, Mr. Gordon, of Port Fairy, took the chair. For over an hour, amidst a tremendous uproar, Mr. Rodgers tried unsuccessfully to make himself heard. Two police constables present were powerless to keep order, and they, with Mr. Rodgers, Recruiting Sergeant Stevens and the chairman were bespattered with rotten eggs in all stages of decay.
Finally, Crossley “broke its neutrality.” Someone called for “Three cheers for the Kaiser,” which were followed by a roar of cheering for Germany.
The meeting by this time had worked itself into a frenzy, and at the earnest request of the chairman and Sergeant Stevens Mr. Rodgers abandoned the meeting. He left the room with Constable Nelson, and was fortunate enough to get away in the darkness without injury.
The crowd, not being able to find Mr. Rodgers, turned their attention to the chairman. Amid yells of “Hang the —” Mr. Gordon was seized and brutally kicked. An attempt was made to fasten a buggy trace around his neck, whilst a search was made for a rope. The chairman was then pushed to “the place selected for his execution,” but a man holding a white flag over his head intervened on his behalf. In the confusion the light went out, and Mr. Gordon quietly walked away through the crowd. Sergeant Stevens had a vehicle ready and Mr. Gordon sprang in. There was a wild yell from the crowd when it was realised that their victim was escaping, and as the vehicle reached the road attempts were made to drag Mr. Gordon out, and stones were thrown.
“Give me the trenches,” said Serjeant Stevens; “they are safer than this.”
The report describes very poor behavior on the part of the crowd, albeit wonderfully described. It should be noted that this account, provided to the Argus and the Age newspapers, was sourced from the chair of the pro-conscription meeting, hardly an impartial observer. Supporters of the Crossley congregation said the reports were exaggerated and they defended the community from what they considered sectarian slurs and unfounded claims of disloyalty. The Member for Wannon, Arthur Rodgers, denied that he had heard anyone call for three cheers for The Kaiser. The report of the incident was published on the day of the referendum when the newspapers were trying to get people to turn out to vote in favor of conscription.
When the votes at the Crossley booth were counted, all votes cast there were against the proposal. In the early 1960s, the author and his two older brothers attended Saint Bridgid’s Crossley where these events happened. It is likely that some of the grandparents of children in our class were part of the unruly crowd that gathered in 1916.
It is perhaps understandable that the author was never told the details of what happened at this public meeting in 1916. The nuns of the Good Samaritan Order who were our teachers merely told us that the government’s recruiters had been run out of town, as if this was just as it should have been.
The question remains, though, as to why the authorities of the time should have thought that people from Crossley would vote for the conscription measure at a time when their friends and relatives in Ireland were struggling against British imperial forces. Crossley and Killarney were almost entirely Irish Catholic communities, comprised of many people whose forebears had left Ireland in the wake of the famine and whose families in the district had kept abreast of news concerning political events in Ireland.
Further afield, in nearby places such as Woolsthorpe, support for the war was very high. That hamlet had a large Protestant majority. It is said that all the young men of Woolsthorpe who could volunteer for the war did so. Several of these young men did not return, including a young man related to Lionel on his paternal side.
The upshot of the fracas at the Crossley school hall came in December 1916 when John Devlin, Owen O’Sullivan, John Joseph Kelly, William Holscher, John Kelly and John Ryan were charged with having behaved in an offensive manner. All pleaded not guilty, but were subsequently found guilty by the magistrate and fined twenty shillings each.
The government held two conscription referenda, one in 1916 and another in 1917. In both referenda the people of Koroit and district voted overwhelmingly against conscription. In the Koroit sub-division, the 1916 result was 827 “for” and 1879 “against”, while the 1917 result was even more decisive, with 671 “for” and 2070 “against”. At Killarney in 1917 there were 195 “no” votes and zero “yes” votes.
In Victoria as a whole, a very slim majority in 1916 voted “yes”, whilst in 1917 a slim majority voted “no.” The referenda failed to pass at the national level in either year because the “yes” campaign failed to get a majority of states to support their cause. In January 1918, the Kirkstall branch of the ALP organized a grand banquet to celebrate the “no” victory, and five Labor members of Parliament attended.
In the Koroit district as a whole, it is thought that over one hundred and eighty men enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces, and between thirty and forty of these were killed. It is clear that a large majority of the men who enlisted were Protestants, although there were a few Catholics who did enlist, particularly in the first two years, prior to the Easter Rising. As Peter Yule writes in his History of Koroit, “It is the case that the Protestant population of Koroit suffered more than average in the First World War, while the Catholics suffered very little.” Other places, such as Mortlake, which had a large Presbyterian population, suffered very severely in terms of the numbers of its sons killed and wounded.
This discrepancy in community suffering and in “patriotic” commitment caused a degree of resentment over subsequent years. What could one say to neighboring families who had lost a loved one, when one’s own family members did not serve or even support the cause in which so many sons were wounded or died? The Catholic community sought to mend relations and to quickly move on from the bitterness of the war period.
In the years immediately after the war, while other towns quickly erected large and elaborate memorials to the war, Koroit seemed to want to forget the whole episode. It was not until 1928 that a small memorial to the fallen was erected in the botanic gardens. While other towns rushed to form branches of the Returned Services League, Peter Yule writes that “the Koroit branch was not established until 1933, and struggled for membership until the Second World War.” By that stage, Irish independence had been won and the local links to the old country had dimmed.
The period between the First World war and the Second World War saw some fundamental changes in the countryside around Koroit. Most important was the consolidation of properties, which in turn led to a marked decrease in the population living in the countryside. There was some consolidation of the district’s population. Koroit stayed about the same size but with considerably fewer businesses. The old con-acre leasing system gradually disappeared in its more traditional form.
As well, people moved away from the district to Warrnambool and further afield. Small properties of twenty acres or so became less viable. More successful farmers bought out their neighbors. Mechanization changed farming techniques in ways that benefited larger holdings. Many families left the hamlets of Crossley, Southern Cross, Kirkstall and Illowa.
The Politics of The Split and the influence of the Church in the Twentieth Century
In the twentieth century, both Federal and State electoral divisions in Australia were split into smaller geographic administrative zones called “sub-divisions”. The ALP was the dominant party in the Koroit sub-division throughout the 1930s, receiving a majority of votes at every election. The alliance of the Catholic Church and the ALP remained strong. Irish Catholics supported the ALP because it was the party of the underdog and the oppressed working class and it seemed to offer the best chance to address the institutional grievances of Catholics. Also, the conservative parties were perceived to be unwelcoming and prejudiced against Catholics to some extent.
However, some larger Catholic landowners were starting to show signs of disillusionment with Labor. Farmers with middle-class aspirations were concerned by issues such as high tariffs on farm equipment. Tariffs had been increased to protect metropolitan based businesses and their workers from the threat of foreign competition. Also, the increased rates of pay farmers had to provide to unionized farm workers was a growing source of disgruntlement. Within the Catholic community, class and property divisions were more evident.
Additionally, some in the Catholic Church community began to be increasingly concerned by the alleged dangers from the growing influence of the Communist Party and radical left wing politics on the organised labor movement generally. Marxist based ideology was seen by many in the Catholic leadership as antithetical to Catholicism. This antipathy towards “Godless Communism” was widespread in many communities across the globe, especially among those in more privileged positions.
Despite this emerging unease in some quarters, the great majority of Koroit’s Catholic community remained loyal to the ALP until the split of 1955. By the time this schism in the Labor Party rent the community generally, the Second World War had come and gone.
In contrast to the previous war, the reaction of people in Koroit to the Second World War was not particularly different to that of most other rural towns in Victoria. While the Republic of Ireland remained officially neutral throughout the war, most Catholics in the Southwest thought the Nazis should be confronted, and support for the war only increased once Japan entered the conflict. Unlike Archbishop Mannix’s fierce opposition to conscription in the First World War, Mannix and the Catholic hierarchy adopted a unified stance in support of the war against Germany and Japan.
Koroit was a subdivision within the Victorian Legislative Assembly seat of Port Fairy, renamed Port Fairy and Glenelg in 1927, until the seat’s abolition in 1947. The seat was one of the safest ALP seats in the Victorian Parliament in the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1937 the ALP received 78 percent of the vote.
Change was waiting in the wings, however. By the end of the 1940s, as Peter Yule points out, “Catholics in Australia now had few distinct economic or social grievances and the Catholic Church hierarchy became increasingly concerned with the dangers of communist infiltration of the ALP”. There was now less discrepancy in wealth to distinguish Catholics from Protestants, and greater discrepancies in wealth had emerged within the Catholic population.
The conservative parties embarked on a long process of becoming more accommodating to middle-class Catholic membership. There was a growing realisation that Catholicism might ally with the conservative side of politics in Australia to form a bulwark against Labor’s more radical wing. The Church hierarchy, increasingly concerned with the dangers of communist infiltration within the ALP, commenced supporting groups of ALP members prepared to fight communist aligned sections of the ALP in an increasingly bitter struggle for control.
The National Catholic Rural Movement, led by Bob Santamaria, began “discussion groups” in towns and cities across Victoria. Such groups were established in Koroit and Kirkstall and these attracted a high level of support from those Catholics who were already ALP members. The supporters of this movement within the ALP became known as the “groupers” and they ran discussion groups at local venues and organised social functions.
By 1953, many Catholics in the Koroit community were aligned with the “groupers”. At that time, the Koroit ALP branch was one of the largest party branches in Victoria with eighty-three members, most of whom were Catholics.
The “groupers” confronted the ALP membership actively aligned with the communists. An outcome of the campaign was the formation of the largely Catholic Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The movement and the new party had the tacit backing of Archbishop Mannix and was effectively organised by Bob Santamaria and his cadres.
In 1955 the labor movement throughout Australia split, and the schism saw the formal foundation of the DLP as a completely separate political entity that was no longer part of the ALP. The split in Labor was especially acute in Victoria, where it brought down the state Labor government.
In Koroit, the majority of politically active Catholics were supporters of Manix, Santamaria and the “Movement.” When commenting upon the situation, Peter Yule asserts that “In Koroit, however, there was not so much a split as a collapse of the ALP, with almost all members leaving to join the DLP. The split in the ALP was accompanied by a great deal of bitterness in Koroit, much of it sectarian in nature.” Some businesses were boycotted or vandalized because of the political allegiances of their proprietors. The records of the ALP branch were burnt, and there was even an upsurge in schoolyard disputes centred on the purported political allegiances of parents.
Following the split, Crossley saw the strongest level of support for the DLP in Australia. Helen Doyle, in her history of Crossley, illustrates the great shift in political allegiance which occurred in the Crossley district at this time. She writes: “In 1952, [prior to the split], the Crossley booth had polled as follows: ALP 95, Liberals 27. Three years later, shortly after the split in 1955, the results had shifted dramatically: ALP 11, Liberals 19, DLP 76”. Around Tower Hill, strong local support for the DLP persisted until the 1970s.
Protestant business owners in the town tended to identify as middle-class and tended to be aligned with the Conservative parties. They were less affected by the internecine political split in Labor. Many working class Protestants and workers of a secular disposition tended to remain loyal to the ALP.
The DLP was concerned to uphold the rights of workers through “noncommunist” Trade Unions and it advocated spending more on health, education, and pensions. It was generally against what it saw as the excesses of capitalism, but this was combined with strident opposition to communism. The DLP advocated for a conservative domestic social program and a pro-American foreign policy, placing great emphasis on defence and Australia’s alliance with the United States. It was generally less concerned with traditional ties to Britain.
The party was strongly anti-abortion and generally opposed modern birth-control methods. It was skeptical of progressive feminism. It supported the traditional family as the proper basis of society and advocated for what it termed “family values”. It opposed so called “progressive” social movements and liberally permissive attitudes, despite the growing ascendency of these forces among young people from the 1960s and into the 1970s. Despite this, the DLP was not a party that advocated for the kind of neo-liberal economic policy that was then starting to emerge as fashionable on the conservative side of politics.
The DLP valued strong social control but this needed to be aligned with traditional Church teaching. The party became increasingly socially conservative, opposing homosexuality, abortion, pornography and illicit drugs. It took a clear stand against “permissiveness but it was not against programs of economic redistribution, so long as these programs were based on Catholic concepts of faith and family.
DLP membership was strong in the Southwest, perhaps stronger than anywhere else in Australia. The membership of the DLP overlapped with highly visible Catholic social organisations but it was also linked to more secretive Catholic fraternal organizations such the Holy Name Society and the Knights of the Southern Cross, both of which were significant forces in Koroit at different times. These Catholic organisations were relatively closed, hierarchical, top-down structures often led by strong personalities. Membership positions were often handed down through opaque family networks.
One of the roles of the Knights of the Southern Cross was to overcome barriers to the promotion of Catholics within the learned professions and in the nation’s elite bodies generally. Its objective was to foster a Catholic middle-class version of the left’s “Long march through the Institutions” or the Masonic movement’s networks of influence.
On a national level, the inclusion of conservative Catholics into state and professional institutions was a partial and limited success. Catholics are now in leadership roles in most political parties and professional organisations. Nevertheless, for many decades the tenor of the times was generally against the propagation of the movement’s more socially conservative programs. A more recent set of social conditions seems more favourable to a revival of conservative Catholic ideas, and the various movements aligned with these values have never given up or gone away. Increasingly, conservative Catholics align with conservatives of other faiths in a manner which would have been inconceivable in days gone by.
Following the Labor split of 1955, Koroit was consistently the highest DLP voting subdivision in Australia, with the DLP vote exceeding that of any other party at most elections until 1972. This distinctive political orientation of Koroit through the mid-twentieth century is perhaps the last great example of a well-defined characteristic that set Koroit apart from other places. There was probably no other Australian town where more of the electors voted for the DLP than for any other political party, year after year.
The influence of the church hierarchy remained strong in Koroit. Archbishop Daniel Mannix was a patron of the DLP, in conjunction with some of the other bishops. Although this support was not a formalized arrangement, it was widely acknowledged. Koroit was part of the Diocese of Ballarat, and the Bishop of Ballarat, James Patrick O’Collins, was a key ally of Daniel Mannix and Bob Santamaria. Bishop O’Collins was a leading figure in both the National Catholic Rural Movement and the Catholic Social Studies Movement, both allied to the DLP.
It is noteworthy that Bishop O’Collins predecessor as Bishop of Ballarat was Daniel Foley, the Irish born first cousin of Archbishop Mannix. Bishop Foley served as Bishop of Ballarat from 28 April 1916 until he died in Koroit on 31 October 1941. It is said that both Bishop Foley and Archbishop Mannix had relatives in the Koroit district, although the details of this are obscure. Another politically prominent priest with clearer family ties to the district was Monsignor Jim McInerney, who helped establish the DLP in the 1950s.
The author can recall serving as an altar boy at several services led by Bishop O’Collins. Like Archbishop Mannix, Bishop O’Collins holidayed at Koroit in the summer months, staying at the rather grand Presbytery building opposite the school. Bishop O’Collins did not enjoy saying the mass in English, which he was required to do after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s. He would lapse into Latin at every opportunity, even though the use of Latin had supposedly been superseded in Australian churches. Throughout the 1960s, some priests would advocate that parishioners should vote for the DLP during elections in Victoria.
Aunt Biddy was somewhat sympathetic to the DLP but her voting allegiance in the 1960s was to the Liberal Party. She was generally anti-Labor in her convictions and even prior to the split she did not support Labor. She was an admirer of Robert Menzies, the Liberal Party’s founder and leader who was Prime Minister throughout the 1950s, and into the 1960s. Biddy was strongly anti-socialist and advocated traditional conservative Catholic social values, and in this she was in line with the social conservatism of the DLP. She voted Liberal as it was the party of conservative government and because it was committed to free enterprise and open markets, much more so than was the DLP. She welcomed the increased role Catholics came to play in the Liberal Party, although she still thought the party was something of a closed shop when it came to wielding influence at a state and national level.
Lionel remained aligned with the mainstream ALP after the split of the mid-1950s. He was generally secular in his outlook, and religious conviction was not prominent in his life, although he acknowledged a supreme being. Lionel was never sufficiently Catholic or Irish enough to have been attracted to the DLP, which he openly disliked. Through the 1960s he remained a supporter of the ALP, and he was generally supportive of trade unions in their struggles for better pay and conditions for working people, so long as their leadership was not overly militant or socially revolutionary.
However, in the early 1970s the progressive shift the ALP took under Gough Whitlam was something that Lionel increasingly came to mistrust and react against, although he initially welcomed the demise of the Coalition government after such a long period in power. Like many people, he thought it was time for a change.
At heart, Lionel was a socially conservative rural working-class man who became increasingly unsympathetic to the progressive and permissive suburban middle-class youth who supported the ALP under Gough Whitlam. He had very little in common with them, both in terms of education and life experience. Lionel increasingly aligned with the Conservative parties after he joined a masonic lodge in the mid-1970s and like many people in the following decades he became more skeptical of the role of trade unions in the workplace.
As a student in the 1970s, the author was a great supporter of Gough Whitlam. This was a decidedly minority position to hold in the Western District at the time. The majority of Western District people supported Malcolm Fraser when the Whitlam government was dismissed in 1975. Many people celebrated Gough’s downfall. The author was especially grateful for the free university education provided to many students following Whitlam’s tertiary education reforms of the early 1970s.
Patricia rarely expressed political opinions and was generally not interested in politics. The author can recall that she liked Flo and Joh Bjelke-Peterson, the Country Party politicians from Queensland. She admired Flo’s scone making ability and she thought the Bjelke-Petersons were among the few politicians she could clearly understand. This put her at odds with the author’s university friends, who professed to having no idea as to what Joh and Flo were talking about.
The Catholic clergy in Koroit in the mid-twentieth century enjoyed an exhalated status in the Catholic community. Like most people in Koroit, both Lionel and Patricia, and the older children of the family, were educated by the clergy. The Koroit district’s Catholic schools were named Saint Brigid’s, Saint Columba’s, and Saint Patrick’s, located at Crossley, Kirkstall, Illowa and Koroit. They were all just a few kilometers from each other, with Koroit at the centre.
The convent in Koroit and the large presbytery building behind the Catholic church in town functioned as an extensive compound where the clergy lived and worked. This Church buildings were at the heart of a large and dynamic ecclesiastical complex. The Bishops of Ballarat, Bendigo and Melbourne were frequent visitors and their presence in the town was always noted by one and all. Mass, Confession, Communion and funerals were part of daily life. It was common for clergy serving in the Koroit parish to have family connections to the Southwest.
Primary school education as delivered by the Good Samaritan nuns in the 1960s was traditional and largely pre-modern. It was not the education young people in Australia receive today. Our teachers were not trained in modern pedagogy but they did know the Catechism.
The Good Samaritan Order first arrived in Koroit in 1908 with the opening of the Convent of Saint Patrick. From that year the nuns took over teaching at Saint Patrick’s Primary School, which was across the road from the convent, and also at Saint Bridgid’s, Crossley, just a few kilometers away. They also taught at the schools in Kirkstall and Illowa when they subsequently opened. At any one time there could be more than twenty sisters living at the convent.
Despite the many shortcomings and failings, notably the prevalent use of disciplinary violence in those days, the author remains grateful for the education and insights he received at these rural Catholic schools in the Southwest. There is a certain benefit from learning within a well-established faith tradition. A firm point of departure has its advantages, and serves as a reference point later in life.
Catholic education is perhaps no worse than most others and it was available at a price which families could afford. The alternatives were perhaps equally as doctrinaire in their own various ways. Many people in previous generations had virtually no education at all.
Many people left school as soon as they had a job to go to, usually at fourteen or fifteen. The author did not know a single person from the district who had ever gone to university, and the idea of doing such a thing was not generally considered a viable or available option. When Whitlam’s reforms suddenly made it possible to go, the author was attracted to tertiary education as much as a means of escaping the restrictions of small towns as by the desire to study new ideas.
Biddy and Lionel hoped that training as a teacher or as an office clerk might have some value for a person with no aptitude for a trade. The concept of studying for a liberal arts degree, rather than studying something that was strictly vocational, was not something they considered a worthwhile use of one’s time, although they did not interfere when the choice was made as university attendance was then an opportunity that did not come with any great cost attached.
Since the 1960s, Koroit has become much the same as other places in the Southwest. Perhaps some traces of the former distinctive features of the town remain. Voters in Koroit nowadays return a safe conservative majority similar to most other small rural towns. Over time, the net effect of the emergence of the DLP was to transfer votes from the ALP to the Liberal and National Parties.
