AustLit

'Not far from where I live is a large Catholic church built in the 1940s. My mother and her three siblings were educated in the parish school next to it. Her mother, a trained teacher, worked at the school as a volunteer during the era that Victoria’s education department forbade married women’s employment. My parents married in that church in 1977. I was baptised there and, later, confirmed as an adult (at age 11!). Witness to all those comings and goings is the name ‘+ Daniel Mannix DD’, inscribed on the school’s foundation stone that he laid in 1956. There are hundreds of parishes around Melbourne that carry similar marks from Mannix’s tenure as archbishop, 1917–63. ...'