MARKEY, Rev. Fr Robert –  Mass celebrating the entry into Eternal Life of the late Rev. Fr. Robert Markey will be in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Sturt St, Ballarat, on Thursday 8th September 2016 at Ten (10.00) am. Burial will follow in the Ballarat New Cemetery.

It was a short, simple note, but its brevity belies the significance of the man it eulogises, and the movement he helped support in Ballarat and beyond. That his funeral was concelebrated by Bishop Bird and other priests from the diocese gives some indication of the standing Robert Markey had in the Catholic Church. 

With his death one of the last connections to a once powerful yet oddly indeterminate Catholic movement was severed, one that was particularly strong in Ballarat.

Markey was a chaplain of the National Catholic Rural Movement (NCRM), a main branch of Bartholomew Augustine ‘Bob’ Santamaria’s Catholic Social Studies Movement, the infamous ‘Groupers’ that opposed communism in the union movement and promoted a conservative agenda through print, radio and television for 40 years. It survives today in a muted form in the National Civic Council.

The Groupers were part of a broader worldwide lay ‘Catholic Action’ which sought to achieve its political and communal goals through a muscular pursuit of social organisation. This included forming anti-communist factions within trade unions – a practice which eventually led to the great split in the Labor Party in 1955. Among groups they supported were the Young Catholic Workers (or Jocists) and the Australian Family Association.

But the NCRM was a curious combination of a fervent belief in decentralisation and the need for a small farm-led reconstruction of rural Australia. It had a vision of Roman Catholicism established as the faith of the farmer, built upon the seemingly endless ability of fecund farm wives to produces broods of children. Ultimately, despite the direct support of the Catholic hierarchy and the endless energy of Santamaria’s lobbying, the movement failed and withered. The times and prevailing economics did not suit it. Yet for a period it held tremendous political sway.

In Ballarat

Robert Markey, like many Catholic prelates of his era, was fervently anti-communist. His early youth was spent working in the Newport Railway Workshops, where he became attracted to the political philosophy of Santamaria. He later became a fervent follower and aide to him. He also wrote, filmed and produced television programs for BTV6 Ballarat on the local history of the Catholic Church, and collected a large amount of audio-visual material on Santamaria. This includes speeches by him and other prominent Catholic Action supporters such as the poet James McAuley. The collection is part of the State Library of Victoria.

Markey’s work in the NCRM was often in the background, although he took a deep interest in farming methods in India. He arranged funding for sponsored projects in Kerala, and later encouraged Indian migrants to come to the region. Around 200 Indian families eventually came to the Ballarat region through the encouragement of the movement.

The NCRM was particularly strong around Ballarat and the south-west of Victoria. Its motto, To restore Christ to the countryside, and the countryside to Christ, reflected the movement’s peculiar adherence to a kind of agrarian social policy that sought to recreate a kind of Catholic rural utopia – although the detail of how this might be achieved, or indeed what form it would take, was never totally clear.

What was the National Catholic Rural Movement?

"Help of Christians guard this land from assault or inward stain. Let it be what Christ has planned His Eden where you reign." 

The Catholic convert James McAuley wrote these lines in 1956, and it would be reasonable to regard them as epigrammatic for the NCRM’s aims.

The NCRM as an idea was formed in the 1930s, following the example of similar movements in the United States. US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, with its massive government spending on infrastructure and reconstruction of rural communities, was mirrored in Australia with the establishment and growth of government instrumentalities such as the State Electricity Commission and the expansion of other bodies like the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission.

With the onslaught of development these new government bodies undertook, the future of country life looked bright for the members of the NCRM. It was opposed vehemently to communism, yet tolerated state monopolies and opposed privatisation.

By 1939 the NCRM had 30 established groups, focussed mainly around Ballarat and Wagga Wagga in southern NSW. At its peak membership in 1951 it had over 6000 members and 300 groups. It published a newspaper periodical, Rural Life.

Farmers had seen their livelihoods battered by the Great Depression. In Australia, the Soldier Settler schemes following World War One were for the most part an abject failure, putting ill-resourced and under-prepared families onto too-small holdings comprised often of infertile land.

What was fertile was the ground of Catholic suspicion that they were being excluded from opportunity because of their faith. Churchgoing for all religions was stronger in rural areas than the cities, and Catholic intellectuals from such groups as the Campion Society and Catholic Action saw a chance for consolidation through giving farmers "the practical application of a Christian rural philosophy", as Santamaria himself wrote.

Santamaria was the child of Italian immigrants who had come from great poverty on the islands near Stromboli. Nevertheless his vision of a ‘noble peasantry’ seemed to inform much of the NCRM’s literature. In reality, the idea of filling Australia’s empty countryside with masses of immigrant farmers was far too fraught a concept for any government of the day to consider.

If Australia, he said, was "founded upon small industry, the small farm, the small town, it is clear that a stable social order will emerge favouring the institution of the family".

His plans included setting up small communes of yeoman farmers who would in some ways self-subsist. In a period when increasing mechanisation was the trend, NCRM literature would use images of men ploughing with horse-drawn implements.

It also advocated the introduction of larger numbers of farming migrants at a time when the rural workforce was falling. And it sought to be granted large areas of government land for its communes without any real detailed farm planning.

Why did it fail?

Santamaria stayed at the helm of the NCRM from its inception to its gradual disappearance. Its stubborn insistence on a European model of small farming and its relegation of women to the role of childbearers at a time of rising female awareness of their opportunities, meant it dealt itself the method of its own irrelevancy.

In actual fact, what the NCRM evolved to stand for was the fight against communism and excessive capitalism that was the core reason for the existence of the Catholic social movements. Santamaria and his acolytes believed that the fight against the possible collectivisation of farms, such as had taken place in the USSR, could be fought by the expansion of the small farmer. 

At the same time, the NCRM also railed against big landholders such as the pastoral companies of the UK buying up swathes of land and sitting on it.

Santamaria was an influential but equivocal figure, and his tempestuous nature led him to pick fights with any perceived enemy, not just the communists. After the death of his great mentor and supporter Archbishop Daniel Mannix in 1963, his determined grip on the Catholic Action movement began to slip.

The strong Christian ethic of equity and social justice lay at the core of the National Catholic Rural Movement. In itself this was an admirable aim. Where the movement failed in the long term was providing a feasible plan to achieve its vision, and accommodating a modern view of society.

Its few established outposts, such as Maryknoll near Pakenham, faded into the past.

As William McKell was heard to say by journalist Alan Reid after the then-NSW premier attended a conference of the NCRM, "They frightened me, old friend. All they want for a rural policy is a sheep, a goat, three acres - and a migrant."

Acknowledgements: this article has drawn on the work of Kathy Madden in her paper Dreams and Realities: some insights into the National Catholic Rural Movement (1994), and The Pope's Battalions: Santamaria, Catholicism and the Labor Split by Ross Fitzgerald, Adam James Carr, and William J. Dealy.