Today is March 17, St Patrick's Day. For the greatest part of Ballarat's history, around Australia and beyond, it was once the day for a march in celebration of Ireland's patron saint.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
But it was also a parade celebrating and demonstrating the cohesion of the Irish Roman Catholic community, its solidarity and success. A feast day for the church, it was also commemorated with public meetings and sports and in Ballarat a dedicated race day at the Miners Rest racecourse.
The Irish Catholic community in Ballarat, strong since the first days of the colonial settlement, had thrived and built a strong presence in the city of gold. Politicians and publicans, police and public servants counted in their number many who owed their origin to the Emerald Isle, who had left due to famine or to seek fortune.
But the sectarian divide was strong, and discrimination against the Irish was keenly felt and protested. The rising nationalist movement in Ireland, protesting for home rule, and the Fenian movement agitating for political change by violence if necessary, caused mistrust and fear in colonial governments, no less in Victoria where there had been a strong Hibernian presence in the organisation, arming and carrying out of the Eureka Rebellion: Irish blacksmiths had forged - and wielded - many of the pikes borne by the rebels.
It had not been assisted by the attempted murder in NSW of the visiting Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh by a maddened Irishman named Henry O'Farrell in 1868. Although it was clear O'Farrell was suffering from delusions brought on by alcoholism and general mental illness, the cunning Henry Parkes, then Colonial Secretary of NSW, managed to convince the sad would-be assassin to confess to being instructed by a 'Fenian Government'.
O'Farrell was hanged, despite a plea for mercy by the Prince. The sectarian divide was widened. In response to what was felt to be attacks on their community, the Irish redoubled their efforts to unite, to be seen to be 'good Australians'.
Marches grew in number and complexity, and in Ballarat the tradition grew to finish the parade with sports and a race meeting at Dowling Forest - usually with a seven-event card. Newspapers reported the day's events: short plays and tableaux staged by the Catholic Young Men's Society and the League of the Cross in the early 1900s, 'strongly supported by the younger generation, to whom Ireland is just a tradition'.
Ballarat's parades continued well into the 1960s. The welcome decline of sectarianism, and the gradual ebbing of religion generally, saw them disappear as a feature of Ballarat's March life by the early 1970s.