Australian Catholic Schools in a Changing Political and Religious Landscape

Abstract

Casimir College in the inner Sydney suburb of Marrickville encapsulates the story of Catholic schooling in modern Australia. In the 1930s, the Brothers of the Christian Schools (known in Australia as the De La Salle Brothers) and the Sisters of the Good Samaritan, the fi rst locally created congregation (1857), were invited by the parish priest, Fr Casimir Maguire, to establish separate schools for boys and girls. The original schools amalgamated in the early 1980s to form one large co-educational school by which time the Religious had almost disappeared from them and the Irish Australians, which the schools originally served had long since been displaced by immigrants of Italian, Lebanese, Vietnamese, and other national backgrounds. The last De La Salle brother retired from the school in 1995. Originally the schools were funded entirely by the fees of the relatively poor Marrickville parents and the meagre resources of the congregations. The labour of the brothers and nuns who staffed them was free. The advent of government funding from the early 1970s, combined with the reorganisation of secondary schooling across the Archdiocese of Sydney, gave rise to the present college. It is well equipped, staffed by lay teachers and is predominantly funded by the Australian and state governments. It forms part of the community of schools whose management and development is supported by the Archdiocesan Catholic Education Offi ce (Luttrell, 2000, p. 147).