Bicentenary of Australia’s first legal priests: Fr Philip Conolly and Fr John Joseph Therry

200 years ago two Catholic priests arrived in the New South Wales colony. Edmund Campion charts their ministry and life in Sydney and Hobart. Campion dedicates this history to Tony Baine.[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]

On the third of May 1820, 200 years ago, the ship Janus sailed into Sydney Harbour with two Irish priests as passengers, Fr Philip Conolly, aged 34, a Maynooth College man, and Fr John Joseph Therry, aged 30. They were our first legal priests. Fr Therry’s story is well-known:  he said he would stay here for four years and in fact he remained for 44 years, dying in 1864 as pastor of Balmain in Sydney. By then, Balmain was a settled parish such as we knew until just the other day: daily Mass, weekly confessions and Sunday night devotions.

Fr Conolly’s story is somewhat different. When he died, 19 years after arriving here, he had been suspended a divinis, i.e. barred by the Bishop from saying Mass, preaching, celebrating the sacraments and struck off the government’s list of chaplains and so without a settled income. Therry was by his bedside to give him the last rites and then to bury him, putting on his gravestone the psalmists’s doleful lament, ‘My days have declined like a shadow and I am withered like grass.’ (Ps.101.12)

The two priests began together in Sydney and after ten months Conolly sailed to Hobart, where his initial Mass drew nine worshippers. He stayed with Edward Curr, a Catholic storekeeper who would become a nabob, accorded a long entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The Lieutenant-Governor gave Conolly five acres on the edge of town to build a church and presbytery. Within six months he had raised nearly 100 pounds, so he built a house with a lean-to chapel attached to it.

In Ireland, Fr Conolly had circulated an appeal for prayerbooks, catechisms, vestments, altar requisites and books ‘for the use of the poor convicts’. His biographer, the late Fr Terry Southerwood, claims that Conolly baptized more than 650 persons in Van Diemen’s Land (VDL); however a visitor in 1833 found the ramshackle lean-to chapel a mess, its altar cloths filthy, the sacred vessels black and three of Edward Curr’s children unbaptized. The chapel seemed a symbol of pastoral failure. And the promised church remained unbuilt. [Note: W. T. Southerwood:  Lonely Shepherd in Van Diemen’s Isle. (George Town, Tasmania:  Stella Maris Books, 1988). This book, in minuscule type, is best read with a magnifying glass. Fr Southerwood’s chapter on Conolly’s landholdings is a masterpiece of historical research. See also his articles in Australasian Catholic Record 1977, 1983, 1984, 1985. He corrects earlier writings on Conolly, such as Cardinal Moran, Archbishop Ullathorne and H.N.Birt OSB. Fr Southerwood was parish priest of Launceston in Hobart diocese. One of his ancestors had been a marine on the First Fleet.]

On the other hand, Fr Southerwood says that Conolly’s main work was counselling the convicts:  in two years he stood on the scaffold praying with 34 men sentenced to execution, an unnerving experience. One of these was Alexander Pearce. With another convict, Pearce had escaped from Macquarie Harbour; then, feeling hungry, he had attacked his companion with an axe, striking him four times, and afterwards sliced a fillet from his thigh, which he roasted for dinner. Asked what was said from the scaffold, Conolly wrote his report in Gaelic, a mystery language to government men, who thought it might be Hebrew.

Conolly also acted as a pastor to captured members of the Brady gang of bushrangers who maintained a reign of terror in the colony for two years. When Matthew Brady was captured, he was found to have a multitude of admirers, who sent him flowers, fruit and sweets in gaol. They petitioned the government for a reprieve and applauded Brady on the scaffold.

Patrick Dunn was a friend of Brady’s and a notorious drunkard. The police may have fitted him up on a criminal charge because he wouldn’t pay them bribes, so he became a folk hero to many Catholics. Dunn went to his death wearing a white alb made by Mrs Curr, with a black cross on its front, and he mounted the scaffold with a crucifix in his hands saying the rosary. Catholics took up a collection to buy an expensive coffin for him and packed out his funeral in Conolly’s chapel.

Fr Conolly did not approve. He thought executions should be deterrents against crime, not gateways to glory. His sympathies lay with the lonely settlers who were targeted by the Brady gang.

Ninety per cent of Irish convicts had been sent to New South Wales but the ten per cent who went to VDL kept Conolly busy. Some of the women had committed crimes in Ireland in order to join their husbands in the antipodes. Once here, they often re-offended, prostitution, vagrancy and drunkenness being common crimes. Half the women in the House of Correction were Catholics who did the washing for government institutions and spun wool and horsehair.

With a parish the size of Ireland, Conolly soon realized that he needed priests to help him. The trouble was, he did not seem to get on with other priests. The first of these was Fr Therry, whose relations with the government were frequently strained, leading to his being put off the government payroll for 12 years… sacked as chaplain. In this, Conolly sided with the government and sought Therry’s recall. In letters to Bishop Poynter of London, he denigrated his brother priest, saying he was imprudent, vain, unlettered, conceited, affected and – worse! – money-hungry. Therry ignored such complaints, secure in his people’s affections.

Then there was a Carmelite priest, Fr Samuel Coote, who arrived in May 1824, with government approval but without church faculties from the Bishop of Mauritius, in whose diocese VDL then was. He brought with him a case of church plate and vestments, but lacking church faculties he could not be gazetted as a chaplain. Acting as Vicar-General, Conolly allowed him to say Sunday Mass and catechise the children pro tempore.

In the meantime, Conolly bad-mouthed Coote to the Bishop, saying he was ‘very illiterate’ and ‘a man of no manners’ who ‘blundered through’ the Mass. The Bishop supported his Vicar-General and recalled Coote, who had travelled through the countryside gaining signatures to a petition against Conolly. The government supported Conolly too. By this time, the Carmelite had got a bad name as a receiver of stolen goods and a tavern-singer with ‘the lowest class of convicts’, as Conolly said. Coote escaped to Sydney and thence to Mauritius, where he passes out of our history.

Ten years later another religious order man turned up in Hobart. This was John Bede Polding OSB, the newly appointed bishop for New Holland, on his way to take up his appointment in Sydney. Bishop Polding was dissatisfied with Conolly’s ministry and so he left behind in VDL a young Benedictine monk, James Ambrose Cotham, to augment the work. [In 2019 a biography of Cotham was published in England, The Indomitable Mr Cotham:  Missioner, Convict Chaplain and Monk. See Dr Colin Fowler’s review in Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 2019.]

Conolly and Cotham did not get on. One reason may be the secular priest’s disdain for religious priests. Another reason may be that Cotham lent a friendly ear to the complaints of Conolly’s enemies. Within a year this tension would explode.

Conolly’s closest friend in VDL was the Anglican priest, Robert Knopwood, a Cambridge man and a landholder, who was 24 years older than the Irishman. For the last 35 years of his life, Knopwood kept a diary, a valuable historical source. Conolly is named in it 588 times, an index of their friendship. They formed a habit of having Sunday dinner together, sometimes sleeping overnight in each other’s homes. And, as friends will, they often drank together. Knopwood’s biographer says ‘his liquor bills provide plenty of evidence of his conviviality’. [Today a waterfront pub in Hobart is called The Bobby Knopwood.]

Before Bishop Polding’s arrival a lay committee, calling itself ‘The Friends of the Roman Catholic Religion’ was set up to get rid of Fr Conolly. These activists were, you might say, an unusual church committee: a forger, a shoplifter, a swindler, a street brawler, a convicted libeller… They filled Fr Cotham’s ear with their complaints and before long he was writing a long report to the Bishop detailing the Irish priest’s failings, which may be summarized as sloth, drunkenness and, mirabile dictu, satanism. The young monk threatened the Bishop that if he did not intervene he, Cotham, would leave VDL. [Note: 12 March 1836. Cotham to Polding, ‘Entre nous, I really sometimes have taken him to have dealings with his Satanic Majesty;  nay, really one night when he was inebriatus, I thought by what he said, his countenance, and the figure he cut, that he was the devil incarnate.’ (H N BIRT: Benedictine Pioneers. Vol I, p 104)]

Apart from the young monk’s allegations, there was a question about the chapel land – did it belong to Conolly or to the Church? Strangely, there were no government documents to answer this question; it depended on people’s memories, which changed over time and, in any case, were contradictory. Fr Conolly insisted that the land, which he had improved, was his and some government officials supported him; others disagreed.

Thus when Bishop Polding came down to Hobart with his Vicar-General, W B Ullathorne, a fellow monk, he required Conolly to give an account of his administration and to answer charges about his lifestyle.

Ullathorne sent a report of this encounter to Rome, saying that the priest had answered the Bishop ‘insolently’; to which the Bishop had responded by stripping him of his priestly faculties – suspensio a divinis. Which means, as I have said, that he could no longer say Mass, nor preach, nor celebrate any sacrament. On his part Conolly sued Bishop Polding for libel, but that was unsuccessful.

In the Catholic community their pioneer priest was now a pariah.

The sentencing read over Fr Conolly in a packed chapel will interest students of history: Whereas you, the Rev. Philip Conolly have contumaciously persisted in refusing to us, your ecclesiastical superior, an account of the property of the Church in your holding or possession, as in obedience and duty you are bound to render; and whereas you have contumaciously refused to place in our hands a sum equal in amount to the collections made in the chapel, or otherwise obtained from the faithful for religious purposes and not yet carried into effect; and whereas having refused to render the same account and to give into our hands the said monies, you have also contumaciously disobeyed our requisition on your obedience that you should testify to the correctness and completeness of the account rendered and of the monies given in; and whereas in answer to a charge affecting your moral and sacerdotal character, and to which we directed your attention – you returned an insolent reply as regards us your superior, insolent and highly disrespectful as regards the charge; vague, irrelevant and unsatisfactory – a charge of harshness and cruelty towards certain individuals;– as regards the period within which the said answer was required to be delivered, knowingly and purposely deferred beyond the time by us specified; and whereas in your communications to us of the 23rd and 25th inst. you have advanced propositions false and subversive of ecclesiastical discipline and destructive of all order and subordination in the Church of God; now we, having given Canonical admonition and being invested by the Supreme Head of the Church with full authority for the same, do suspend and hereby declare you, Rev. Philip Conolly to be suspended from the exercise of all sacerdotal functions, no authority, save that of the Holy See and our own, can absolve you.

So he remained for the last three years of his life. Polding had the good sense to send the other pioneer priest, Fr Therry, as Vicar-General to VDL to charm Conolly back, which he did.

And thus Conolly died, fortified by the last rites, on 3 August 1839, aged 53, a few months after his friend Bobby Knopwood.

Therry sang his Requiem while all Hobart stood still; and Therry buried him, putting that apt quotation from the psalmist on his gravestone, ‘My days have declined like a shadow and I am withered like grass’ (Ps. 101:12).[/s2If]

May he rest in peace.