The battle of the colours: Irish Catholic identity, St Joseph’s Nudgee College, and rugby 1891–1914

Abstract

In the years either side of Federation in 1901, Australia’s Irish Catholics balanced two often contradictory impulses: their determination to retain their cultural and religious links with Ireland in the face of an often unsympathetic Protestant majority, and the desire to become ‘good’ Australians in order to make ‘a go’ of their lives in the new land. This paper explores how this process played out at St Joseph’s Nudgee College, a Christian Brothers’ day and boarding school in Brisbane, the capital of the Australian state of Queensland, and how sport played a central role in satisfying both imperatives. This discussion will be framed by the intersection of the social/political/economic context of Queensland during the period 1891–1914. It will focus on the educational context in which the Irish Christian Brothers operated as they struggled to make the College a bastion of Irish Catholicism and a vehicle for the socio-economic advancement of their community.

Keywords:

• Australia
• Catholic education
• Christian Brothers
• education
• Irish Catholics
• Queensland
• rugby
• sport
• St Joseph’s Nudgee College

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Although the college’s full title is St Joseph’s Nudgee College, it is almost universally referred to simply as Nudgee. The authors will use Nudgee from this point onward. St Joseph’s Gregory Terrace, the college’s brother school, is usually referred to as Gregory Terrace or Terrace.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Kerby

Martin Kerby (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia with a specialisation in History. His research interests focus on biography, historical inquiry and artistic and cultural responses to conflict. Dr Kerby holds two doctorates in the field of biography. He has received numerous research awards including several ANZAC Centenary grants, both state and national (2014, 2015, 2017) and a State Library of Queensland Fellowship (2018). He was recently awarded a place on the national and highly regarded Gandel Holocaust Studies Program for Australian Educators (2020, currently delayed due to COVID-19). Dr Kerby has published extensively including The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914 (Kerby, Baguley & McDonald, 2009, Palgrave Macmillan). He is also currently the Chief Editor of Australian Art Education and has published eight issues under his leadership.

Margaret Baguley

Margaret Baguley (PhD) is a Professor in Arts Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia with a specialisation in visual arts. She has received numerous awards recognising the high quality of her teaching and research. She is currently the Associate Dean Research for the Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts. Her research interests encompass the arts, arts education, leadership, group dynamics and creative collaboration. She has an extensive number of publications including The Palgrave Handbook of Global Arts Education (Barton & Baguley, 2017, Palgrave MacMillan). Dr Baguley is also a practising artist with 10 solo exhibitions and 47 group exhibitions with 40 of these being invitational. Her most recent group exhibition received Australia Council for the Arts funding and she has been a recipient of grants from the Ian Potter Foundation, Craft Queensland, and Arts Queensland. Dr Baguley is currently elected President of Art Education Australia (AEA), the national peak body for visual arts education, and is also a representative member for visual arts education on the National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE) group.

Abbey MacDonald

Abbey MacDonald is a Senior Lecturer in Arts Education at the University of Tasmania, where she specialises in visual art curriculum, pedagogy and practice. Dr MacDonald is a qualitative researcher with an interest in the applications of storying and Arts-based methodologies to support participant, researcher and teacher engagement in and with relational art inquiry. Her research contexts include professional learning collaboration, teacher embodiment and enactment of curriculum, interdisciplinarity and exploration of the intersections and spaces between practice, pedagogy and methodology. Her classroom teaching experience includes secondary visual arts, media arts and English, as well as residential education leadership. While her area of teaching and practice specialisation is grounded in visual and media arts, she has taught into, designed and developed units across the five Arts in Australian tertiary education contexts.

Vaughan Cruickshank

Vaughan Cruickshank is a Lecturer in Health and Physical Education at the University of Tasmania. His primary research contexts include the challenges faced by male primary teachers, health and physical education and enhancing the teaching/learning experience through the use of digital technologies. Parallel to his explorations of digital technology innovations for pedagogy, Vaughan is exploring how arts-based methodologies might be engaged to articulate process and participatory experiences in his research contexts. He is interested in exploring the potential for arts-based research in relation to digital technologies, and how arts-based research processes and practices resonate in the male primary teacher and health and physical education space.