A School on a Mission. 140 Years of CBC On Wakefield St by Lingard Goulding (review)

Abstract

will take great thinkers, generous pragmatists, principled planners, with formidable powers of sensitivity capable of developing a credible model of real inclusion and true equality. There are existing wells of thinking to draw from and one of them was dug by Arthur Griffith. Is he truly ‘the father of us all’? That is a debate well worth having, but only after reading the book! Dr Mary McAleese was President of Ireland, 1997–2011. A School on a Mission. 140 Years of CBC On Wakefield St, Lingard Goulding (Adelaide: Christian Brothers College, 2018), xiv+338 pages. In the foreword to A School on a Mission, Giles Fitzherbert comments that ‘thereismoretothisbookthanisatfirsthandapparent.Readers,payattention’. What at first appears as a volume to celebrate the life and achievements of CBC on Wakefield Street – a Catholic school in the Christian Brother tradition – becomes in part a story of Catholic Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and an account of the extraordinary missionary activity of a band of brothers in faraway Australia. The story, told with great affection and good humour by Lingard Goulding, is all the more interesting in that it is by an ‘outsider’(‘I am not a practitioner of the Roman Catholic faith’), but who, as a distinguished educator himself, has a great understanding of school life and of the challenges that founding and sustaining a school over a period of 140 years presents. His story, therefore, is of Ireland and its missionary zeal in education, of resourceful and determined religious men who, against all the odds, gave an education to the sons ‘of labourers, squatters or small time farmers’in the young state of South Australia, and about the remarkable development of a school from humble beginnings to being an inclusive and innovative centre of learning in the heart of Adelaide. Lingard begins his account by looking at the life of Edmund Rice, the founder of the Christian Brothers, whose contribution to Irish education is unparalleled, if (currently) somewhat under-appreciated. He then looks at the life and work of Br Ambrose Treacy, by any assessment a remarkable person. A man of deep faith, true entrepreneurial spirit and steely determination, he led the first wave of Brothers to Australia and established ten schools in as many years, the last of which was CBC on Wakefield. Studies • volume 109 • number 434 240 Summer 2020: Book Reviews This feat is not to be casually passed over. Enjoying neither the financial support of the bishop for even a residence – ‘I have not a rap for you. Throw yourselves on the people and they will provide for you’ – and determined to cater for the poor (as Rice had done in Ireland) without any support from the State, the brothers literally had to beg not only for their subsistence but for the means to teach the children in their care. All the buildings, facilities, resources that we take so readily for granted had to be fund-raised for from a community of Catholics who were relatively poor and on the lower rungs of Australian society. The achievement is staggering and Lingard recites the various initiatives and developments taken by the different headmasters over the decades of the school’s life. The picture is one of a school moving into a place of educational prominence, whilst remaining faithful to its founding mission and of an emerging Catholic population that stands proudly with the other Christian traditions. The added appeal of the book lies in its humour and in the personality of its author, who cannot help but reveal himself. Two examples will illustrate. There is an amusing account of a faux pas by Br Hughes, who refused to allow the boys sing the national anthem on the occasion of a visit by the Governor of the Colony. Having listened to some of Moore’s melodies and religious hymns ‘sweetly sung by the school choir’, the Governor asked for a rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’. Br Hughes sullenly replied, ‘The boys are not taught to sing that anthem’. The issue reflected the latent anti-English feeling of the (predominantly Irish) community of Brothers. A related issue reared its head when it came to the order of toasts...