The Divided Heart of Catherine Mackerras

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there” – So L. P. Hartley famously wrote in his novel, The Go-Between. A century ago, Christianity was the dominant religion of Australia and indelibly coloured its social, cultural, and political fabric. Catholicism was the faith of the Irish working classes; Anglicanism and Presbyterianism were the faiths of the elite, the powerful, the establishment. Catherine Mackerras — best remembered as the mother of unusually accomplished children, including conductor Charles Mackerras — was a member of that establishment in Sydney. But in 1933, to the shock of family and friends, she crossed the religious and social divide to convert to Catholicism. Her posthumously published memoirs, Divided Heart, offered a heartfelt account of this decision. Yet they also left an enormous amount unsaid. In this volume, Patrick Mullins sheds light on the gaps and silences in Mackerras’s account. He explores how she approached faith, family, and self-understanding in an Australia now long vanished. He reflects on how she reckoned with the decision to embrace Catholicism, and the influences that coloured the portrayal of her conversion. The Divided Heart of Catherine Mackerras traces the contemporary parallels of Mackerras’s story and its resonances in a country that, a century on, sees itself as determinedly secular — yet continues to ask similar questions and experience the same deep yearnings. Patrick Mullins is the award-winning author of Tiberius with a Telephone (2018), The Trials of Portnoy (2020), and Who Needs the ABC? (2022). He wrote The Divided Heart of Catherine Mackerras while a Visiting Fellow of the PM Glynn Institute at Australian Catholic University.