At the beginning of this month the Knights of the Southern Cross in Australia celebrated their 90th birthday. Cliff Baxter was commissioned to write the history of the Order in New South Wales to mark the milestone. Catholica editor, Brian Coyne, who has a number of associations with the Knights, reviews the book...

An obituary?

Cliff started it. Very early on when he was given the commission to write the history of the Knights of the Southern Cross in New South Wales he said to me he wasn't writing an obituary. That comment has become a standing joke between us as every time I speak to him I ask "how's the obituary going?"

Reach for the Stars is published by Connorcourt Publishing www.connorcourt.com

I've now had the opportunity to read it. Sadly I have to say that I think he has written an obituary. A beautiful obituary mind you — and one drawing attention to a body of work by a significant group of men that deserves to be written up. Nevertheless, I think it is an obituary. He's writing about an era, and a set of needs, that have passed and are unlikely to ever return.

Before giving an overview of the book, Cliff's style in tackling it, and my conclusions as to who is likely to read and value this book, let me be upfront re my own associations, appreciations and biases concerning the Knights of the Southern Cross. My father was a long-time member of the Knights in Western Australia and always keen for me to get involved but, for various reasons that never occurred because of his urging even if I was heavily involved in many other activities at parish and the wider level. In about 1999 I was invited to join the State Executive of the Knights in Western Australia but that occurred at a time in my life when I was impecunious and simply unable to fulfil what I thought the task required from a practical logistical point of view so I ended up resigning. The insights gained over the 18 months or 2 years I spent on a State Executive though have been valuable, and formative, to the work I am now doing with Catholica even if I have little doubt that most of my fellow Knights might see an initiative like this as the work of the Devil and light years removed from what they see their role in the world as.

At heart my own assessment of the Knights of the Southern Cross is that they played a massive and crucial role in enabling Catholics to enter the mainstream of Australian society. Their initial objective was principally simply the practical one of ending discrimination against Catholics (and in those days it was principally Catholic men as men were the principal breadwinners in most families). In solving that problem, I have written over the years, that together with the religious teaching orders (who playing an equally crucial role in lifting Catholics into the social mainstream), the Knights more than probably made a huge, if unintended contribution to moulding the very character of our nation and its sense of national tolerance.

That objective was largely achieved by the 1960s — around the time I was leaving school and entering university and adult life. Like many other lay apostolates, I think the Knights have struggled to find an objective and sense of direction in the decades since the 1960s. They have faced other difficulties since that time in that the recruiting pool that in earlier times provided them with leaders of enormous aptitude has dried up. In their heyday, the Catholic Church employed few lay people. Today it employs tens of thousands and those who might have been the leaders of lay apostolates are often employed full time in the Church as school principals and in management positions in Catholic health and aged care initiatives. Time, and the very changed structure of the Church, has made the Knights and similar apostolates either redundant, or starved of the leadership and vision that can achieve the sort of things that were achieved in its earlier history.

A book seeking to provide hope...

Cliff Baxter.

Now to Cliff's book. Writing history, I am sure, is perhaps one of the most difficult writing commissions there is. How can any person adequately sum-up a single person's lifetime in two or three hundred pages let alone the history of an organisation comprising thousands of members? The writer of a history has to make a selection that hopefully provides an honest portrait of the person, or the organisation, or nation they are writing a history about. Tom Lee's history of the first 500 years of Christianity springs to mind. So often I have felt frustrated that what Tom writes is merely a snapshot of some of the events and personalities who were so important to the unfolding story of how Christianity developed. Cliff's book, it seems to me, is written with three objectives in mind. Firstly it seeks to honour the "significant personalities" who gave the Knights an ethos and direction over its 90 year history. Secondly he endeavours to encapsulate in some 280 pages what that ethos has been and the major initiatives the Knights became associated with that gave practical reality to the ethos. Thirdly, and despite our jokes about it being an obituary, Cliff has endeavoured to write a book that provides hope for the future and some continuation of the work into the future.

Cliff's book is broken down into 51 chapters and that itself reveals something of the style he has chosen. He tells the Knights' story in an anecdotal way focusing on particular personalities and events chosen to build the bigger picture of how the whole fraternity developed over its 90 years. These are short, highly readable chapters written in a journalistic and entertaining style. For the principal audience the book is aimed at — members of the Knights themselves — this will be a great nostalgia trip.

Outside the immediate readership of the Knights perhaps the most valuable contribution Cliff's book makes to a wider national discussion is in providing a New South Wales perspective on that great division in Catholicism that arose between the bishops of New South Wales and Dr Mannix (Archbishop) and Mr B.A. Santamaria (lay political activist) in Melbourne. This continues to be a fascinating part of Australia's national and religious history. The NSW side of the story is perhaps under-represented in the extant analysis of what went on and this book will help make up the deficit albeit in a small way as Cliff only spends a couple of chapters examining this aspect of the history of the Knights.

Cliff and myself remain good mates even if we have very different political outlooks and we do differ in our assessments as to what is required if Catholicism is to be rejuvenated. At times I find Cliff overly sentimental and his sentimentalism clouds his judgement. He yearns for a past that isn't going to return. Like many older Catholics today Cliff's personal story has been moulded by the lessons learned from his own children and trying to marry the real outcomes against the high hopes that were imbued into older Catholics by the bishops through organisations like the Knights of the Southern Cross.

"Reach for the Stars" is a valuable contribution for those who want to understand not only the history of the Knights of the Southern Cross in New South Wales but something of the forces that helped shape the Catholic ethos in this country.

P.S. "Do you know Bill Ross?" is the secret code the Knights used amongst themselves to identify themselves to one another in an earlier era of their history. Bill Ross was the esteemed foundation secretary and executive officer of the Order in New South Wales.

Brian Coyne

[Index of Commentaries by Brian Coyne]