Are today's Muslims yesterday's Catholics?

(Transcript from World News Australia Radio)

As Muslims feel the heat in today's often-brutal migration and asylum debate, it reminds Malcolm Fraser and others of how Catholics were once treated.

In a recent story on SBS Radio, former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and two former leading federal bureaucrats attacked the state of Australia's debate over migrants and refugees.

But as Mr Fraser expressed his frustrations that day, he also addressed another, somewhat separate aspect of the migration saga that was not in that story.

It's a tale of, well, Muslims and Catholics.

Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser was pondering the descending tone of Australia's migration and asylum debate the other day when he suddenly flashed back to another day.

Another time, in fact.

"You know, people used to say Catholics are not Australian because they owe allegiance to the Pope. And I could hear conversations when my father was alive in which people really believed that. Now we know how totally false and totally wrong those sorts of views were, but it was part of Australia. Now as other people heard those arguments, they said, 'Look, we've just got to put that aside.' But, now, it's Muslims, who (supposedly) owe their allegiance to the Prophet."

Are today's Muslims yesterday's Catholics?

It is a notion Malcolm Fraser is not alone in suggesting.

Late last year the Canadian writer, Doug Saunders, offered the same comparison in an opinion piece for The New York Times -- about the United States.

Mr Saunders, author of The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?, was writing shortly before November's US presidential election.

"American Muslims are falling victim to the same misunderstandings and fallacies that threatened earlier waves of non-Protestant immigrants. The last thing they need, as they work to become part of the mainstream, is a political movement devoted to portraying them as a menace. In an election year when both major parties have a Roman Catholic on the ticket, we should take care to make sure that history does not repeat itself."

In modern terminology, Catholics were -- as Muslims are -- the Other, the group that society seeks to subordinate or at least, sees as not fitting in.

The Australian Human Rights Commission's 2011 Report on Freedom of Religion and Belief in 21st Century Australia found widespread fear of Muslims' intentions.

One in six submissions reportedly expressed a fear that Muslims sought to bring in sharia law or otherwise undermine Australia as a free society with a Christian heritage.

A similar fear of Catholics' intentions in their early days in the country comes through clearly in a story recounted in Robert Hughes' iconic book The Fatal Shore.

Two Irishmen were sentenced to whippings of 300 lashes each simply because of a deposition taken from a suspicious, illiterate English convict named Hester Stroud.

"From what she saw of the Irishmen being in small parties in the camp of Toongabbie, and by their walking about together and talking very earnestly in Irish, deponent verily believes they were intent on something improper."

Indeed, authorities in the early British penal colony of New South Wales were constantly on the lookout for an uprising by the political prisoners among the exiled Irish convicts.

Many prisoners involved in rebellions in Ireland in 1798 and 1803 were among those shipped out to Australia.

Most of the Irish convicts and settlers spoke their native language until about the 1850s, and then the arrival of the Fenians helped keep the issue simmering.

The Fenians, Irish nationalists whose uprising against British rule in their homeland failed in 1865, were the last of the Irish convicts sent to Australia.

An Irish immigrant heightened matters with an assassination attempt on the first Royal visitor, Prince Alfred, in 1868, but it was the First World War that truly pushed them to the fore.

Welsh-born Prime Minister Billy Hughes believed, as part of the British Empire, Australia was at war if Britain was, and he wanted to institute conscription for military service.

Irish sentiments -- and parts of the Australian Labour Party -- staunchly opposed helping the British, and the idea failed when put to a referendum.

Father Edmund Campion, a priest, historian and author of such books as Rockchoppers: Growing Up Catholic in Australia, says that solidified the tension in Australian society.

"British Australians said we had to support Britain, which had founded the country, in its hour of need. The Australian nationalists said that we had already done enough. And both these camps were now identified religiously. The British Australians were identified as Protestant. The Australian nationalists, if they had a religion, were identified as Irish Catholics. And this meant that the interwar decades were the most sectarian decades in Australian history. Government House in Melbourne, for instance, put on their advertisements for servants, Catholics need not ... Roman Catholics need not apply. And so it went. There were firms that wouldn't employ Catholics, there were banks that would employ Catholics but would not make them bank managers, and so on."

Michael Hogan wrote arguably the preeminent book on the Protestant-Catholic divide of the era, The Sectarian Strand.

Now an honorary associate with the University of Sydney, the long-time specialist in Australian politics says Malcolm Fraser's comparison with today's Muslims is very fitting.

"The coincidences of the sorts of attitudes of people are very similar to what we see in Australia today with regard to Muslims. They're the latest wave of migration. The prejudice tends to be especially class-based, as well as religion- and ethnicity-based. We're talking about people of Middle East appearance who are (supposedly) likely to be gangs and hoodlums and bash you up and all that sort of stuff, you know? And they're the same sort of images that were applied to Irish Catholics in the second half of the 19th century."

Dr Hogan says, after the First World War, unlike the Roaring '20s that Europe and North America lived, the 1920s brought joblessness and a virtual early Depression to Australia.

The jobless included many of the returning soldiers, who were ripe for being stirred up and, in many cases, joined one of the rising, anti-Catholic secret armies of the time.

Michael Hogan remembers, even when he was growing up after the Second World War, his father's workplace still was openly divided between Catholics and Protestants.

"My father worked in the public service. And the public service was divided between those branches of it that were controlled by the Masons and a few that were controlled by the Catholic Knights of the Southern Cross. And my father used to always wear a badge proclaiming his allegiance, every day, to work -- the Holy Name badge -- so that nobody was in any doubt what side of the fence he stood on."

In Sydney, a 30,000-circulation sectarian newspaper called The Rock made its living uncovering the alleged horrors of Catholicism.

But Malcolm Fraser says the politicians of the post-Second World War period had learned a lesson from what Billy Hughes did in the First World War.

Mr Fraser says they learned what not to do and it guided them through the next several decades.

"We had a prime minister who played politics with religion -- it was then Catholics and Protestants -- during the First World War. And that left the divide ... families divided, communities divided, in the most bitter fashion. That didn't start to end until probably the late 1950s. So it took, you know, almost half a century to start to wash those divisions out of our hair."

Father Edmund Campion suggests the Irish Catholics, by standing up and saying they had the right to be Australians in their own way, qualify as the first "ethnics" in Australian history.

Back in 1911, they were the ones behind the first so-called Australia Day -- in a search for an alternative to Empire Day, set aside six years earlier to celebrate the British Empire.

Edmund Campion says it was then, and is now, a wider search for the Australian identity.

"So I would think that Malcolm Fraser is quite right to say that, where the Catholics were back then, the Muslims are now. Catholics back then were the outsiders, were discriminated against, were thought less of. And, in many ways, exactly the same qualifications can be added to Muslims today. People watching them ... newsletters writing about them derogatively ... cartoonists poking fun at them ... they feel it very much. And it is now the challenge for Australian society to accommodate new people coming here so that we can have a genuinely pluralist society, that not all Australians have to be like everyone else. One size does not fit all."

Malcolm Fraser says the political lessons learned from the days of the First World War began to fade away in the late 1980s.

Mr Fraser cites Labor building the first asylum detention centres, the '90s rise of Pauline Hanson, then John Howard playing on what he calls racist fear in the 2001 Tampa crisis.

"You only need one person in a position of authority to exploit fear of the unknown, fear of somebody or a person, a people, or of a religion, that can be depicted as different. And if a person is in a position of authority, if a person is a prime minister, a lot of people are going to listen to that. And once that genie comes out of the bottle ... it's easy to get it out of the bottle, it's much, much harder to put it back in the bottle. And that, unfortunately, is the task now ahead of Australia. But where can you find one active leader who's speaking in those terms?"

And if today's Muslims are yesterday's Catholics, who are tomorrow's Others who will suffer?

Michael Hogan declines to offer a guess but says history suggests that time will come.

"There is an historical sense of almost a social elevator, a social lift, going on: that as each newly arrived group of immigrants hits the shore, they become the scum of the earth. And then they have to organise, they have to educate themselves, until the next wave of immigration comes from somewhere else, and then they become part of us, rather than them. And that's what's happened with Catholics, of course, is that they are educated now in a way they weren't before, they are integrated into all the professions and business and everything else ... there is very little distinction between Catholics and Protestants now. So, now, everybody's looking for the newest wave of migration to find ... um ... them that we can be opposed to."