Henry Kendall’s Religion

Abstract

Goodwin’s investigation of Kendall’s religious persuations takes as a starting point a suggestion by Douglas Sladen (in A Century of Australian Song, 1888) that Kendall was something of an outsider in social and literary circles in so far as he was a Roman Catholic ‘in a secular, or at best an undenominational community’. The article examines the available evidence on Kendall’s religion and the question whether being a Catholic at the time was really something of a social liability, and discusses contemporary social attitudes towards religious groups, particularly Catholicism. The author concludes that Sladen was wrong in considering Kendall to be a Catholic, and that, on the whole, Sydney society at the time was not intolerant of Catholics but was rather a society increasingly tolerant of all religious differences, including secularism and irreligion.