Abstract:
This study provides an examination, largely drawn from New South Wales (NSW) census data from the second half of the 1800s, of religious variations in the inland sheep-wheat belt catchments. It focuses on the south-west of the colony, in particular the Lachlan catchment, where the Roman Catholic portion of the population was atypically high. While it confirms existing understandings of the distribution of the principal religious groups in colonial society, including the greater propensity of Roman Catholic immigrants to settle in a large region extending south-westwards from Sydney, the study raises questions about the trajectory and timing of Catholic settlement. By the early 1870s, the dominance of the first-generation of Irish Catholics in the south-west was fading, due to a convergence of factors, including the aging of the district's pioneer Irish Catholic population, the declining rate of Irish immigration to the colony, and the timing of the census enumeration. While the fall was important in its local context, this did not conceal the continuing dominance of the Irish Catholic heritage in the Lachlan catchment and surrounds.
