They lead the carriage of the Irish-born Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, along Bourke Street in Melbourne.

Around 10,000 first world war veterans and throngs of Catholic schoolboys march behind the procession while tens of thousands of Melburnians line the streets and cheer them on.

It is Saturday 20 March 1920.

This special St Patrick's Day parade (three days after the calendar marks the actual commemoration for Ireland's patron saint) is being made into a silent film by Bert Cross, a cinematographer who'll find fame in 1927 for adapting to film Marcus Clarke's novel For the Term of his Natural Life.

But Cross is almost incidental to the film - Ireland Will be Free - he is shooting this day.

Indeed, when you look at the film, which has been restored by the National Film and Sound Archive before its first full screening in almost a century this Friday, it is obvious the true directors are before, not behind, the camera.

They are Mannix and his perhaps unlikely friend and confidant John Wren, a man whose contradictions (shunned by the establishment while a puppeteer of politicians; illegal bookmaker-cum-millionaire who never lost touch with his Collingwood slum roots; a supporter of the church who only formally worshipped late in life, and a staunch Irish republican who unequivocally supported the Empire's war from the outset) put him at odds with easy definition.

The common, enduring epithet "colourful Melbourne identity" undermines Wren's complexities.

Amid the fierce sectarianism that engulfed Australia during and just after the war, Mannix - archbishop from 1917 to 1963 - made the film as a testimony to his support for an Irish free state. Mannix, born in County Cork in 1864, a life-long republican and later confidant to the Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Éamon de Valera, supported Britain's declaration of war in late 1914.

But in 1915, when sectarianism became a potent undercurrent of Australian society amid false suggestions that Irish Catholics were not volunteering to fight in sufficient numbers, Mannix's opposition to war grew. Continue reading

Sources

• Guardian Australia, from an article by Paul Daley, who writes about Indigenous history, Australian culture and national identity for Guardian Australia.
• Image: National Museum Australia

He was a central figure in the social and political history of Australia in the 20th century.

Mannix did everything in his power to frustrate biographers, including, as Brenda Niall relates, consigning his personal papers to an enormous bonfire. It honours something of the man's contrariness, then, that so many biographies have been written of him.

There have been at least half a dozen before this. He deserves them all. He is a spell-binding figure and the extraordinary diversity of opinions about his personality and career is testimony to the deep and lasting passions he aroused.

For my money, Brenda Niall's Mannix is the most wise, shrewd and elegant biography yet produced of this complex and beguiling man. Niall's irresistible prose strengthens the candour of this fine book.

Niall writes as an insider: she first encountered Mannix in 1959 when he was 95 and she was in her 20s. She was sent by Bob Santamaria to interview Mannix for the biography on which Santamaria had been working but that did not appear until 1984.

Mannix had been kind to Niall's family after the death of her father. She continued to work within this world and was close to many of the people within it, including the man often regarded as Mannix's only real friend, Father Bill Hackett.

Niall published an excellent biography of Hackett in 2009.

As the years elapsed, Niall found she needed to distance herself in some ways from this intense Catholic sub-culture. There is a poignant moment, one of many, when she is watching Mannix give a "bravura performance" in a long TV interview in 1961.

By this stage she had become "uncomfortable with Santamaria's certainties". Mannix "seemed wilfully to ignore the pain and bitterness felt on both sides of the ideological divide". Niall writes: "all very well for him, I thought, switching off the television".

Niall herself did not switch off. However discerning its judgements, this book is deeply engaged with its subject. Continue reading

• Michael McGirr in The Sydney Morning Herald

Michael McGirr is the Dean of Faith and Mission at St Kevin's College in Melbourne.

Anzac Day is one of those mysterious days. We know the meaning, only what is the meaning precisely? I relate more readily to certain family birthdays and to Easter; more readily to All Souls' Day with its call to remember the departed, surely one of the things that makes us more human, than to Anzac Day. The day is a memorial for the dead, especially now that none of the original men at Gallipoli are alive to tell the story, but what else is it?

My paternal grandfather, Edgar Harvey, was not only an Anzac but among those who landed nearly 100 years ago at the Turkish cove, later named Anzac, on 25 April 1915. Yet the family almost never talked about this, or subsequent events in his wartime experience. It was passed over in silence. It still is, largely.

In a country where Gallipoli is treated as a moment of great national importance, it might be expected that I would feel proud to have a grandfather who fought there and survived. While that is the case, it was never instilled in me to feel that way.

My father rarely if ever talked about his father Edgar's wartime experience. Silences in childhood may come to say that there must be secrets, or there are feelings too hard to express. Just being alive, I came to learn, is what is important, not being proud about knowing someone who was there.

One thing my father, an Anglican, did repeat while I was growing up in the 1960s was Daniel Mannix's claim that the Great War was nothing but a trade war. The vehemence with which he repeated this assertion told me it stung, he was hurt by the truth of it. Continue reading

Sources

• Philip Harvey in Eureka Street
• Image: The Guardian