Dreams and realities : some insights into the National Catholic Rural Movement

TL;DRAbstract

\They _frightened me old friend. All they want for a rural policy is a sheep a goat three acres - and a migrant.\" So commented a former Governor General returning from a rural conference in Albury according to Alan Reid a political journalist writing a newspaper story in October 1954. Who were the mysterious they? Forerunners of the communes of the sixties perhaps the cult movements of the seventies? Certainly it was a religious organisation but one where most of the members belonged to that oldest form of institutionalised Christianity - the Roman Catholic Church. Co-operation was an esteemed principle but the freedom \"to do your own thing\" was not. The National Catholic Rural Movement (NCRM) as it was called was an expression of Catholic Action a concept formulated in Rome but which the Australian hierarchy was struggling to establish in a country far removed from Europe. Yet with a mixture of somewhat naive romanticism and ironclad ideology the NCRM had its own idealistic visions

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