'Typical of the New Zealand Occupational Distribution'?: A Reconsideration of Catholic Interwar Employment Patterns

Abstract

During the 1920s and 1930s, New Zealand Catholics often characterised themselves as a relatively poor community, and mostly engaged in low paid, unskilled employment. In the 1970s, reflecting on the Church fifty years earlier, historian Ernest Simmons claimed that Catholics tried to explain their relative lack of social and career advancement by blaming the Masons and other opponents and by creating 'a myth that Catholics had always been poor'. In his seminal 1990 work on the Irish in New Zealand, Donald Akenson attempted to debunk this myth, declaring that 'the dead centre normality of Irish Catholics is striking' and that they were 'typical of the New Zealand occupational distribution'.