'LET THE DAMN PROTESTANTS DO THE ENLISTING': THE T.C. BEIRNE LIBEL CASE IN BRISBANE, 1916-17.

This article focuses on a Queensland supreme court trial during World War I. In October 1916, a Protestant weekly, the Sentinel, accused, without naming him, a Catholic businessman in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley of disloyalty, undermining the war effort and discrimination against non-Catholics. Thomas Charles Beirne, a legislative councillor, was the most prominent Irish Catholic retailer in the city. He took himself to be both the target and a casualty of the paragraph and sued the Sentinel's editor and printer. The ensuing trial exposed some of the dynamics of Brisbane's Catholic- Protestant divide during the Great War. This paper situates the trial in a series of sectarian exchanges triggered by the Easter Rising in Dublin and intensified by the debate over conscription. The paper appraises the consequences of the Beirne libel trial and verdict for the individuals involved and the wider community. It also considers some implications of the case for the meaning, memory and historiography of sectarianism in Queensland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]