AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

Susan Wyndham

In researching her biography of Daniel Mannix, the Archbishop of Melbourne for 46 years, Brenda Niall was surprised to find how liberal his views were on most issues: he opposed World War I conscription, capital and corporal punishment, and the White Australia policy; supported the church reforms of Vatican II; and called for more openness in teaching children about sex.

“I can’t say whether sexual abuse was going on his time but it probably was,” Niall says. “He lived to be 99 and his attitude to sex education was way before its time. If it had happened, children might have talked to their parents … He was against the silence.”

Niall’s biography, Mannix, has won the $25,000 National Biography Prize for its nuanced and personal portrait of a complex man who was Archbishop until his death in 1963 and is mostly remembered as…