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The dramatic story of the Catalpa escape in the ocean off Rockingham has lured an Irish Jesuit historian to WA.

Professor Oliver Rafferty, a lecturer in church history at Heythrop College, University of London, is St Thomas More College's annual Chair of Jesuit Studies.

Each year a local benefactor funds a visiting Jesuit scholar.

Professor Rafferty is the first historian to occupy the Chair and he will take a series of six seminars in the Arts Faculty on Irish and British history, as well as delivering some public lectures, in his two months at UWA and Notre Dame University. Professor Rafferty said he had always been interested in history, growing up in Belfast with his mother and grandmother sitting around the fire telling stories.

"My grandmother loved to talk about the Titanic and the stories surrounding its construction in Belfast," he said. "I grew up in a very pious traditional Catholic home, despite my grandmother and the local parish priest constantly at odds over her late husband being a Communist," he said.

"I always assumed that I would become a priest and the only time I really questioned it was soon after I had been ordained and I wondered if it really was the right thing to do."

One of eight children, Professor Rafferty was named after the Blessed Oliver Plunkett, the last person in England to be put to death for his faith, in 1681. "My siblings all called me ‘Blessed Oliver' and I thought that was my real name, until I went to school."

The two threads of his life wove together when he studied history for his Doctorate of Philosophy at Christ Church College Oxford. His published thesis was The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat .

He has studied theology, history and philosophy in the US, the UK and India, worked in schools in London and Glasgow and as a missionary in Western Guyana and held academic positions in the US, the UK and South Korea.

But this is Professor Rafferty's first visit to Australia - to the famous ‘scene of the crime' where six Fenian prisoners escaped from Fremantle Gaol (or, as it was then, the British penal colony of Western Australia) in April 1876, raced to Rockingham and narrowly avoided several attempts to recapture them as they were picked up by the whaling ship Catalpa, sailing under the American flag.

The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries, supporters of the Irish Republican Brotherhood with the aim of overthrowing British rule in Ireland.

Professor Rafferty's public lecture at UWA , for the Institute of Advanced Studies, is The (Mis)use of Religion in the Justification of Political Violence. It will be in the University Club Auditorium on the evening of Thursday 23 August. His seminar series will be offered on Fridays from 1pm to 2.30pm from 10 August to 21 September.

St Thomas More College was founded by the Jesuits in the 1950s and the order has retained a long association with the College.

Future appointments to the Chair of Jesuit Studies include Professor Thomas Scirghi from Fordham University New York in early 2013 and Professor Guy Cosolmag, the Pope's astronomer, in 2014.

Published in UWA News , 6 August 2012