The permanent presence of Catholicism in Australia came with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788. The first schools in Australia were Christian schools established by the Church of England in the early days of British settlement in the late 1700s. Free "charity schools" run by other denominations gradually came into existence later. One-tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic and at least half of them were born in Ireland. A small proportion of British marines were also Catholic. Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland, so the authorities were suspicious of the minority church for the first three decades of settlement. Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Anglicans. The first Catholic priest colonists arrived in Australia as convicts in 1800 - convicted for "complicity" in the Irish 1798 Rebellion. The Irish led Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804 alarmed the British authorities and the priests permission to celebrate Mass was revoked. Priests were not officially permitted to travel to the colony until 1820.
The absence of a Catholic mission in Australia before 1818 reflected the legal disabilities of Catholics in Britain and the difficult position of Ireland within the British Empire, but by 1833, there were around ten Catholic schools in the Australian colonies. The Church of England lost its legal privileges in the Colony of New South Wales following the Church Act of 1836. Drafted by the Catholic attorney-general John Plunkett, the act established legal equality for Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to Methodists.
John Bede Polding, a Benedictine monk, was Sydney's first bishop (and then archbishop) from 1835 to 1877. Polding requested a community of nuns be sent to the colony and five Irish Sisters of Charity arrived in 1838. While tensions arose between the English Benedictine hierarchy and the Irish Ignatian-tradition order from the start, the sisters set about pastoral care in a women's prison and began visiting hospitals and schools and establishing employment for convict women. In 1847, two sisters transferred to Hobart and established a school. The sisters went on to establish hospitals in four of the eastern states.
At Polding's request, the Christian Brothers arrived in Sydney in 1843 to assist in schools but the Irish-English divide proved problematic and the brothers returned to Ireland. In 1857, Polding founded an Australian order of nuns in the Benedictine tradition - the Sisters of the Good Samaritan - to work in education and social work.
Establishing themselves first at Sevenhill, in the newly established colony of South Australia in 1848, the Jesuits were the first religious order of priests to enter and establish houses in South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory - Austrian Jesuits established themselves in the south and north and Irish in the east. The Australian gold rushes saw a rapid increase in the population and prosperity of the colonies. While the Austrian priests traversed the Outback on horseback to found missions and schools, the Irish priests arrived in the east in 1860 and had by 1880 established the major schools of Xavier College in Melbourne, St Aloysius' College and Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview in Sydney - which each survive to the present.
In 1872, Victoria became the first Australian colony to pass an Education Act providing for free, secular public education. The other colonies followed over the following two decades. With the subsequent withdrawal of state aid for church schools around 1880, the Catholic Church, unlike other Australian churches, put great energy and resources into creating a comprehensive alternative system of education. It was largely staffed by nuns, brothers and priests of religious orders, such as the Christian Brothers (who had returned to Australia in 1868); the Sisters of Mercy (who had arrived in Perth in 1846); Marist Brothers, who came from France in 1872 and the Sisters of St Joseph, founded in Australia by Mary MacKillop and Fr Julian Tenison Woods in 1867. MacKillop travelled throughout Australasia and established schools, convents and charitable institutions but came into conflict with those bishops who preferred diocesan control of the order rather than central control from Adelaide by the Josephite order. MacKillop administered the Josephites as a national order at a time when Australia was divided among individually governed colonies. She is today the most revered of Australian Catholics, canonised by Benedict XVI in 2010. Catholic schools flourished in Australia and by 1900 there were 115 Christian Brothers teaching in Australia. By 1910 there were 5000 sisters from all orders teaching in schools.
Following the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, the church experienced huge changes but also began to suffer a decline in vocations to the religious life, leading to a priest shortage. On the other hand, Catholic education under lay leadership has expanded, and about 20% of Australian school students attend a Catholic school. Australia's post-World War II multicultural immigration program has seen a diversification of the Catholic population of Australia away from its predominantly Irish roots - with Catholics arriving from nations like Italy, Lebanon, Malta, Vietnam and Sudan and changing the face of the student population undergoing Catholic education.
Allegations of sexual abuse by staff associated with Catholic education in Australia have involved small fractions of students and staff at Catholic schools and received widespread media and community scrutiny. In 1996, the Australian Church issued a document, Towards Healing, which it described as seeking to "establish a compassionate and just system for dealing with complaints of abuse". Papal apologies followed from John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Outside the church, the lobby group Broken Rites was formed with the aim of supporting victims and campaigning for punishment of perpetrators.
Today one in five Australian students attend Catholic schools. As with other classes of non-government schools in Australia, Catholic schools receive funding from the Commonwealth Government. Church schools range from elite, high cost schools (which generally offer extensive bursary programs for low-income students) to low-fee local schools. Notable schools include the Jesuit colleges of Loyola College Watsonia, St Aloysius, Loyola Senior High School, Mount Druitt and Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview in Sydney, Saint Ignatius' College, Adelaide and Xavier College in Melbourne; the Marist Brothers St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, and the Marist Brothers St Gregory's College, Campbelltown; the Society of the Sacred Heart's Rosebay Kincoppal School, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary's Loreto Normanhurst and Loreto Kirribilli, the Sisters of Mercy's Monte Sant' Angelo Mercy College, the Christian Brothers' St Edmund's College, Canberra, Waverley College Sydney, St Kevin's College, Melbourne, St Mary Mackillop College, Canberra and Aquinas College, Perth - however, the list and range of Catholic primary and secondary schools in Australia is long and diverse and extends throughout metropolitan, regional and remote Australia: see Catholic Schools in Australia.