Australian Dictionary of Biography entry:
James Dixon (1758–1840)
by Vivienne Parsons

This article was published in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, 1966, online in 2006

James Dixon (1758-1840), Roman Catholic priest, was born at Castlebridge, County Wexford, Ireland, into a family in comfortable circumstances. He was educated by a neighbouring parish priest and later at Salamanca and Louvain, where he completed his course in 1784 and became curate at Crossabeg parish, near Wexford. There he was arrested in 1798 under suspicion of taking part in the Irish rebellion and of having commanded a company of rebels at Tubberneering. He was tried by court martial and convicted on shaky evidence. According to Dr Caulfield, bishop of Ferns, he was probably mistaken for his brother Nicholas, who took an active part in the rebellion. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, but was reprieved conditional on his being transported for life.

Dixon arrived in New South Wales in the Friendship on 16 January 1800. He remained in Sydney, where his conduct satisfied the authorities. On 19 April 1803 Governor Philip Gidley King, influenced by the uneasiness of the Irish at not being able to practise their religion, granted him conditional emancipation and permission to exercise his duties as a priest, as the secretary of state, probably on the representation of the former governor, John Hunter, had suggested. Dixon was obliged to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration, but was allowed to minister as priest as long as he and his congregation strictly obeyed the governor's orders. The Holy See recognized the advantage to the Catholic convicts of this permission. At the petition of Father James McCormack, guardian of St Isidore's in Rome, Propaganda forwarded a faculty to him, as well as to Fathers Peter O'Neil and James Harold, neither of whom was in New South Wales when it arrived, and made him prefect apostolic of New Holland, the first Catholic ecclesiastical appointment in Australia.

The first public Mass under the new regulations was celebrated in Sydney on 15 May 1803 and others followed later at Parramatta and the Hawkesbury. King was so pleased at the salutary effect on the Irish Catholics that he decided to pay Dixon a salary of £60. But after praising the experiment in a dispatch of 1 March 1804, he soon put an end to it because he believed that, especially after the rising of Irish convicts, seditious meetings took place when Catholics met to attend Mass. During this insurrection Dixon accompanied Major George Johnston and the government troops and tried to remonstrate with the rebels, but without success. Thereafter King determined to enforce the convicts' attendance at Anglican services. Dixon continued to practise privately in the colony, as the evidence of baptisms and marriages shows: he was described in the 1806 Muster as 'Roman Catholic Priest, self-employed'. According to the letters of Michael Hayes, a leading Irish Catholic in the colony, Protestants as well as Catholics contributed to his support. In 1808 he obtained permission to return to Ireland. He again worked at Crossabeg, where he became parish priest in 1819. He died on 4 January 1840 and was buried in the Crossabeg chapel.

Select Bibliography

Historical Records of New South Wales, vols 4-5
Historical Records of Australia, series 1, vols 4-5
P. F. Moran, History of the Catholic Church in Australasia (Syd, 1895)
J. G. Murtagh, Australia: The Catholic Chapter (Syd, 1959)
Piper papers (State Library of New South Wales)
Bonwick transcripts, biography (State Library of New South Wales)
letters of M. Hayes and P. Girard, 1799-1836 (State Library of New South Wales).

Citation details
Vivienne Parsons, 'Dixon, James (1758–1840)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dixon-james-1980/text2401, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 26 June 2025.

This article was published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, (Melbourne University Press), 1966.

Reproduced by permission of Australian Dictionary of Biography. Original biography:https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dixon-james-1980

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Dictionary of Irish Biography entry by Aidan Breen, https://www.dib.ie/biography/dixon-james-a2636:

Dixon, James (1758–1840), first prefect-apostolic of Australia, was born in June 1758 at Castlebridge, Co. Wexford, son (and fourth of five children) of John Dixon of Castlebridge, of a noted family of millers, maltsters and brewers. His mother's name is unknown. He began his clerical studies under Father Sutton, parish priest of Oylegate, and went to Salamanca (1778), and later to Louvain, where he completed his studies (1784). In 1785 he returned to his native diocese of Ferns and was appointed curate of Castlebridge, where the protestant rector was the Reverend Frederick Draffen, of whom Dixon became a close acquaintance. James should not be confused with another Father Dixon: his first cousin Thomas, also of Castlebridge, who was arrested early in May 1798 and convicted of being a United Irishman and of seditious activities, on the evidence of one Francis Murphy of Wexford town. He was sentenced to transportation and incarcerated in Duncannon fort, where he shortly after died. Murphy himself was subsequently shot in Wexford (3 June) as an informer and his body thrown in the water. Another Thomas Dixon, a brother of James, also took a very active and bloody part in the rising.

After the rising in Wexford, James Dixon went to England with Colonel George le Hunte (a noted loyalist squire of Altramont, Castlebridge) and Draffen. On landing at Milford Haven he was attacked by an enraged mob of protestant refugees from the Wexford rebellion, and escaped with his life only through the physical intervention of Draffen. He was arrested, brought back to Wexford, and charged with having ‘commanded a company of rebels at the battle of Tubberneering’, near Gorey. His kinship to the Thomas Dixons mentioned above, and the fact that his older brother Nicholas had also been an officer in the insurgent army, would certainly have made him guilty by association in the eyes of the authorities and would have secured his conviction. Despite an appeal for clemency to the lord lieutenant, Cornwallis (qv), from Draffen – a singular event at that time – testifying to his complete innocence of any complicity in the rising, he was courtmartialled in Waterford (1799) and sentenced to be hanged, but this was commuted to transportation for life to New Holland (Australia). While awaiting transportation, he was put in grim confinement in Geneva Barracks, Waterford. It is certain that Dixon took no part whatever in the rising: this was attested on oath by Draffen, le Hunte, Bishop James Caulfield (qv) of Ferns, and several other notable persons of Castlebridge area at the time, and by his ecclesiastical superiors when he afterwards became parish priest of Crossabeg.

Together with his fellow priests and transportees Harold and O'Neill, he reached Port Jackson (Sydney) on 16 January 1800 on board the Friendship. Because of his physical condition and good conduct, the colonial governor King allowed him to remain at Port Jackson and gave him conditional emancipation by order of 19 April 1803, ‘to exercise his clerical functions’ publicly. He was thus the first priest allowed (under strict supervision) to celebrate mass in the colony ‘once in three weeks in the settlements at Sydney, Parramatta, and Hawkesbury, in rotation’. On 15 May 1803 he was appointed ‘prefect apostolic of New Holland’ (later ‘of Australia’) by the Holy See – the first catholic ecclesiastical appointment in Australia. He would retain that position until 1816. He celebrated his first public mass on that day and was put on a salary of £60 by Governor King.

The permission to celebrate mass was revoked in November 1804, and an order was issued early the following year compelling all convicts to attend the services of the Church of England under pain of transportation to a penal settlement. It is not clear if these restrictions were subsequently relaxed or ignored, but Dixon laboured under covert and difficult circumstances for a further eight years in the Sydney area as a missionary to the catholic population. It has long been assumed that the revocation of permission was due to an attempted rising by Irish catholic convicts who had perhaps been using the masses to meet and develop their seditious plans. However, the 'rising' likely relates to a major convict escape attempt from a government farm west of Sydney in March 1804. Many but not all of those involved were Irish catholics, and two of the nine hanged in the aftermath were English. So the reason for the withdrawal of Dixon's right to preach cannot be categorically stated.

In an 1806 muster he was described as ‘Roman Catholic priest, self employed’. At the representation of Patrick Ryan (d. 1819), the new bishop of Ferns, Dixon was finally permitted in 1808 to return home, and arrived back in Ireland the following year, where he lived for many years with his brother Nicholas (who, despite some involvement in the rising, had escaped punishment and continued in business until his death in 1816). In 1810 he was made curate, and in 1819 parish priest, in the parish of Crossabeg and Ballymurn, Co. Wexford, where he remained for twenty-one years.

Dixon lived to see the abolition of tithes, the disbandment of the hated yeomanry, and the passage of the catholic emancipation act of 1829, which finally removed many of the provisions operating against the catholic faith. He died 4 January 1840, aged eighty-two, at the Franciscan friary, Wexford, and is buried in Crossabeg, where there is a monument erected to him. He is commemorated in a stained-glass window in Sydney cathedral.

Sources

J. F. Hogan, The Irish in Australia (1887), 226–8; P. F. Moran. History of the catholic church in Australia (Sydney, 1895); W. H. Grattan Flood, ‘Memoirs of Father James Dixon, first prefect-apostolic of Australia’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, xxx (1911), 193–206; K. MacGrath, ‘Two Wexford priests and ‘98’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, lxx (1948), 1092–8; C. Dickson, The Wexford rising in 1798 (1955), app. xiii, 265; J. G. Murtagh, Australia: the catholic chapter (2nd ed., 1959); Dictionary of Australian National Biography, 1788–1950, i, 309; D. Goodall, ‘Dixon of Castlebridge, Co. Wexford’, Irish Genealogist, viii (1980–85), 629–41; David Levell, Tour to hell: convict Australia’s great escape myths (2008), 119–22, 138–54, 164–73

Revision comments: Information about the revocation of Dixon's permission to say mass has been updated based on new material. Sources also updated.
Publishing information
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.002636.v1
Originally published October 2009 as part of the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
Last revised May 2021.
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license.

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Celebrant of First Known Mass in Australia
Fr T.J. Linane, From Abel to Zundolovich, Vol. 2: Biographies of Priests on the Australian Scene up to 1900, 1980, pp 143-144:
(Contributed by Gavan Cashman, Secretary ACHS, Sydney)

The western world underwent a subtle evolution after the War of American Independence. Political philosophers questioned the old concepts of absolutist governments in a more radical way than they had prior to the American revolt, and then came the French Revolution which put into practice the theories and with the Revolution came the overthrow of numerous European regimes. The new ideas from France met and interlaced the burning frustrations of both the intellectuals of Ireland—Catholic and Protestant—and the masses of the people looked for religious liberty and the lifting of economic oppression.
Agitation and minor political violence culminated in the great Rebellion of 1798, when the fiercest martial clashes between rebels and government were in the Wexford/Wicklow area.

Persons, otherwise of little consequence in the flow of history, were caught in the tide. One such was a well disposed priest, James Dixon, of Wexford in the Diocese of Ferns. Suspicion or a loyalist informer's story was enough to direct the Army's attention to the subject and many an innocent victim was implicated in the harsh and summary punishments inflicted by savage and insensitive officers. Some priests supported and some opposed the rebellion on practical grounds. One priest had the distinction of being condemned to death by the bloodthirsty General Lake in Wexford.

James Dixon was born at Castleridge, Co. Wexford and his seminary education was at Salamanca and Louvain from which he was ordained. His early education was at the hands of a neighbouring priest. He was appointed curate at Crossabeg at 26 years of age and he died there as Parish Priest at 82 years of age.
His life, on those facts, could have been the simple story of a good, unambitious priest. His family seems to have retained some substance throughout the penal times as a brother was captain of a collier working out of Wexford and another was partner in a banking firm within a few years after the '98.
The Bishop of Ferns, Dr. Caulfield, opposed the rebellion and he did not wish his priests to be involved in it, but he thought that James Dixon was condemned as he was mistaken for his brother, Nicholas. Dr. Caulfield refused a government request for the dismissal of a priest who refused to absoIve the traitor who lodged the information naming Fr. Dixon.

There is some doubt regarding 'Nicholas' Dixon. Moran's History, following Caulfield, refers to Nicholas and implies identity with a rebel leader 'cousin germain' while Thomas Pakenham in 'The Year of Liberty' (1969) names Captain Dixon as James' brother. Pakenham names Thomas as the sea captain and both he and his wife were very active in 'the cause'. Thomas was not above giving and personally executing sentence of death. The latter's activity would certainly give rise to government interest in his brother but Dr. Caulfield is quite definite that James was opposed to the action.
James Dixon was sentenced to death but like so many others from the '98, his sentence was commuted to transportation for life to NSW. He sailed in 'Friendship' in company with 'Minerva' which had on board Fr. James Harold. 'Minerva' made better sailing and arrived in Port Jackson a month earlier than 'Friendship', which arrived on 16th February 1800.

Governor King, who almost spluttered his abhorrence of the seditious priests, was able to send Fr. Harold to Norfolk Island some months later and the 'seditious criminal' Fr. Peter O'Neil, was found to have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice and was returned to Ireland. Fr. Dixon remained in Sydney and by September, 1803, King was remarking his good conduct and the restraining influence he could exert on the behaviour of the Irish convicts. The British Government approved permission for priests to officiate, subject to King's opinion. King imposed stringent conditions on Fr. Dixon's activities but Mass was allowed publicly. However, permission was not extended to Fr. Harold on Norfolk Island although he was not inhibited as a schoolmaster.

The permit was short-lived. It was issued in April, 1803 and the first public Mass was celebrated on Sunday, 15th May. This would have been in the Rocks area as a marriage was solemnised on the same day as recorded by Kenny between ' .... Henry Simpson* Shipwright and Catherine Rourke of the Rocks, widow.’ The Castle Hill Rebellion of March, 1804 terminated the permit so that, from 1788-1820, Mass was permitted for 10 months only. Rome had given authority as a Prefect Apostolic but there was little opportunity to exercise additional faculties publicly. King had found Dixon a liability once more but he did carry out some priestly functions unofficially as Michael Hayes says ('Letters') that he was supported by both Catholics and non-Catholics and he appears on the 1806 Muster as R.C. priest—self-employed. He regularised marriages and performed baptisms until late 1803, when he was allowed to return to Ireland. His health had deteriorated and he suffered greatly from gout and this complaint afflicted him until his death. Moran claimed that at the time of his departure NSW was left without a minister of religion. This is not strictly correct as Harold had by this time returned from Norfolk Island by way of Van Diemen's Land and took over the unofficial ministry.

Fr. Dixon returned to Crossabeg where he became in time Parish Priest and he was buried in the church. 48 years as an obscure priest; 8 years as a convict priest in NSW; 10 months as an official chaplain in NSW; a place in our history which we now look back on with enlivened curiosity.
There are vestments at St. Patrick's College, Manly, which are said to be the make-shift work of Fr. Dixon's supporters.

Fr. Harold was to return to Sydney before Fr. Dixon's departure but this was after Bligh's overthrow and before Macquarie's assumption of office. An insurrection in NSW would no doubt have an especial connotation for Frs. Dixon and Harold!

* The May, 1803 issue of the Gazette carries the information.

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Freemans Journal, Dublin, 10 January 1840, p 4:
Died. On Friday last, at Sion, the Rev. James Dixon, for 20 years parish priest of Crossabeg. Driven by the ruthless hand of persecution in early life from the land of his nativity, he returned after an absence of nearly a quarter of a century, which he spent in ministering to the spiritual comfort of his brethren in a foreign clime, to that country which he loved, and from which he was expelled without a crime. On his arrival at his native parish he was forthwith inducted to the pastoral charge of Crossabeg by the present venerable head of our diocese, the Right Rev. Dr. Keating, the duties of which he uninterruptedly performed until within a few days of his demise. We would willingly draw a veil over those days of terror, when law, justice, and equity were alike set at defiance by the minions of a ruthless power, and under the guise of a mock loyalty such excesses were perpetrated as make humanity shudder, but that we cannot resist mentioning an instance that redounds to the honour of a brother clergyman, who ministered at a different altar; and like his friend, the subject of our notice, is now removed “to that bourne from whence no traveller returns.” It is unnecessary here to state that the Rev. James Dixon, without even the forms of justice having been gone through, or a single crime alleged to his charge, was dragged from his kindred and flock, in the year ’98, and proscribed as a fit subject for transportation.—When the blood-thirsty Orangemen of the day got their victim within their grasp, and not satisfied with the mildness of such a sentence on a Popish priest, were about to lay violent hands on him, the late Rev. F. Draffen, Protestant rector of Castlebridge, flung his arms about their victim, and resolved that sooner than innocent blood should be shed he would perish with him. The good and benevolent man succeeded in saving the life of his friend; and happily lived to welcome him back to his native shores. The Rev. Mr. Dixon lived to the patriarchal age of 90, and never was heard to utter a word but Christian forgiveness towards his persecutors. May he rest in peace.—Wexford Independent.