Anglicanism and Nationalism in Australia,1901–1962

In recent years Australian nationalism has attracted considerable attention from historians, but most of the literature has been written from a secular standpoint. The present paper focuses on the contribution of the Anglican Church to the development of nationalism in the period between the coming of Federation and the attainment by the church of a new constitution that gave it autonomy. The first part of the paper examines the English character of the church and its attitudes towards empire, monarchy and "White Australia." The second part explores the emergence of a more distinctively Australian identity within the church. Although importannt, this was not strong enough greatly to influence the church whose presence helped perpetuate the hold of British cultural values in ways and to an extent not hitherto fully appreciated.     

"A Dogged Inch-by-Inch Affair": The Church of the Nazarene in Australia 1945–1958

The Church of the Nazarene began work in Australia in 1945 at the instigation of a handful of disaffected Australian evangelicals, marginalized from more orthodox believers in their holiness radicalism. They were often looked upon as holy rollers and sinless perfectionists, purveyors of a brand of religion thought to be populist, coarse, and theologically suspect. In America in the 1940s, the holiness movement churches had moved much further toward the traditional mainstream than was the case in Australia. The early Australian Nazarenes saw a decline in the religious fervour of other evangelical bodies, and saw themselves as raised up to champion a return to the apostolic fire of early Methodism. They were, perhaps naively, unaware of the lowering of religious tension in their own mother church. Differences between the ecclesiastical culture of Australian and American Christianity were to prove internal challenges to be added to the challenge of external opposition.     

Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925

This paper considers the translation of domestic discourses over imperial space as middle-class British women established homes in India from 1886 to 1925. Unlike studies of imperial domesticity that delineate separate spheres of home and empire, I consider the exercise of imperial power on a domestic scale, by examining advice given in household guides on managing servants and raising British children in India. Rather than view the household merely as confining, I also explore the advice given to British women regarding travel outside their homes in India. The domestic roles of British women reproduced imperial power relations on a household scale, and the political significance of imperial domesticity extended beyond the boundaries of the home.