John Bull’s Other Vineyard: Selling Australian Wine in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Nineteenth-century Australian wine makers saw Britain as the natural market for their wines and envisioned themselves as participants in a greater imperial economy, so Australian wine should be considered in discussions of imperial commodities and the reception of popular imperialism in advertising. The Australians’ concentrated efforts to sell their wines to British consumers were stymied, though, by high tariffs and negative impressions of the quality of Australian wines, and Australia would remain a marginal player in the British wine market until the second half of the twentieth century. This article uses four case studies to argue that Australian wines were promoted in Britain in the nineteenth century and that the marketing strategies hinged on associating Australian wines with imperial unity and the civilisation of Australian settler society.     

Bruce Smith,Edward Shann,W.K. Hancock: The Economic Critique of Democracy in Australia

This paper argues that there were a number of writers in Australia from the late 1880s to the early 1930s who developed what is best described as an economic critique of the workings of democracy. The three writers considered by this paper, Bruce Smith, Edward Shann and W.K. Hancock, all developed critiques of Australian democracy along similar lines. The central feature of their argument was that Australian majoritarian democracy was making poor policy decisions because it attempted to override the laws of economics in the name of the popular will and ethics. They seemed to have believed that this problem would only be resolved once Australia possessed a mature and economically literate population.     

Radio Ministries: Religion on Australian Commercial Radio from the 1920s to the 1960s*

This article examines the first forty years of religious broadcasting on commercial radio in Australia, a subject largely neglected by historians of Australian religion and the media. It reveals the diversity of religious broadcasting on Australian commercial radio, the ambiguities of the regulatory framework within which it operated, the influence of American religious broadcasting in Australia, and the challenges confronting religious broadcasters, particularly in the decade between the introduction of television and the emergence of talkback radio. The article concludes in the second half of the 1960s, when religious programming faced mounting commercial pressures, as well as a new opportunity in the shape of “talkback” radio.     

Divine Healing in Australian Protestantism, 1870–1940

The topic of divine healing was not at the forefront of the Protestant movement during its first three centuries as it reacted to what was seen as an exaggerated and often fallacious miraculous supernaturalism in Roman Catholicism. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Protestant churches in Britain, America, Europe and Australia had to consider divine healing in light of a newly emerging holiness movement. This article examines the developments in practice and theological perspective of the Protestant churches in Australia, particularly as they responded to the clear claims of the growing Pentecostal movement in the nation and the sacramental perspective on healing supported by the High Anglican sector of the Australian Church of England.     

The Colonial Religion of the Anglican Clergy: Western Australia 1830 to c. 1870

This article sets out to remedy an historiographical oversight in Australian history by identifying the principal characteristics of the religious culture of Anglican clergy in the colony of Western Australia between 1830 and about 1870. Using sources, both personal from clergy or clergy wives, and official correspondence with the colonial governments, and clergy correspondence to mission societies and their bishop, a number of features of clergy religion are delineated. They enable a comparison to be made between metropolitan and colonial Anglican clergy cultures. These include anxieties about status and income; the involvement of the clergy in charity, education, church building, and public worship; isolation and religious competition. While many of these were familiar to English clergy, they took on new aspects in the colonial context, which required the clergy there to become conscious that the colony was a new land, however much they attempted to remake it in their own ecclesiastical image.     

Containing "Contamination": Cardinal Moran and Fin de Siècle Australian National Identity, 1888–1911

Cardinal Patrick Moran, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney 1884–1911, believed that Australian Catholicism would flourish with the emergence of the new nation through Federation in 1901, provided that Australians turned away from foreign influences, including anarchism and nihilism. Moran also sought to use Australia to "Christianise" the enormous population of China, and believed that Chinese immigration could make a useful contribution to nation building. As the nineteenth century closed, Moran's aims were also complicated by the more insidious threats represented by a challenge to religious faith by fin de siècle ideas — a modernism manifesting as both a general challenge and a specific doctrinal relativism that might erode the Church's authority, and the threat Moran felt was posed to the development of the liberal Australian state and the Catholic Church by radical political alternatives. Concern that a mood of religious apostasy and secularisation might spread to the Catholic community also influenced Moran's support for the fledgling Australian Labor Party, which Moran believed could develop as an instrument to reinforce a moral and inclusive sense of Australian identity for the Catholic working class. Like his pro-Chinese views, Moran's advocacy of "the rights and duties of labour" was defined by an imagined alliance of evangelism and nation building, stimulated by the fear, as he expressed in 1891, of "an unchristianized world."     

The Polygamy Question: Missions,Marriage, and Assimilation

Polygamy was a vexed question for missionaries in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the mid twentieth century, Christian missions of various denominations worked with the Australian Commonwealth Government to achieve a policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white Australian culture. Yet there was little consensus as to how this assimilation policy could or should be applied to Aboriginal marriages. This article demonstrates that the issue of polygamy exposed divisions between church and state as well as among Christian denominations over their understandings of marriage. These differences stemmed from differing spiritual visions of assimilation in Australia. The conflicts over marriage in the Northern Territory, therefore, reveal that assimilation, and settler‐colonialism more broadly, operated on a religious plane as Aboriginal people, missionaries, and bureaucrats engaged in a spiritual contest over what represented a legitimate and acceptable marriage in that land.     

One city,different views: a comparative study of three pilgrimage maps of Jerusalem

Among the early printed maps of Jerusalem there is a special group of realistic maps, which should be identified as pilgrimage maps. They were based on an actual acquaintance with the city, and drawn by pilgrims or for them. These maps depicted Jerusalem as the Holy City for Christianity; portraying the city through the eyes of the Christian pilgrims, and reflecting their perceptions, excitement and devotion. They often underscored the city's religious sites and traditions, and undermined certain elements of the city's actual cultural and religious landscape.     

'The Holiest Campus', its Decline and Transformation: The University of New England, 1946–79

In the mid-1960s and possibly earlier the University of New England (UNE), located at Armidale in rural New South Wales, was reputed to be 'the holiest campus' in Australia. The article finds a considerable body of evidence to give credibility to this view. It argues that UNE was relatively religious because it drew more of its students from the most devout social groups in Australia than other universities and because those students were then proselytized by religious societies that operated effectively and with strong clerical support in a small, cohesive institution. The ethos of UNE was broadly Christian, perhaps more so than that of metropolitan universities.
After 1965 there was a substantial decline in religious practice, belief and influence at UNE, as apparently at other Australian universities and in Australia as a whole. In the case of UNE, secularization was more than a decline in civil or social religion, more than a process of decline through differentiation: in the first half of the 1960s over half of the student body was highly religious but by the late 1970s the proportion had fallen to one-fifth to one-quarter. Associated with this decline was a transformation of religious activity marked by the reassertion of Christian denominationalism and the emergence of a non-Christian spiritual sensibility.     

From abolitionists to fundamentalists: the transformation of the Wesleyan Methodists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This article analyzes the cultural trajectory of a small, but influential denomination that formed in 1843. Wesleyan Methodism first emerged as an abolitionist protest against the Methodist compromise with slavery. The new church drew in members who championed a range of antebellum social reforms, including abolitionism, pacifism, women's rights, and temperance. By the early twentieth century, Wesleyans would become closely identified with fundamentalism, waging war against modernism, championing personal holiness, and maintaining a militant brand of protestant orthodoxy. This article places Wesleyans within a larger religious and cultural context of the Civil War era and the late nineteenth-century disenchantment of the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras. It also traces the reasons for the Wesleyans shifting focus away from social reform and toward matters of personal holiness.     

“Australianizing” the Local Catholic Church: Polding to Gilroy

The Catholic Church in Australia until around the 1940s has commonly been described as “Irish” and “Roman”. Historians cite the high proportion of Irish clergy and bishops, the latter often educated in in Rome. While the above pattern is accepted, there is evidence of earlier “Australianization.” This article examines such evidence in the foundational Archdiocese of Sydney and focuses on two archbishops, John Bede Polding and Norman Thomas Gilroy. Polding (archbishop 1842–1877) contributed to Australianization by initiating the Australian hierarchy, establishing a local seminary, seeking leaders experienced in Australia, and founding the local Sisters of the Good Samaritan. Gilroy's episcopate (1940–1971) saw the consolidation of the Australianizing trend. Witness to the Anzac landings, the first native‐born archbishop of Sydney and cardinal, Gilroy led the archdiocese as the Australian episcopate and clergy became further Australianized. On his retirement, after being named “Australian of the Year,” the Catholic Church in Australia could best be termed “Australian” and “Roman.”     

Ocean and grove: holiness,leisure, and contested landscapes at Ocean Grove,New Jersey

In 1869, leading members of the Wesleyan holiness movement established Ocean Grove, an oceanfront camp meeting resort in Monmouth County, New Jersey that would become one of the most popular religious resorts in the United States. Scholarship on Ocean Grove treats the resort as a significant example of the spatial preferences and town planning efforts of the holiness movement. Tracing conflicts between leisure and worship, and between the romanticization of nature versus the sacralization of city life, suggests the landscape of the resort emerged as a mediation of these conflicts and provides further evidence for the sacralization of nature as a necessary component in the planning of Methodist and holiness communities in the late nineteenth century.     

Religion and Politics in Australia

Abstract

The relationship between religion and politics in Australia has in the past been conditioned by the peculiarities of Australian history. Traditionally religion was related to issues of moral reformation and sectarianism. Changes in Australia over the past forty years have changed this relationship as the public role of religion has waned. In recent times there has been somewhat of a religious comeback in Australian public life. This has been related to a new style of Christian politics, the presence of two strong Church leaders, Cardinal George Pell and Archbishop Peter Jensen, the presence of Islam, the election of a committed Christian Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister and the continuing importance of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) as a civil religion.     

Stanner's War

The Pacific War and its aftermath were a turning point in William Edward Hanley Stanner's career. Until then, he had struggled to establish himself as a scholar and seemed destined to stay, like many other Australian scholars, within the orbit of British academia and its colonial empire. Almost immediately after war had been declared, Stanner returned to Australia, working in various capacities and, in May 1942, commanding the North Australia Observer Unit. In October 1943, he was transferred to the Australian Army's Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs (DORCA). Members of the Directorate saw themselves at the forefront of progressive reform in Australian colonial policy. Stanner opposed what he considered the grandiose plans for a post-war Papua New Guinea that were hatched by the DORCA ‘boys’, as they called themselves. By the end of the 1940s, however, control over policy was firmly in the hands of the civil bureaucracy and the new Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck. Any influence that may have accrued to either Stanner or to the idealism of the ‘boys’ in the Directorate was lost.     

Cogs in the Machine: The Experiences of Female Munitions Workers and Members of the Australian Women’s Land Army in South Australia, 1940–45

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’.     

Marriage as a Marker of Secular Inclusion? Oral History and Lesbian and Gay Narratives on Marriage in Contemporary Australia

Same‐sex marriage has been one of the most widely discussed social issues in contemporary Australia for some time. In late 2017, after holding a contentious national postal survey that year, the Australia government introduced legislation allowing same‐sex couples to marry. This article draws on a major national lesbian and gay oral history project conducted in partnership with the National Library of Australia between 2012 and 2015, when discussions of same‐sex marriage were becoming increasingly widespread. It investigates the way interview subjects incorporated marriage into their narratives. In doing so, it highlights how understandings of marriage — both amongst lesbian and gay people and heterosexual people — have shifted and evolved over time. While some subjects saw marriage as a somewhat outdated, religious, and patriarchal concept, many others invested personal significance in the institution, arguing that allowing gay men and lesbians access to marriage would be a strong symbol of social progress and equality in a secular society. We conclude with one young interviewee who had managed to reconcile his faith with his sexuality and desire for marriage equality.     

“Free,Compulsory and (Not) Secular”: The Failed Idea in Australian Education*

The nineteenth century radically transformed education from a church function to a state duty. During the early to late 1800s, Australian legislators debated the foundations of education for their new society. Decades of acrimonious argument, and sustained (but failed) attempts to create a workable denominational system led the colonies to explore more radical options. To minimize religious division, Australia's proposal was for public education to be “free, compulsory and secular.” New South Wales legislated these then politically progressive principles in the Public Instruction Act of 1880, following Victoria in 1872, and Queensland and South Australia in 1875. No state defined the term “secular” and each interpreted it differently. Prolonged, ambiguous applications of the secular principle continue to create confusion and division today. This article examines constructions of the “secular” in education and compares the approaches of Henry Parkes in New South Wales and George Higinbotham in Victoria. It follows the erosion of secular intent in public and parliamentary debates from early settlement to 1880.     

Asian Servants for the Imperial Telegraph: Imagining North Australia as an Indian Ocean Colony before 1914

In the late nineteenth century, the officers of the Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company provided north Australia with a cable connection to London via Java, Singapore, and India. The telegraph project prompted a new era of colonisation in tropical north Australia and the officers of the company sought to ensure that the north would be shaped according to their notions of Indian Ocean colonial culture. They insisted on employing Asian domestic servants in opposition to White Australian nationalists who advocated restrictions on Asian migration. Like the pearling industry, which was permitted ongoing access to Asian labour, the telegraph company drew on the support of liberal parliamentarians, and leveraged their privileged position as providers of imperial telecommunications to develop an elite colonial counter-culture in north Australia.     

Catholicism, Science, and Modernity: The Case of William Miles Maskell

This is a case study of William Miles Maskell, an eminent entomologist, devout Roman Catholic, and the foremost scientific critic of evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Modern Western intellectual history, built on the assumption that secular, scientific modes of thought inexorably swept aside traditional metaphysical and religious ones, has generally written off such persons as ignorant reactionaries battling truth, enlightenment, and progress. But this grand narrative — of scientific light banishing religious darkness — oversimplifies and dis-torts the past. Maskell failed to prevent evolution from becoming paradigmatic in New Zealand biology, to be sure. But it is far from clear that he lost what he regarded as the more important fight — against the scientism and agnosticism he saw as characteristic of modern science. We need to develop a considerably more subtle and nuanced historiography of science-and-religion that gives the religious and philosophical critics of nineteenth century science their due. They battled modernity's scepticism and scientism more successfully than historians have generally acknowledged.     

Liberal Imperialism in Australian Political Thought, 1902–14

British politics immediately following the Boer War featured a group of politicians and intellectuals known as the Liberal Imperialists and this account explores the political thought of their Australian counterparts. Australian liberal intellectuals of particular relevance for this study were located in Melbourne, which was at that time the federal capital, and they were loosely clustered around the key political figure of the period, Alfred Deakin. The extended circle of Alfred Deakin provides scholars with a useful group of active intellectuals from whom it is possible to derive an idea of the Australian inflection given to Liberal Imperialist thought, concentrating on the intersection of notions of imperial unity and progressive social reform agendas which flourished in both Australia and Britain during the Edwardian era. The group of politicians and public intellectuals, comprising an overlapping membership including the Imperial Federation League, friends and associates of Alfred Deakin and the Boobooks Club, would subsequently evolve into the main Australian branch of the Round Table organisation. This article is concerned with discovering the outlines of the Australian version of Liberal Imperialist thought and especially the nature of the Australian inflection superimposed on this British set of ideas, as found in a variety of contemporary pamphlets, printed books and Boobooks minutes. The Australians were less pessimistic than Richard Jebb about the possibilities of a supranational imperial organisation but also insisted that such an organisation must respect the sovereignty of dominions. They differed from most of their British counterparts in supporting the widespread use of tariffs to nurture industry and they also supported the restrictive immigration position enshrined in the infamous White Australia policy, yet they were much in favour of the notion of a strong British navy.