The Religious Crisis of the 1960s: The Experience of the Australian Churches

The decade of the 1960s in North America and Europe is generally seen by historians and sociologists as a time of sudden and unexpected religious upheaval. But was this the case in Australia? This article examines the changes in belief and behaviour within Australia’s major churches during the ‘remembered sixties’ from c. 1964 to c. 1972, in relation to the cultural and social context, and the extent to which these amounted to a religious turnaround or crisis. Areas examined include the impact of radical theology, symbolized by the book Honest to God, and the ‘new morality’; the changes in Australian Catholicism initiated by the Second Vatican Council; the debate among Catholics over birth control and the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae; the decline in weekly church attendance, Sunday school enrolments and the membership of church youth organizations; the ‘crisis’ in the ordained ministry; changing attitudes in the churches towards social issues; and the responses of the churches to the Vietnam War. The religious unsettlement that occurred in Australia during this period was very similar to North America and Europe, though there were distinctive local emphases. The central issues in debate were common to all major denominations: the relevance and authority of traditional institutions and formulations of belief.     

Alternative Radio: exhibiting radio and music heritage after the Christchurch earthquakes

This article examines the representation of Christchurch, New Zealand, student radio station RDU in the exhibition Alternative Radio at the Canterbury Museum in 2016. With the intention of ‘making visible what is invisible’ about radio broadcasting, the exhibition articulated RDU as a point of interconnection between the technical elements of broadcasting, the social and musical culture of station staff and volunteers, and the broader local and national music scenes. This paper is grounded in observations of the exhibitions and associated public programmes, and interviews with the key participants in the exhibition including the museum’s exhibition manager and staff from RDU, who acted as independent practitioners in collaboration with the museum. Alternative Radio also addressed the aftermath of the major earthquake of 22 February 2011, when RDU moved into a customised horse truck after losing its broadcast studio. The exhibition came about because of the cultural resonance of the post-quake story, but also emphasised the long history of the station before that event, and located this small student radio station in the broader heritage discourse of the Canterbury museum, activating the historical, cultural, and personal memories of the station’s participants and audiences.     

Radio awards and the dialogic contestation of Indonesian journalism1

Reformasi-style radio journalism in Indonesia has been shaped by a desire to be dialogical and to involve the audience as producers or engaged consumers of current affairs. This is a break from the monologism of the New Order's official culture which excluded any serious audience participation. This article focuses on two competitions used by radio institutions for exploring different ‘dialogical’ strategies – the Balinese commercial radio station Global FM awards to listeners of ‘Social Empowerment Personality’ and that of the best radio news programme organised by the German NGO Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (FNS).     

Searching for the Land of the Golden Cocoa-Nut: Australian Travel Writing about Commercial Enterprise in the Pacific Islands

Pacific Island trade and commerce was a prominent theme in travel writing produced within Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This reflected the long history of European commercial exchange between the Australian continent and the Pacific Islands, and a European literary legacy that idealised the region’s economic potential. This article explores popular perceptions of commercial enterprise in the Pacific Islands as expressed in travel writing, focusing on authors with a significant connection, by birth or affiliation, to either the Australian colonies or the Australian nation. The formation of a distinctively ‘Australian’ vision of the Pacific that evolved since European exploration is traced. The voice that took shape in literary form in the Australian colonies during the late 19th century contributed to a national narrative in the early 20th century that imagined the Pacific Islands as a region for Australian investment, profit and colonial enterprise.     

Media portrayal of the cultural relationship between Australia and Japan

This article traces Japanese and Australian media portrayals of the cultural aspects to the bilateral relationship. The article examines popular discourse about Japan and Australia in the media of each country, demonstrating how this has reflected the evolution of the cultural relationship. In Australia, the press has swung from portraying Japan as a problematic source of income from the resources trade, through to the home of ‘cool’ technology and fashion. In Japan, discourse about Australia has ranged from images of a country populated with cute animals, to a regional partner sharing the same democratic ideals. The article draws from the personal experiences of the author who was a correspondent and journalist for Australian and Japanese news corporations during the 1980s and 1990s. The author covered the ‘koala wars’ and the frill-necked lizard boom prompted by the Mitsubishi Mirage television commercial, as well as monitoring the growth in Japanese tourism to Australia. The author also draws on data from tracking surveys conducted by the Embassy of Japanese in Australia.     

Criminalising commercial surrogacy in Canada and Australia: the political construction of ‘national consensus’

This article examines the language used to justify a criminal prohibition on commercial surrogacy in Canada and Australia. I demonstrate that legislators in each country framed commercial surrogacy as an area over which there was national ‘consensus’ because of uniquely Canadian and Australian values. This was an effective political strategy, but for different reasons in each country: in Canada, because it fit with frames surrounding healthcare and anti-commercialisation, and in Australia, because the distinction between ‘altruistic’ and ‘commercial’ surrogacy mapped onto broader themes of altruism in Australian society. This suggests that the political use of national frames is especially successful when it taps into pre-existing narratives of what constitutes unacceptable behaviour in a given polity, and when it is attached to criminal prohibitions.     

"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.     

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.     

Two places and three times: fragments retrieved of India and Australia in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s.

This article uses memory and specifically my memories to build up a sense of how Australians perceived India in the second half of the 20th century. I focus first on the late 1950s to consider Australian perceptions of India as seen through my eyes as a university student. I then present my observations as a student studying in India in the first half of the 1960s to track the limited awareness of Australia in India. The final section, based mainly on newspaper clippings of the late 1980s, assesses how India featured in Australian perceptions some two decades on and in the very different world of the day – one that was much more knowledgeable but not necessarily significantly more involved.     

伪满洲国的广播剧

伪满时期的新闻传播是中国新闻传播史上具有异样色彩的一页。当时的传播媒体主要是报纸、杂志和广播,它们的主要传播对象是当时身处东北的日本人和中国人,传播本身却受到日本殖民统治的严密控制。本文拟从当时的各种相关文献资料中,以广播剧为视角进行调查取证,梳理广播剧在伪满时期的产生、发展、形式变化的脉络,由此分析考证当时在日本统治监管下的文化传媒的实际状态,为伪满时期的新闻传播史研究提供素材。     

'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.     

Business Fashion: Masculinity,Class and Dress in 1870s Australia

This article explores the emergence of ‘business fashion’ as a new mode of male dress in 1870s Australia. The focus is on men at the vanguard of this new fashion: namely, bankers and sharebrokers in New South Wales’ gold-mining towns during a gold rush between 1871 and 1874. The rise of business dress offers us insight into the surprising extent of male interest in fashion in late-colonial Australia – and fresh perspectives on the history of Australian masculinity, class and consumption as a consequence.     

The Turnbull government’s ‘Post-multiculturalism’ multicultural policy

ABSTRACT

The Turnbull government presented Australia’s fifth national multicultural policy statement in March 2017. This article analyses the policy statement and argues that it represents the most significant change to Australian multicultural policy in four decades. Among other things, it abandons the language of government responsiveness to cultural diversity that previously defined Australian multiculturalism. The 2017 policy amounts to a new form of post-multiculturalism—different from earlier conservative, neoliberal and centre-left versions—in that it seeks to ‘mainstream’ multicultural policy on the grounds that Australian multiculturalism has succeeded in its intended task. While a mainstreaming strategy of this sort is, I argue, theoretically consistent with Australia’s liberal nationalist approach to cultural diversity, the institutional and attitudinal conditions that it presupposes are yet to be fully realised in Australia. More multicultural work needs to be done before this kind of post-multiculturalist approach is practicable.     

Intimate Oral Histories: Intercultural Romantic Relationships in Postwar Australia

This article examines the experiences of individuals in romantic relationships that crossed ethnic, religious or racial lines in post-World War II Australia. Using interviews from the Australian Generations Oral History Project, supplemented by archival and newspaper material, this article examines how broader changes in immigration and the cultural make-up of Australia in the second half of the twentieth century impacted individual Australians, influencing who they could desire, court and love. Through the narration of intimate life stories, this article attempts to capture the emotional experience of individuals whose relationships, while made possible by national policy decisions, still tested and breached social norms and cultural expectations at the personal and familial level.     

Drivers and difficulties in the economic relationship between Australia and the European Union: from conflict to cooperation

ABSTRACT

Economic relations between Australia and the European Union (EU) have always been strong, but they have not always been easy. They have been difficult for Australia because it associated the EU with the loss of the UK preferential export market on its entry into the then European Economic Community. And because Australia associated the EU with the original Common Agricultural Policy, which combined subsidies for agricultural production and high agricultural tariffs to make Australian agricultural exports not competitive. They have been difficult for the EU also. Australia developed a biosecurity system to protect its agricultural sector: quarantine requirements and food safety standards made the importation of EU plant and animal products too costly. Yet Australia and the EU need each other. The EU, which is Australia’s largest services trade and investment partner, supplies the business services that drive a knowledge economy and provides the credit to finance economic development. Correspondingly, the EU needs Australia both as a commercial base in Asia and as a reliable energy supplier. This article analyses the drivers and difficulties in the economic relationship between Australia and the EU as they start negotiations for a free trade agreement.     

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.     

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.     

The Protestant Work Ethic and the Australian Mercantile Elite, 1880–1914

This article tests, in the Australian context, Max Weber's thesis that the work ethic of capitalism owed its origins to Protestantism. It studies the Australian Protestant churches for the presence of a work ethic, and investigates whether the Catholic Church also promoted such a moral precept to its members. The study then examines whether the work ethic of the Australian mercantile elite was drawn from that of the Protestant churches, from which most of its members came. The article proceeds to describe how the mercantile elite removed the religious origins of the work ethic and made it one of the foundations of its creed of economic individualism. This creed was based on the self-righteous dogma that those who worked hard were rewarded by getting rich while those who were poor only had their own lack of hard work and thrift to blame. The article demonstrates that the work ethic of modern capitalism, as espoused by the Australian mercantile elite, was the result of the secularization of the work ethic of Protestantism, a process in which the religious content of the moral principle was removed.     

In Loving Memory of Mary Belshaw,May McRidge,and the Nyungar People of the Badjaling Mission, 1930–1954

Using examples from his family and religious history, Patrick O’Farrell analysed the transition from Irish emigrant to assimilated colonial in what was perceived as vacant land. Like O’Farrell, this article will also use family history to address the issues of memory, religion, and assimilation. The Irish weaver Mary Belshaw (1879–1960) came to Australia in 1913 and was instrumental in the emigration of her family to Australia during the 1920s. She worked as a Protestant missionary among Aboriginal Australians from 1915, until her retirement in 1953. Although the grave she shares with her co‐worker May McRidge (1882–1943) bears the words “Ever remembered by what she has done,” her story was largely forgotten by her family. In 1986, the Nyungar people erected a memorial stone to Belshaw and McRidge and the thirty‐nine Nyungar families who lived at the Badjaling Mission in Western Australia from 1930 to 1954. This article will address the wider issues in twentieth‐century Australia which contributed to the neglect of the story by Belshaw's Irish Australian family and then led to its recovery. It will reveal how an Irish heritage was rediscovered because the story lived within a Nyungar community who had survived terra nullius and assimilation policies to return to their land at Badjaling.     

Reading Anzac Religion and the Sacred: The Bible as a Central Text and Artefact of Australian Soldiers' Experience of the First World War*

This article demonstrates the resilience of religious traditions and practices among Australian soldiers, and the need for caution about presuming connections between the experience of modern war and secularisation. A core argument is that the Bible should be understood as a central text and cultural artefact of Australian soldiers' experience of the First World War. The pocket New Testament was the most widely possessed book among Australian soldiers, and probably the most read and valued. For many it offered profound religious, moral, and emotional consolation. For others it possessed talismanic qualities, conjured home associations, or became an “object of memory.” Communal reading practices made Testaments prominent in the aural experience of war, but such practices could also elicit antipathy towards religion. Taken together, these findings inform scholarship on the mentalités and material culture of Australian war experience, challenging the longstanding scholarly and popular myth of the secular Australian soldier. Additionally, the article breaks new ground in situating Australian experience within a substantial international scholarship on the crucial role of religion (both official and popular) among soldiers of all combatant nations. Partly due to its majority Protestant population, Australian soldiers' Bible possession and usage resembled that of Anglo-Saxon and German Protestants.