The Goldfields’ Sabbath: A Postsecular Analysis of Social Cohesion and Social Control on the Ballarat Goldfields, 1854

The historiography of the Sabbath reflects closely the concerns of its Sabbatarian subjects: the rise or fall in public piety and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of evangelical moral reform and social control. In this article we step away from the question of how religious or secular goldfields society was, and instead, observe how Sunday functioned on the goldfields. In doing so we eschew a dominant narrative of religious history — secularisation — and deploy a postsecular analysis. Such an analysis reveals a remarkable degree of social cohesion: a diverse, but common, practice of rest on the Sabbath. It was only because of the universal honouring of the goldfields’ Sabbath that government troops were able to so quickly and decisively end the Eureka Stockade on Sunday, 3 December 1854.