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Believing in Australia
A Cultural History of Religions
By Hilary M. Carey Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Copyright © 1996 Hilary M. Carey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-657-7
CHAPTER 1
Christian foundations, 1788 — 1850
The indifference of Australia's first European colonisers, both voluntary and involuntary, to the practice of religion is a thing so often observed as to have the status of a cliché. In fact, the administrators of the early colonies were all too aware of the capacity of religion to arouse passionate thought and action. Caution, not indifference, characterises official attitudes to religion in the first years of European settlement. For those in a position of any authority in the late eighteenth century, particularly if that authority was exercised over mixed groups of Anglicans, evangelicals and Roman Catholics, religion was synonymous with civil disorder. Negotiations for the choice of a site of penal exile to replace the American colonies were conducted during periods of some of the most intense religious unrest England has ever experienced. In the 1780s powerful sectarian forces had been unleashed by moves to mitigate the legal restrictions on Roman Catholics. The passing of a Bill by parliament in 1780 led to violent riots in London under the cry of 'No popery'. During these riots, Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was nearly destroyed. Despite this, Archbishop Moore supported a further Bill in May 1791. Meanwhile, the rise of Methodism underscored popular antagonism to the established church, anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism.
Official caution toward religion is most strikingly realised in the original cartography of the Australian coastline. As Paul Carter has argued, Cook's naming of the physical features of the landscape reflects the internal iconography of the explorer and the Enlightenment values he believed in. Indeed, Cook's equable indifference to religion is so perfect as to represent almost a caricature of the Enlightenment man and if he ever experienced a religious impulse, it would seem to have escaped his biographer. Hence Australia's bays and beaches, coves and future settlements were named according to their colour and geometric shape, after British bureaucrats and patrons, or their place in the time and process of the voyage itself. Where Columbus was moved to dedicate his landing in the New World to the Holy Spirit, Cook, phlegmatic and rational as ever, celebrated his landing on the east coast of Australia by noting the activity of his scientists. While the procedures of international law were scrupulously observed to ensure that Botany Bay became an English colony, no one troubled to secure the new land simultaneously for the Anglican Church. Like all other colonial possessions, Botany Bay became English not Anglican, a secular outpost of Empire in the southern oceans.
The official pragmatism which led to the avoidance of issues likely to encourage religious conflict should not be confused with official agnosticism. Like all similar colonial ventures, the settlement of the First Fleet in the colony of New South Wales was imagined as the act of a Christian community. Appreciation of widespread working-class hostility to institutional religion and nonobservance of church rituals and attendance has to be balanced by understanding the universality of notional sectarian adherence. The first census taken in New South Wales in 1828 confidently attempted to muster every one of the 36 484 respondents into one of four religious categories, namely Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, and 'Mohammedan and pagan', the latter numbering some nineteen endangered souls. All the Europeans who came to Australia in the first years of settlement, including all the convicts, were claimed, at least potentially, by one or other of the churches. In practical terms, there were three main Christian traditions carried to the early colony: the established churches whose values were represented by the governors and military authorities; evangelical Protestantism, represented by most of the early clergy and missionaries; and Catholicism, represented by between one-quarter and one-third of the convict and free settlers and the clergy they gathered to serve their community. Although far from exclusive, these three divisions were reinforced by overlapping structures of class and ethnicity. For example, most of the Irish in the colony were Catholic; most of the middle class adhered to the established Church; most members of the artisan classes could be found singing hymns with one or other of the evangelical congregations. In this chapter, these three main groupings of religious adherents will be examined in turn.
Establishment religion
The administrators of the early colony of New South Wales, including the governors, the military and secular officers, identified most closely with the established churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Established religion in eighteenth-century England was intimately bound up with the apparatus of government. In rural England, a resident squire was the partner of the Anglican minister who presided at Sunday services which, until 1846 when the relevant Act was repealed, all members of the community were officially compelled by law to attend. The arrangement of pews in the village church reflected the order and hierarchy of the whole community. The minister was a member of the professional middle classes, who was ordained after taking a degree at university, receiving holy orders from the hands of his bishop. The Church of England was episcopal in nature, that is, it was organised into dioceses which were managed by bishops, 24 of whom had the right to sit in the House of Lords. The head of the Church of England was also the head of state, although by ancient tradition, the Archbishop of Canterbury was its spiritual leader. The established Church of Scotland, also known as the Presbyterian Church, was more influenced by Calvinism and seated authority in the presbyters or elders of each congregation, rather than the bishop. The whole of England, Scotland and Ireland was nominally covered by a network of ancient parishes, no part of which was immune from the pastoral care of the ministers of the relevant established churches. The doctrines of the Anglican Church were laid down in the Thirty-nine Articles, a set of doctrinal statements first issued in 1571 and contained in the Book of Common Prayer, to which all important officials were required to swear their belief. The ideal of a universal, compulsory national religion was under radical stress at the time of the British colonisation of Australia, particularly in the new industrial towns. The Toleration Act of 1689 had led to the semi-official recognition of the right to religious practice outside the boundaries of the established churches, and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and Catholic Emancipation in 1829 did away with other official disabilities. But enough remained of the ideal of the identification of church and state to influence the administration of the early colony.
The governors were most affected by the official constraints of established religion and its identification with the leader of any English community. The first Governor, Arthur Phillip, like all eighteenth-century servants of the crown, had to take the Oath of Abjuration rejecting all Roman Catholic pretenders to the English throne, and a declaration that he rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Catholic understanding of what happened to the bread and wine during the Mass.
Nevertheless, despite these powerful traditions, the single most salient feature of colonial religion as it was practised in the Australian colonies in the first half of the nineteenth century was that there was no established religion. This fortunate status was repeatedly confirmed by the colony's settlers and administrators who included the colonial authorities in England and the governors, the military and other officers resident in Australia.
Richard Johnson, who was appointed chaplain of the settlement of New South Wales in 1786, was not seen by the governors as having moral responsibility for the colony as a whole. The first clergy were regarded as prison chaplains whom, it was immediately acknowledged by all who had reason to disagree with them, did not have the same level of training or capacity as Anglican clergymen in England. In a sour moment Macquarie wrote to Bathurst in 1814 that 'Mr Marsden and some of the Assistant Chaplains are originally of low Rank, and not qualified by liberal Educations in the Usual Way for the Sacred Functions entrusted to them, and are also much tinctured with Methodistical and other Sectarian Principles'. Macquarie was typical of the early governors in that he regarded the protection of the rites and rituals of the established church as his responsibility, not that of the 'Methodistical' paid clergy.
Most colonial governors exercised the prerogative of their office by working to minimise the claims of distant religious authorities and the local clergy. Governor Arthur Phillip's official instructions on the establishment of the colony of New South Wales in 1788 included references to the maintenance of religious practice, but only in the most general terms. He was told to enforce 'due observance of religion and good order among the inhabitants of the new settlement'. In these instructions the maintenance of 'good order' is identified with religious observance. The only other advice about religious matters which Phillip received, and again there was no particular priority attached to this, was to 'take such steps for the due celebration of publick worship as circumstances will permit'. This sounds very much like a token gesture and something to be achieved in its own good time. After regular Sunday worship was established, the governor found the celebration of divine service to be a convenient hitching post around which to tie the announcement of official business, the muster and disciplining of convicts and a general check on the state of their clothes and provisions. Attendance at Sunday worship was made compulsory for everyone by repeated government orders as an outward sign of good government. This was establishment religion and had little to do with personal faith or practice.
Religion had a rather different function for the members of the colony's small middle class, made up of members of the New South Wales Corps and the other civil officers receiving government stipends, as well as the civilian merchants and farmers who were enriched in the course of early colonial development. Cook's supreme indifference to religion was a little unusual even for his time and class, but the military and naval personnel of the early colony were certainly accustomed to looking after their own religious needs. If he felt so inclined, the captain of an English vessel might read some prayers or lead other religious devotions on a Sunday at sea, but no one would dare to remark if he did not.
Gary Bouma has argued that Australia is characterised by what he calls a 'military chaplaincy' style of religion, and that this derives from the peculiar circumstances of our colonial experience. The middle class of the early colony was dominated by the military and landowners for whom religion was something 'done for you by a professional'. It was made up of ceremonies to mark important events and an ethos which offered support for the Empire, family life and public order, though not necessarily in that order. Bouma argues that those who share the military chaplain version of religion are quite at odds with evangelical Protestantism which is so important a feature of the United States. Indeed, he claims that Australia missed out on the major Christian revitalisations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the Wesleys' Great Awakening and the Oxford Movement, together with their parallels in Europe and the United States. All this is open to question. Some members of the military shared the individualistic enthusiasm for religion encouraged by the evangelical revival and it can not be assumed that reliance on a more ritual based form of religion is an indication of mere notional adherence.
There is good evidence, on the contrary, that Australian colonists were particularly open to religious proselytism, and that this was a source of concern to the authorities, particularly as it manifested itself in an intensification of sectarian tension. Nor is it correct to assume that the military was wholly given over to public religion of the military chaplain style. Though this may have been true of the men who joined mainstream regiments, the New South Wales Corps was not a prestigious body among the regiments of the Empire. As a colonial regiment with substantial policing functions, the New South Wales Corps was made up of a considerable number of Protestant Irish troops who made a career out of imperial service overseas. Irish Protestants in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not have a casual attitude toward their religion.
What impact did establishment religion have on the internal spiritual life of individuals? It is important to avoid assuming the standards of religiosity demanded by the evangelicals. Establishment Anglicanism was the faith avowed by the majority of the Australian colonists, convict and free settler, military and merchant class, throughout most of Australia's colonial history. It was a flexible faith with a powerful capacity to evoke central establishment values of patriotism, family, civil order, hierarchy and private, undemonstrative piety. This can be illustrated by referring to the journal of a soldier who served in New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land and India from 1824 to 1832. Major Tobias Kirkwood of His Majesty's 40th Regiment of Foot travelled on the prison ship Minerva on its journey to New South Wales in 1824. On the voyage, like so many others, homesick and bored by the tedium of the sea, Kirkwood commenced a journal, part of which is in the form of a daily letter to his wife from whom he was to be absent for a period of eight years. The Master of the Minerva, Captain J. Bell, generally marked the Sabbath with prayers and sometimes with Divine Service as well. On Sundays Kirkwood would often lie in his bed, reading the Bible or a sermon before going to sleep. On arriving in Sydney late in 1824 he set down his thoughts at the start of the New Year:
To a person just come out from Europe, you must be easily convinced, it is only by reflection I acknowledge the season, and also by having attended the duties that a Christian is called upon to discharge. I passed this day, I hope, rationally and, I hope also, without doing any injury or violence to any individual living either by thought, word or deed — I got up at about 7 o'c, the morning being very fine ... After breakfast I read my Saturday's prayers and the portion of Scripture I daily allot myself, two Chapters in the New and three in the Old testament;
Sunday 2 Jan 1825 I got up about 7 o'c, the morning looking a little dark, as if likely to rain; after dressing I read my private prayers and then in the Bible; at half past 9 o'c Surgeon Dobie came to breakfast, after which we went on parade and I marched the men to Church; the Governor's seat in this church is open to field Officers only; the Garrison seat is for all the other ranks; I was shown into the former, which was then totally vacant; however in about quarter of an hour the Brigade Major, with Mrs Abel and three of her Brothers, came into the Pew. The Service was performed by the Revd. Mr Cowper, formerly a Bombadier in the Royal Artillery, a man who is very vulgar in his delivery and expressions, but very zealous in his profession, and generally considered a good man; he gave a very good discourse on commencing the new year, the text taken from the Book of Proverbs, 'Boast not of to-morrow for ye know not what a day may bring forth'.
After Church I called to ask after Mrs Balfour who has been ill ... [A]s I was going to the bathing place, the yellow flag was up for a ship coming in; if it was the Anne Amelia, with Captain Turton — of the 40th Reg. I should hear from England ... There was no letter for me, which was a great disappointment.
There is ample evidence here of military chaplain religiosity.
Kirkwood attended church as part of his official duties. The church itself allowed the delineation of rank by the arrangement of pews, just like in any Anglican village church. Religious observation was not overly strict, since Kirkwood found his own pew, set aside for junior officers such as himself, empty except for one other family. Moreover, like Macquarie before him, Kirkwood made note of the low class of the clergyman — vulgar, but 'zealous in his profession'. Kirkwood was clearly above average in his attendance at his religious duties, and this entry was written soon after his arrival and in the spirit of the resolution of the New Year. The rest of the journal shows that he was just as likely to spend Sunday swimming at the bathing spot off Mrs Macquarie's chair, visiting and gossiping about his friends and reading the verse of Sir Walter Scott or the Sydney Mail. But religion was well integrated into the activities of this young officer's life and he would have been shocked to think he was dismissed as an unreligious person or that the colony was regarded as a place without religion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Believing in Australia by Hilary M. Carey. Copyright © 1996 Hilary M. Carey. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd.
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