Colonial Religion is a collection of seven essays arising out of the author’s sustained and meticulous study of early colonial Anglicanism in Australia over the course of the past three decades. Of the essays, five are fully revised and updated versions of previously published articles, and two are so comprehensive a reworking of previously published papers as to represent wholly new work published here for the first time.
At first glance Colonial Religion might be taken to be a purely historical work, with any contribution it might potentially make to the present state of Anglicanism in Australia being located in the potential for an enhanced understanding of its past. But this is cast aside in the first line of the introduction, which links these historical investigations to the very recent tribulation of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The immediate connection is to the manner in which the complex governance structure of the Anglican Church of Australia presented a conceptual challenge to the Commissioners. The broader, and much more fruitful, connection, however, is to the manner in which the significant societal changes explored throughout these essays provides context for the many cultural and social challenges which Anglicans in Australia face in the present day.
Bruce Kaye describes the essays in this collection as both historical in their intention and character, while being simultaneously theological. The first five essays in the collection are previously published essays concerned with Australia’s first Bishop, William Grant Broughton (1788–1853). The first is an interesting and engaging exploration of the ‘Old High Church baggage’ William Grant Broughton brought with him to New South Wales upon his arrival there as Archdeacon in 1829, that sets the scene for much that follows and which is returned to in the later essays. The insights on Broughton, who was enthroned as Australia’s first Anglican Bishop in 1836, emerge both from the historical and social context, and from Broughton’s own publications, inclusive of the travel diary he kept while en route to the colony. The second is a detailed analysis of Broughton’s struggles to adapt the governance model of the Church of England to the colonial context. As Kaye sums this up, ‘the issue… for Broughton is one of translating the meaning of the Reformation settlement as exemplified in the Royal Supremacy, from England to the novel and institutionally unformed situation of NSW’ (p. 33). The third essay then describes the ‘collapse of the Royal Supremacy’ as that notion came face to face with what Kaye summarizes as ‘the problems which might confront traditional Anglicanism in coming to terms with a plural society and an ecclesiastically non-confessional state’ (p. 55). This was especially difficult in New South Wales which, unlike other colonies of the British Empire established in other parts of the world, was established as a convict settlement and presided over by the Governor. This essay rehearses some of the struggles of Broughton and alludes again to the social and theological “baggage” Broughton brought with him to the colony.
There is a change of emphasis in the fourth essay in the collection, which focuses on the interactions between Broughton and the ‘energetic Bishop Selwyn’, the first Bishop of New Zealand, over the course of the 1850s. It is an insightful and highly informative description of the circumstances surrounding the convening and conduct of the 1850 ‘conference’, so named in deference to the royal prerogative to convene synods. By this time there were now newly established dioceses in Tasmania, Melbourne, Newcastle and Adelaide, and Selwyn (New Zealand) also attended. Having noted the contrasting views of Perry (the first Bishop of Melbourne) to synodical governance, and in particular the inclusion of lay people, Kaye describes how the governance model favoured by Perry and Selwyn prevailed over Broughton’s proposal for conventions of lay representatives to meet simultaneously with the synod. As Kaye notes, and carefully documents, the view put forward by Perry and Selwyn in respect to synodical church governance eventually prevailed in every Australasian diocese. Interestingly, Kaye reflects that the historian must rely on the notes kept by Perry for much of the sequence of events of the 1850 conference; he wonders if the Metropolitan (Broughton) was responsible for the absence, or at least paucity, of the views expressed by Selwyn in the public minutes of the 1850 conference. The fifth chapter of the collection details what Kaye calls ‘the strange birth’ of Anglican Synods in the Australian Church, which emerged from the 1850 conference in the years after Broughton’s death in office in 1853.
The final two essays are the two newly published works, both extensively adapted from earlier published work. The first concerns the events surrounding the establishment of Sydney University and Broughton’s role in it, which, somewhat surprisingly to this reviewer, largely concerned opposing it as ‘an infidel place’ with which Broughton’s clergy were forbidden any involvement! The final essay is a brief exploration of the social transformation of the then colony into a pluralistic nation of the Commonwealth, and of the Anglican place within these structures. It serves to consolidate and contextualize all that has gone before.
Bruce Kaye’s collection of essays provides a very valuable, meticulously researched, and engagingly written description of the pivotal events of the mid-nineteenth century with regard to church state relations in colonial Australia. As Kaye notes, the implications of these events continue to be felt, and wrestled with, by Anglicans in early twenty-first-century Australia.
