¹ Evangelicalism honours tasks which the laity are equipped to perform, especially evangelism and social engineering. It is a supra-denominational movement and establishes cross-denominational institutions which are more attractive to laity than to clergy who need to succeed within denominational structures. In many evangelical institutions women and youth, to whom traditionally ordination has been closed, are principal agents or objects.

² In some ways Australia is propitious soil for evangelicalism. In traditional stereotyping Australians value the practical above the theoretical, and therefore activity above doctrine. They are not rabidly anticlerical, but they are more so than the English. The mobility of Australian society and its democratic spirit favour individualism rather than the covenantal community so conducive to clerical power. For the most part Australian churches are organized on a regional or state basis; such decentralization allows greater scope for the initiative of laity as well as the lower clergy.

³ Roe, Jill, ‘Theosophy and the Ascendency’, in Davidson, J., ed., The Sydney-Melbourne Book (Sydney, 1985), p. 215 Google Scholar.

⁴ On the development of Adelaide as a monochrome Anglo-Catholic diocese, see Hilliard, D., ‘The Transformation of South Australian Anglicanism, c.1880-1930’, JRH 14 (1986), pp. 38–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Judd, S. E., ‘“Defenders of their Faith”: Power and Party in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, 1003—1938’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney, 1984 Google Scholar); Robinson, D. W. B., ‘The Origins of the Anglican Church League’, Second Moore College Library Lecture, Sydney, 1976 Google Scholar.

⁶ West, J., History of Tasmania (Launceston, 1852), p. 31 Google Scholar.

⁷ Not that most Australians have seen it that way. Few settlers felt that they had come to Australia in obedience to a divine plan, and few have felt any sense of mission, national or otherwise.

⁸ The argument that evangelicalism has been dominant, and not domineering, in the fashioning of Australian life, and that it cannot be understood without the regional factor, has been pressed on me by Canon Len Abbott of Sydney. 1 am grateful for all the energy he has expended in communicating his very deep vision of Australian religious history to me. Margaret Lamb, my research assistant, has been a faster learner of the Abbott thesis than I. Much of the illustrative detail of this paper has been gathered by her.

⁹ T. lnglis Moore: Australian society has always been ‘fundamentally irreligious, loosely pagan’; Tom Collins: A metaphysical question seems to slip out of the average Australian’s mind ‘like a wet melon seed’; D. H. Lawrence took six weeks in Australia to arrive at the firm conclusion that ‘Australians have no inside life of any sort: just a long lapse and drift’; T. L. Suttor, the Catholic historian, ‘My theme is of an absence, a vacuum’; he speaks of the ‘great Australian tragedy, the refusal to explore God’; O’Farrell: ‘What is most significant historically about Australian religion is its weakness’; he speaks of Christianity’s ‘tenuous and intermittent hold on the minds and hearts of the Australian people’, its ‘peripheral or subordinate relation to their main concerns’; John Barrett on the position of the churches in Australia’s past: ‘There is little drama here for the historian’; J. D. Bollen: ‘Religion has not taken a spectacular part in our past… has not determined the life of a people… fairly unobtrusive’; McLeod, in his preface to The Pattern of Australian Culture (1963), says ‘Religion because it cannot be regarded as a cultural force in Australia … has been omitted’; Allan, J. Alex, Men and Manners in Australia (1945), p. 163 Google Scholar: ‘it must be said, for better or worse, that [the Australian] is not a “religious’ type as far as dogma is concerned’; Russel Ward concludes that part of the Australian stereotype is an aversion to religion—The ‘typical Australian’ is a ‘hard case’, ‘sceptical about the value of religion’; Manning Clark characterizes Australia as ‘The Kingdom of nothingness’.

¹⁰ lnglis, K. S., ‘Colonial Religion’, Quadrant, 21 (December 1977), pp. 65–72 Google Scholar, stresses the importance of studying the laity, the forgotten factor in Church History.

¹¹ ‘… there is a striking difference between Sydney and Melbourne right across the religious board … Religious life in Melbourne has always been more urbane, more ecumenical, more catholic in its social vision, more Tory in its conservatism, whereas Sydney has been more assertive.’ Campbell, R., ‘The character of Australian Religion’, Meanjin Quarterly, 36 (1977). PP. 183 Google Scholar seq. The regional differences have been discussed by Roe, M., Questfor Authority in Eastern Australia, 1835–1851 (Melbourne, 1965 Google Scholar), and Barrett, J., That Better Country: The Religious Aspect of Life in Eastern Australia, 1835–1850 (Melbourne, 1966 Google Scholar).

¹² Michael Hogan argues that Sydney’s culture explains its distinctive evangelicalism as well as its distinctive Roman Catholicism, Presbyterianism, and Methodism. Sydney is the ‘maverick’ in matters intellectual, sporting, political, and religious. See his review of Stephen Judd and Cable, Kenneth, Sydney Anglicans (Sydney, 1987) in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society (1988), pp. 84–6 Google Scholar.

¹³ This claim is based on the sociological work of the Australian academic, Hans Mol, a confessed evangelical. See his Meaning and Place: An Introduction to the Social Scientific Study of Religion (New York, 1983); Faith and Fragility (Burlington, Ontario, 1985); The Faith of Australians (Sydney, 1985).

¹⁴ Not all were impressed with its vitality. In 1825 Archdeacon Scott wrote to the Bishop of London: ‘I have a difficult task to perform, too, amongst the clergy, many of them altho’ good and excellent men, have been bred up with those peculiar notions of gloominess and what they call ‘real piety’ that their flocks are much affected by it as by the various sectaries which are here.’ Bonwick Transcriptions, Box 53, 44271/1 1512.

¹⁵ Anglican evangelicals joined the nonconformists to establish a Reformation Society in New South Wales in 1836.

¹⁶ Judd, Stephen and Cable, Kenneth, Sydney Anglicans (Sydney, 1987), p. 67 Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Tasmania had been separated from New South Wales in 1825 and Western Australia was settled in 1827.

¹⁸ Queensland began as a separate colony in 1859 with the determination not to be the waste paper basket for ‘England’s sweepings’, a resolve aided by the Revd John Dunmore Lang who was always on the lookout to establish a Presbyterian eden in Australia.

¹⁹ J. D. Lang was obsessed with the need for a white Protestant citadel in the South Seas.

²⁰ Pike, I. D., Paradise of Dissent (Melbourne, 1967 Google Scholar) documents the nonconformist role in the establishment of civil liberties in South Australia.

²¹ Borchardt, D. H., Australians: A Guide to Sources (Broadway, 1987), p. 349 Google Scholar.

²² In Victoria, Ormond, Cato, Grimwade, and the Evangelical Trust founded by Lee Neil, W. M. Buntine, and the Griffiths; in South Australia the Elders, Smiths, Hughes’s, Coltons, and the Angas’s. The Victorian country diocese of Bendigo did not have a strong squattocracy because of the operation of the Land Acts. It may be no accident that evangelicalism flourished there as well as in Sydney until the early decades of the present century.

²³ The New South Wales Methodists, however, had George Allen, the ‘lay bishop’, and Ebenezer Vickery who purchased the Lyceum Theatre for the Wesleyan Methodist Central Mission, the Presbyterians had J. A. Brown who is said to have endowed so many churches in the Hunter Valley that he threatened their spiritual vitality, and the Baptists had G. E Ardill.

²⁴ Gillman, Ian, Many Faiths, One Nation (Sydney, 1984), pp. 33–5 Google Scholar.

²⁵ Piggin, S., Making Evangelical Missionaries (Appleford, Oxford, 1984), pp. 40–4, 129–32 Google Scholar; Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988), p. 379 Google Scholar.

²⁶ Volume I, p. 3.

²⁷ Loane, M. L, Hewn from the Rock Origins and Traditions of the Church in Sydney (Sydney, 1975), p. 3 Google Scholar.

²⁸ Clark, M., ‘Faith’, in Coleman, P., ed., Australian Civilization (Melbourne, 1962), p. 79 Google Scholar; Hilton, , P. 379 Google Scholar.

²⁹ Carroll, John, ‘Manning Clark’s Vision Splendid’, Quadrant, October 1982 Google Scholar.

³⁰ Piggin, S., ‘Towards a bicentennial history of Australian Evangelicalism’, JRH 15 (1988), pp. 20–37 Google Scholar; Ely, R., ‘The Forgotten Nationalism: Australian Civic Protestantism in the Second World War’, Journal of Australian Studies, 20 (1987), pp. 59–67 Google Scholar.

³¹ Judd and Cable, p. 69.

³² ‘Barker saw Australia as a mission field which required parish clergy to be able evangelical missionaries’, Judd, p. 42.

³³ Daw, E. D., ‘Hulton Smyth King: The Curate of Fenagh and Wells’, Church of England Historical Society Journal’, 15 (1970), pp. 94–9 Google Scholar.

³⁴ Judd and Cable, p. 92.

³⁵ Daw, p. 94.

³⁶ Judd and Cable, p. 75.

³⁷ Robin, A de Q., Charles Perry, Bishop of Melbourne: The Challenges of a Colonial Episcopate, 1847–76 (Nedlands, 1967), pp. 128–30 Google Scholar.

³⁸ Loane, M., Hewn from the Rock, p. 112 Google Scholar.

³⁹ As yet unpublished autobiography, manuscript, pp. 120 seq.

⁴⁰ 1876-86.

⁴¹ Judd and Cable, p. 213.

⁴² Ibid., p. 143.

⁴³ Ibid., pp. 148 seq.

⁴⁴ Archdeacon J. Moroney interviewed by Margaret Lamb, 17 November 1986.

⁴⁵ Judd and Cable, p. 150.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 201.

⁴⁷ Buck, L., interviewed by Margaret Lamb, 15 November 1986 Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ R. Pocklington, Melbourne Director of Open Air Campaigners, interviewed by Margaret Lamb, 19 May 1988.

⁴⁹ The most mundane explanation of the success of conservative evangelicalism in Sydney is not the inherent supremacy of its churchmansbip, but rather that it was an administrative success.

⁵⁰ The Church of England League of Tasmania, established in 1922, and the Church of England Defence Association of Queensland (1927).

⁵¹ Judd, pp. 185 seq.

⁵² On Nash, see Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne, 1986), 10, pp. 665 seq.

⁵³ L. Buck, interviewed by Margaret Lamb, 15 November 1986.

⁵⁴ Cutler, G., The Torch (Lilydale, 1976), p. 7 Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ C. Sandland, interviewed by Margaret Lamb, 20 March 1987.

⁵⁶ Judd and Cable, p. 251.

⁵⁷ Piggin, , ‘Towards a bicentennial history of Australian Evangelicalism’, p. 30 Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Phillips, W. W., ‘Religion’, in Vamplew, W., ed., Australians: Historical Statistics (Broadway, 1987). PP 428–35 Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Babbage, S. B. and Siggins, I., Light beneath the Cross: The Story of Billy Graham’s Crusade in Australia (Melbourne, 1960), pp. 14–36 Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ In Sydney EFAC and the Evangelical Alliance have not been strongly promoted, but among Melbourne evangelicals they have been looked on as essential to the consolidation of evangelical ministries.

⁶¹ Correspondence between Arthur Deane and John Dykes, Secretary of the Katoomba Christian Convention, 1987.