Trinity Papers No. 15 - 'Gothic Foundations and rising Damp, or Prophets and Rebels'

Gothic Foundations and rising Damp, or Prophets and Rebels: the Contribution of the Liberal Intellectual Tradition in Australian Anglicanism to National Culture

by Colin Holden

Trinity Papers Number 15

Trinity College The University Of Melbourne

The Revd Dr Colin Holden is Assistant Priest at St Peter's Eastern Hill and a Senior Fellow in the History Department of the University of Melbourne. He presented ‘Gothic Foundations and rising Damp’ as the Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture on 9th August 2000.

This paper represents the fifteenth in a series prepared by Trinity College which focus upon broad issues facing the community in such areas as education, ethics, history, politics, and science. Copies are available upon request from the Tutorial Office, Trinity College, Parkville, Victoria 3052 Australia.

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Gothic Foundations and rising Damp, or Prophets and Rebels: the Contribution of the Liberal Intellectual Tradition in Australian Anglicanism to National Culture A resounding silence concerning Australia’s churches, including its Anglican church, has distinguished many general treatments of Australian history - even some quite recent ones. Readers might well conclude that their impact has been so insignificant as to hardly be worth a mention.

Overtly negative assessments are also easy to find. Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country, provides a good example. 1 And when Manning Clark came to the 20th century, the only significant impact of Christianity he could detect was the void left by the outgoing tide of institutionalised religion.

There are more imaginative (and dangerously convincing) ways of representing negative conclusions.

One such version of Anglicanism is presented by Hal Porter in his short story ‘At the Galahad’. One of his main characters describes the Galahad, a grand 19th century St Kilda mansion, now a hotel, inhabited by bishops spinster daughters, Anglo-Indian widows, superannuated deaconesses you know the type: eking out allowances, savings or legacies, bitching at the waitresses and chambermaids, always shooting the roller-blinds right up.

Something’s always too hot or too cold. Or not early enough. Or late again . . .

I saw what he meant. I knew them: gunmetal-grey stockings; long, narrow shoes; crocodile-skin handbag containing scraps of a richer past . . . the juiceless voices: ‘Oh, Mr Gaar-Smith, Ai don’t want to make trouble for the gels. Yet Ai do feel that the gel on mai table is not quaite . . . well, frenkly, she’s vedy slack. Mai toast this morning was barely . . .’. I could see the obsessive glitter in ageing eyes: Food, the god of the lonely, the god of many communions. . . ‘Some of the old bags eat more than a stevedore father-of-nine. . .’.2 Here Anglicanism is the religion of a desiccated and life-denying group playing small-scale but vicious power games, their public gentility a hollow sham. No prophets and rebels here, only gothic foundations and rising damp.

Instead, I intend to provide some evidence of a picture of Australian Anglicanism quite different from Porter’s suggestions of a short-sighted Tory great uncle or a prudish, repressed great-aunt.

Instead, I intend to show that by the beginning of the twentieth century, it was well-placed to influence Australian culture, because it had come to include a wide cross section of Australian community, and had moved well beyond the gentry and sentry associations it had in the earliest period of settlement. Its franchise had come to embrace many people of the lower middle and upper working classes that constituted most of our population.

It was from this position that it became one of many influences in the creation of culture that surrounds us in Australia today, many of whose attitudes we would not at first link with Anglicanism at all. In particular, the liberal tradition in Anglicanism can be seen to contribute toward the creation of the following attitudes: the critical assessment of and responses to government policy, particularly in its social aspects; inclusive attitudes to those of other cultures; and attitudes to psychology and sexual issues.

Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, pp. 65-72.

Hal Porter, ‘At the Galahad’, quoted in My Country, Australian Poetry and Short Stories, 200 Years, Sydney, 1985, ed.

Leonie Kramer, vol. 2, pp. 345-6.

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Where do we begin? Statistical records of denominational affiliation do not demonstrate depth of faith or commitment to particular doctrines. Nevertheless, even statistics might invite approaches different from Horne’s or Hal Porter’s. Writing as recently as 1958, the late Leicester Webb pointed out that, next to England, Australia was the most Anglican country in the world.3 Nor are the kinds of statistics that back Webb’s claim confined to the immediate post-war period, when all major churches experienced a peak in terms of the community’s involvement with their institutions.4 The high proportion of the population represented by Anglicans in national statistics from virtually any earlier point in Australian history makes it pertinent to suggest that it is illogical to ignore Anglicanism, or at least to dismiss the possibility of its impact in a perfunctory manner.

Is there evidence that indicates the breadth of its dispersal and affiliation? I address this point to being with, because its establishment lays foundations for any subsequent claim that it has been able to influence our contemporary culture.

Anglicanism in tandem with democracy 1860-1900: keeping abreast of a changing society By the end of the 19th century, all Australian colonies had moved from earlier unrepresentative forms of government to elected democratic ones, a major social shift. And across the country, by the end of the 19th century, there were significant signs that Anglicanism had negotiated a similar shift that ensured that it held a major place in the culture that had emerged: it was able to attract a broad clientele through its identification with liberal democratic values.

By the first decade of the 20th century, in Melbourne, the mainstream press, in the form of the columnist for Melbourne Punch who reported church life under the heading ‘Church and Organ’, described Anglicanism as having made the transition with a greater degree of success than the Presbyterians. He referred from time to time to the dying off of the old aristocracy, by which he generally meant the pre-goldrush gentry; at St James, originally ‘a centre of aristocratic culture’, you could expect less than twenty on a Sunday. 5 To see the older aristocratic ways, with the well-to do taking their religion seriously, you now had to go to major Presbyterian congregations such as those of Toorak, Malvern or Camberwell; but Anglicanism had not kept any real hold on the upper middle class: ‘the wealthy Anglicans, or those who used to be such, must be motoring, golfing, yachting, reading, idling, or something’.6 He stated that democracy, defined as belief in equality of all irrespective of class, was being promoted by a number of Anglican churches in Melbourne. 7 Among the democratic Anglican parish churches he lists St Peter’s Eastern Hill, with its record for ‘so-called slum work’ and its abolition of pew rents, St Andrew’s Brighton and St John’s Toorak, ‘strangely democratic’, its worshippers mainly from among the shop-owners of ‘the Prahran valley’ Though well attended by the fashionable forty years ago, the constituency had changed in ‘that most Godless, or rather churchless, suburb’.8 The definition of democracy given here and regarded as a characteristic of federation period Anglicanism wasn’t just an urban phenomenon. When William Hancock, father of the historian Leicester Webb, ‘Churches and the Australian Community,’ in E.L. French (ed.), Melbourne Studies in Education 1958-1959, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1960, p. 104.

4 For some statistics from Anglican church records which substantiate this, see the tables in Colin Holden, ‘Parish and Organisational Life in the Diocese of Melbourne’, in Melbourne Anglicans: The Diocese of Melbourne 18471997, ed. Brian Porter, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 84-5, and corrections in Melbourne Anglican, August 1997, p. 9; for an account of aspects of this period from a quite different perspective that reinforce this conclusion, see Stuart Piggin, Evangelical Christianity in Australia: Spirit, Word and World, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 151-3, 167-171.

5 Melbourne Punch, 1 June 1905, p. 729 and 21 March 1907, p. 384.

6 Ibid., 7 February 1907 p. 169.

7 Ibid., 25 April 1907, p. 565.

8 Ibid., 18 January 1906, p. 32, 23 May 1905, p. 393, 1 June 1906 p. 729, 23 May 1907, p. 708.

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Keith Hancock, was incumbent of Euroa, in 1892, he presided over the abolition of pew rents, ‘in favour of free sittings. The general feeling was that the House of God should be equally open for rich and poor, and that class distinctions should not be emphasised there’ - a mode of expression that conforms with Melbourne Punch’s definition of democracy. 9 Seven years earlier, as the raw and newly ordained priest in Nathalia, a centre recently opened up by selector settlement, one of Hancock’s early encounters was with a young English educated, radicalised and lapsed Anglican. Hancock could defeat him in debate with his own tools Benthamite utilitarianism. Eventually, the ‘new chum’ came to church; his response to the sermon of Hancock was to interpret it as reinforcing class distinctions, something which all clergy (ie. the English clergy her had previously experienced) were bent on perpetuating.

Hancock defended himself against this misrepresentation of his own words well enough. The young man had criticised the first lesson, narrating Moses’ killing of the Egyptian overseer, as turning Moses into an undeserved hero. But Hancock retorted that this was ‘justifiable homicide’ and that the Egyptians were not robbed by Jews, but for generations past had shamefully exploited a subject class and nation. Surely the man who delivered hundreds of thousands of slaves from the house of bondage was serving the greatest good of the greatest number? If we admired Wilberforce and Lincoln and Garibaldi must not we in justice admire Moses too? . . . If there were prayers for kings and those in authority it was because high position carried with it great responsibility and a corresponding power for good or evil; the Church would have prayed for President instead of Queen if the British Empire had been a republic . . .10

Gradually, the ‘new chum’ softened his attitude, becoming a close friend and Hancock’s ‘champion among the radical working men of the town’.

From the other side of the continent in Western Australia, the Dean of Perth, Frederick Goldsmith, wrote to the Sisters of the Church in 1890, in the hope that they might come to manage an orphanage. In describing the place of the church in Perth society at large, he wrote ‘The Church tone of the place is by no means advanced but Australians are quick to recognise the value and merit of honest hard work’ - a polite way of saying that respect had to be earned, and not taken for granted on the basis of class or other hierarchical structures.11 And the absence of the wealthier from the pews in Toorak noted by the Melbourne Punch writer was not entirely new. From time to time, Charles Perry, reflecting on the condition of the church in his new see, commented that the acquisition of wealth in the colonies was rarely accompanied by a sense of responsibility in supporting the church and charitable institutions, as was more often the case in England; the comment was repeated in other 19th century correspondence. In country Victoria, Robert Turnbull, owner of 18 thousand acres near Benalla, gave only a ten pound subscription towards the building of Trinity Church, opened by 1861.12 By the 1890s, the vestry had only a few pounds (single figures) in the bank, the clergy stipend was in arrears by several months, and for a decade, the incumbent accepted a reduction.13 The well to do were more noticeable by the absence of their support; that parish, like many others, was being carried along by Australians of the middle range.

Euroa Advertiser, 6/5/1902.

Keith Hancock, Country and Calling, London, p. 19.

11 Frederick Goldsmith to Emily Ayckbowm, 8/5/1890, archives, Sisters of the Church, Ham Common, London 12 Church of England Record for Victoria, July, 1861.

13 Vestry Minutes, 1892-1902, parish archives, Holy Trinity, Benalla.

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Yes, there were gentry who were generous. In South Australia in the first decade of the 20th century, Henry Dutton, ‘the squire of Anlaby’, could fund St Matthews Hamilton, fitting it with sterling silver standard candlesticks encrusted with garnets, and importing matching fittings from England.14 But among Dutton’s generation the equivalent of Robert Turnbull’s meanness is represented by Sir Ernest Lee-Steere’s rebuff in 1919 of appeals in connection with Guildford Grammar School on the grounds that the chapel was an economic waste: I do not agree that it is necessary to have a ‘gilt-edged’ edifice to make one’s devotions in, and am of the opinion that our prayers are heard from beneath a mulga tree just as much as in a magnificent edifice such as St Peter’s in Rome or your own chapel.15

In what might have appeared to be a wealthy country town, Bendigo, John Christian McCullagh, its archdeacon, and incumbent of St Paul’s for 47 years, stated ‘There were no rich men in his parish who were doing anything for the Church. There was not a man in his congregation who was a mining speculator or who derived a shilling from the mines. The wealth of Bendigo consisted mainly in wages paid to the miners, and by them to the shopkeepers’. 16 Most of all, a significant indicator is the persistence of Anglicanism across class divisions in an area where class tensions were at a height - the Kelly uprising in the north-east. Far from being primarily a conflict founded in English-Irish or denominational tensions, the Kelly outbreak was extreme edge of economic protest of small selectors against big landowners using privilege against them.

The Age identified the north-east as the region where squatter-selector tension was highest, describing it as ‘a snug retreat’ for abuse of one group by the other.17 Here Anglicanism was not just the religion of big landowners like the Dockers, Mitchells, Watsons and Barbers, but also of the disadvantaged. During the uprising, the police were tipped off by some Anglican Kelly sympathisers concerning a plan to kidnap Bishop Moorhouse while he was visiting the north-east and hold to ransom. Moorhouse was guided through Kelly country by the police, and made aware of the frustrated plot on return to Melbourne. 18 Joseph Coulston was then a typical Anglican small landholder, who testified to the government: ‘it appears to me that there is no law for the poor man in this country’.19 Selectors who survived this difficult period, and eventually prospered, such as Coulston were significant as founders of churches and donors of land: by 1924, the creation of St Mark’s Kiewa was due to the initiative of Joseph Coulston and his wife. 20 And across the last decades of the 19th century and up to the Depression, landowners of small to medium sized holdings were donors of the land and/or buildings for many of the small gothic churches dotted across the rural landscape (that were, or still are, the outcentres of bigger parishes).

This is as true of the small churches in the south west of Western Australia before World War I, as it is for north eastern Victoria. They reflect the involvement of a very different class from the

Brian Andrews, Gothic in South Australian Churches, Adelaide, 1984, pp. 44-6.

Quoted in Peter Boyce, ‘The First Archbishop’, in Four Bishops and Their See: Perth, Western Australia, 1857-1957, ed Fred Alexander, Perth, 1957, p. 90.

16 Church of England Messenger, November, 1900, Supplement, p. 4.

17 John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak 1878-1880: The Geographic Dimension of Social Banditry, Melbourne, 1979, pp. 30, 39, 52-3.

18 H W Nunn, A Short History of the Church of England in Victoria 1849-1947, Melbourne 1947, p. 50.

19 Lands Commission, evidence, quoted in John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak, pp. 92-3.

20 Esther Temple, A Brief History of St Mark’s Kiewa, Wodonga, 1974.

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Macarthurs at Camden, the Duttons at Anlaby or the Edgerton-Warburtons at Mount Barker in Western Australia.

Two elements that became important in this democratising process, even if they were not originally embraced with this in mind, are two basic features of Anglican church government in most Australian colonies. I am referring to the creation of synods, and the general preference for voluntary compact rather than legislative enactment.

Though it is difficult to imagine from this distance, Charles Perry in Melbourne was regarded by individuals of a more conservative political nature as running radical risks when he gave a conspicuous role to an educated laity in the kind of synodical government which he planned and created in the early 1850s and through the degree of lay participation he encouraged in other structures; was it the shadow of the 1848 French republican movement producing this restiveness?21 But by the end of his episcopate (1876) this was seen as evidence of wise foresight. And those founding bishops who backed consensual compact rather than legislative enactment (basically, all bar the oldest colonies - Sydney and Hobart), were, without realising it, laying foundations that would support the democratisation that was to come. As it was, through making judicious concessions and through good management, bishops such as Perry and Tyrrell in Newcastle forged important alliances between church and laity. 22 From Democratisation to Liberalisation A little further down the track, I will point to evidence of the link between the democratisation of the church by the end of the 19th century, which I have just discussed, and the acceptance of a phenomenon that is the focus of the remainder of this lecture, namely, the appearance of a number of liberal tendencies, tendencies which foreshadow elements that are now part of mainstream culture in this country. These strands are often best represented in a number of individuals, generally those with the highest levels of education, but have an influence far beyond their educational and social peers, to impact on, and be accepted by, those members of the new democratic class that I have already documented.

The kind of liberalism to which I refer was, to begin with, as much a broad intellectual attitude as a matter of specific content. It could embrace Anglicans of quite different churchmanship. In its 19th century manifestation, the litmus test was its attitudes to the sciences; over the issue of evolution, this went along with the placing of Genesis in a broader context provided by various kinds of scholarly textual study. In this area, the attitude of James Moorhouse, Melbourne’s second bishop, contrasted with that of his predecessor, Charles Perry. Moorhouse influenced laity and clergy of all schools. He was not only a formative figure for high churchmen such as Reginald Stephen or John Stephen Hart, but also for a tolerant evangelical cleric like Thomas Armstrong, the first bishop of Wangaratta, who echoed his mentor in his last synods in the mid 1920s by encouraging members to see the Bible not in fundamentalist way, but in light of both modern biblical scholarship, archaeological discoveries and scientific theories such as evolution, all of which had placed human history and experience in a new framework.

In Moorhouses’ generation, Anglican women as well as men were part of this intellectual shift.

Perhaps the best documented example from late 19th century Victoria is Ada Cambridge, In a long career as a novelist and poet, she voiced dissatisfaction with the forms of institutionalised religion.

See Hussey Burgh Macartney, Reminiscences, Diocesan archives, St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne; A. de Q. Robin, Charles Perry, Bishop of Melbourne: The Challenges of a Colonial Episcopate, 1847-1876, Perth, 1967, p. 174 22 A. de Q. Robin, Charles Perry, pp. 85-6; Ken Cable, ‘The Dioceses of Sydney and Newcastle’, in Colonial Tractarians, The Oxford Movement in Australia, ed Brian Porter, Melbourne, 1989, pp. 40-41, 43.

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But there were a number of others, such as Margaret Tripp (1838-1902), one of the founders of Toorak College, well-read in the work of the seminal Anglican Christian socialist, F.D. Maurice. 23 And if the debate over evolution was a specific issue that acted like a litmus test for the liberals of one generation, succeeding generations tended to engage other issues, particularly social and political ones, and to move in succeeding periods from moderate to more radical and aggressive positions.

In one family, successive generations could embrace liberal positions with a kind of incremental effect. Take the Tucker family. Joseph Kidger Tucker began his ordained life as a Methodist cleric in England before being ordained as an Anglican in 1853, a decade after his marriage to the daughter of a Kent gentry family; Tucker was the son of a tea merchant, thus coming from a family of means.

Other relatives had a liberal intellectual outlook: Bishop Westcott of Durham, one of the founders of the Christian Social Union, was a cousin.24 He came to Melbourne under Perry, and was eventually appointed archdeacon of Beechworth and Gippsland. As well as fulfilling an impressive range of country archdeacon’s administrative duties, he would lecture, in an age that saw education and intellectual stimulus as both edifying and as a potential solution to most if not all problems, on topics ranging from ‘The Oriental Churches’ (Melbourne Mechanics Institute, 1869); ‘Engineering Triumphs of the 19th Century’ (Myrtleford), ‘The Progress of the Age (Morses Creek, December 1873), ‘Iceland and the Icelanders’ (Wandilagong and Bright, October 1875. 25 From this background of confidence in education and debate, one of his six children, Horace Finn, vicar of Christ Church South Yarra, was to advance proposals during the 1890s depression for the relocation of working people to rural centres ó decentralisation for employment and health. He earnt the criticism of some parishioners for his spirited stand on the basic needs of hansom cab drivers, including adequate shelters along Toorak Road. He expressed a definite if restrained high churchmanship, which was commented on in an Age editorial.26 Thence to Gerard Kennedy, their best-known son. His Brotherhood of St Laurence failed as a religious community, but GK , though fearful of communism, embraced passive resistance and pro-active protest; he backed resistance to the eviction of a family with seven children from their Fitzroy home in September 1944, and used sit-in tactics again later that same year. While Archbishop Booth disapproved of the tactics as a challenge to law and order, hundreds of others gave support.27 An earlier generation’s liberalism had extended to a degree of radicalism and resistance. GK Tucker was not alone in his generation of Tuckers in criticising the state: another brother, Lyde, was one of those Australians unconvinced by the claims of Empire expressed in the First World War. A total pacifist, he served as a stretcher bearer as a consequence of his objection to armed participation.28 And this liberalism which had 19th century roots expressed itself through all kinds of lesser figures across country. A representative Sydney example is Stephen Glanville Fielding, rector of St Matthias, Paddington, a former sea captain, novelist and science fiction writer. ‘God may be proved by the projectility of a bullet’, he would tell his congregation (meaning: the physical laws governing the There is now an extensive literature particularly journal articles on Ada Cambridge. More generally, see Audrey Tate, Ada Cambridge: Her Life and Work 1844-1926, Melbourne, 1991; Margaret Tripp, Correspondence, State Library of Victoria, Ms 11539.

24 Tucker family records.

25 On his work in the north-east of Victoria, see Church of Messenger, 14/6/1888, pp. 1-2; the lectures are referred to in E. C. Rowland, ‘The Anglican Church of the Upper Ovens to 1902’, lecture to the Church of England Historical Society, Melbourne, pp. 10-12 and notes.

26 I. R. Carter, God and Three Shillings, The Story of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Melbourne, 1967, pp. 4-7; John Handfield, Friends and Brothers, A Life of Gerard Kennedy Tucker, Melbourne 1980, pp. 7-9; ‘Does Ritualism Exist?’, Age, 7/9/1899, p. 7.

27 John Handfield, Friends and Brothers, pp. 151-3.

28 Family information.

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path of a projectile offered him sufficient indication of an intelligent mind behind the created order).

Peppering his sermons with references to Sir James Jeans, Lord Rutherford, he stated that Biblical writers ‘had discerned the same great law of evolution long before it was discovered by the modern scientist’. Though about a quarter of Sydney parish clergy criticised the emergence of a controlling body of conservative by presenting a major petition to the diocesan hierarchy in 1938 - ‘the memorialists’ - he already claimed to his congregation in the 1920s that he was lone survivor of broad churchmanship in Sydney. 29 Content and Expression While the liberal tradition of which I speak was ultimately an attitude, rather than a clearly defined party with a core of beliefs or policies to which members subscribed, nor was it content-free. So to some key topics and the attitudes taken to them.

Criticism of government: the nation at war Though Australian Anglicanism was predominantly but not entirely an uncritical supporter of the British imperial structure during World War I, yet there were dissenters among the Anglicans, and their non-conformity was all the more significant; this was the generation of intellectual liberals for whom the key issues were becoming political and social ones. There was the pacifism of some, like Lyde Tucker. More unusual, was the attitude of Reginald Stephen, then bishop of Tasmania, who offered a radical critique of British imperialism, claiming that the German behaviour decried by the British was in fact copied by the Germans from British models: the use of force in territorial invasion; then opening of markets for (colonial) goods on the basis of might equalling right; the use of the racial superiority argument to justify the dispossession of weaker peoples and nations.

Stephen identified what he called ‘our national wrongs’ as a long term inheritance from the past, which had contributed ‘to the [current] atmosphere of untruthfulness, distrust and covetousness’.30 While the Argus reported Stephen’s words under the heading of ‘bishop’s plain speaking’, the Melbourne diocesan press, which reported far more trivial interdiocesan moments, was curiously silent.

In the inter-war years, despite praise for Mussolini and fascist thugs from prominent Anglicans such as the Hughes family ( remember Kent Hughes line ‘I am a Fascist - without a shirt’?)31 there were some Anglicans who made more questioning, and in the long term, perceptive responses. One such was Helen Baillie. A well-educated woman of independent means, whose father had inherited from a Western District squatter family, her mother was daughter of Walter Fellows, a former vicar of St Johns Toorak. She later recalled that as a teenager, she had argued strongly against father’s Presbyterian, Tory conservative stance. She equally reacted against the military careers of relatives in India, Egypt, South and Central Africa. Her involvements that reflected her criticism of militarism were many and various. By 1934 she was attending a meeting in Melbourne’s Town Hall to protest against Hitler’s treatment of German Jews; she joined the Peace Movement and her correspondence on militarism was rejected by the Age at the time of visit of John Masefield and the Duke of Gloucester as part of Melbourne’s centenary celebrations; in 1936 she joined the Ethiopian Relief Committee to support Red Cross in Abyssinia and helped to create a committee to aid with relief

L. C. Rodd, John Hope of Christ Church St Laurence, A Sydney Church Era, Sydney 1972, pp. 15-16; on the Memorialists, see Stephen Judd and Ken Cable, Sydney Anglicans, Sydney, 1988, pp. 238-40.

30 Argus, 4/1/1915.

31 Four articles in Herald, November 1933.

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during Spanish Civil War. She was an active supporter of many causes that enjoyed only minority support.32 To another more prominent Australian voice. Though Martin Boyd, had been living in England since 1925, both sides of his family represented educated and cultured Anglicanism of more than one generation. His pre-World War Two novels include discussions concerning the rise of fascism, Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, the invasion of Abyssinia and the morality of war. As World War Two progressed, he became increasingly critical of what he saw as immoral choices in the government’s war policies, accompanied by silence or actual backing from the episcopate, Following the bombing of Hamburg in 1943, he wrote an impassioned letter to William Temple. Having claimed that the church was identified with government war policy, he went on: ‘even if it is too much to ask them (the hierarchy’s members) to proclaim the message of Calvary, at least they should keep to the moral level of an honourable pagan who knows that it is better to be dead and defeated than to corrupt his own spirit’.33 Boyd later wrote to Temple that he was not writing from a pacifist position, even though he sympathised with its holders. He did not expect the church to adopt a pacifist line, but was distressed lest the church give carte blanche to the state to wage war by whatever means might seem most effective, however inhuman. He did not accept that German civilian casualties were simply an unfortunate side effect of a policy aimed at war-linked industry. There is now sufficient evidence to show that he was correct in his conviction that the bombing campaign was designed as a deliberate policy of demoralisation.34 In a country town, there was the total pacifism of the dean of Wangaratta, Percy Dicker - regarded as too much of a pacifist by his bishop, John Stephen Hart, far from conservative over social questions, and enough happy to let Dicker chair discussions in 1937 on the possible benefits of socialism as part of the local CEMS programme. In 1944, Dicker also invited Claude Kennedy, the priest in charge of the diocesan seminary, to address the same group, using as a text Maynard’s Fair Hearing for Socialism. Kennedy had shared a study as a student at Trinity with Ralph Gibson, the stater Communist party president.35 As the war ended, the socialist vicar of St Peter’s Eastern Hill, F.E. Maynard, attributed responsibility for many elements of the Pacific war to Europeans, from whom the Japanese had learnt ‘too much that was evil, and too little that was good’.36 He qualified this expansive statement by making it clear that one of the evils the Japanese had learnt from Europeans was imperialism.

Had Stephen, Lyde Tucker, Martin Boyd or F.E. Maynard been at their prime during the Vietnam war, they would have found that instead of their critical assessment of their own side’s ethics and actions being unusual, that it was now almost de rigeur for many Anglicans, as for other Australians.

Many Anglicans, clergy and lay, were seen on the streets of the state capitals across the nation in moratorium marches, and there were some conspicuous Anglicans critical of Australian involvement in that conflict. Perhaps the most fascinating and enigmatic, a mixture of prophet and rogue, was Francis James (1918-1992). An RAF officer, he had been badly burnt after being shot down over France, and spent 20 months as a POW. On returning to Australia in 1950, he became education correspondent and religious editor for the Sydney Morning Herald, well known for wearing a wideCorrespondence 1933-1936 with F. E. Maynard, archives, St Peter’s Eastern Hill; Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock, ‘One Woman’s Concerns for Social Justice’, in Anglo-Catholicism in Melbourne, ed. Colin Holden, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 86, 94-5.

33 Quoted in Brenda Niall, Martin Boyd, A Life, Melbourne, 1988, p. 135.

34 Brenda Niall, Martin Boyd, p. 136.

35 Church Standard, 7/56/1937 and Claude M Kennedy to FE Maynard, 20/9/1944, archives, St Peter’s Eastern Hill.

36 Parish Paper (St Peter’s Eastern Hill), August 1945, archives, St Peter’s Eastern Hill.

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brimmed black velour hat and crimson-lined cloak. Then he became owner of The Anglican. The eccentricities continued: in his 1928 phantom Rolls Royce he set up a typewriter and blinds so that he could use it as an office. But there was more to him than that. The Anglican was turned into a forum for debating Australia’s involvement in Vietnam. The journal’s tone was radical; James visited Hanoi in 1966.

In 1956 he visited China with a delegation of bishops into the remote Sinkiang region, then closed to the outside world. In 1969 he claimed to have secretly visited Chinese nuclear installations, a claim that created an international furore, and was widely dismissed in Western circles; but in Canton among slogan chanting uniformly dressed Chinese, the figure in the eccentric outfit, claiming he had entered China on a false passport provided by a foreign security service, was treated seriously by the Chinese and gaoled. Whitlam secured his release in 1973.37 Richard Hall (author of The Rhodes Scholar Spy, 1991) assessed him thus: ‘I know the security services [kept] files on him [but] it was a mistake to think of Francis ain any sense as a left-winger. He was a curious figure, the ‘English’ liberal radical . . . In a way, Francis never got over the war or high heroics’ (he was the subject of a dramatised TV documentary The Gadfly, made by Lewis Fitzgerald and Bill Bennett).38 It would I think be accurate to describe ‘Basher Bill’ Hardie of Ballarat (1961-74) as a ‘tory’ radical.

Though openly critical of communism, he accompanied this by warnings against those who used the communist can as a tactic to divert criticism of Australia’s economic and social structures. In 1969, he described the gaoling of an objector, John Zarb, as ‘another witness . . . to the bankruptcy of our so-called democratic government, representative, and responsible system of government and society.’ But this hardly prepared the synod for his attack on the war in his charge the following year.

The US government’s prolonging of the war was idiotic face-saving, ‘matched by [the] equal reluctance of our own political masters - I will not say leaders - to acknowledge the folly, inhumanity, and irresponsibility of the party policy that has dragged this nation, largely unwillingly, into the murderous slaughter and mutilation of a whole people’.39 It was met with total silence.

Sex and psychology For a contrast, to a short look at a quite different area: some vignettes connected with the understanding of human motivation and behaviour. It might surprise some to think of the Anglican church as one of the first churches in this country (if not the first) to publish a guide to sex instruction for children. In the face of the claim by more conservative Australians that education encouraged dangerous experimentation, Helps to Parents, a guide published by the Anglican church, was launched in 1918. It was produced as a result of a General Synod motion of 1916; admittedly, fear concerning sexually transmitted diseases was an important factor in its production, but it is significant to note that this publication was accompanied by firmly worded statements from laity and clergy, including a number of bishops, that instruction, not preserving ignorance, was the only reponsible course. Mother’s Union played a role in its promotion, again bringing Anglican institutional involvement to bear; women from nonconformist churches appear to have been involved in similar exercises not through their churches but through organisations such as the WCTU.40 By the inter-war years, a number of Anglican clergy recognised that there were insights Gregory Clark, ‘The Real Francis James Story’, Independent Monthly, October 1992, pp. 5-6; Nikki Barrrowclough, ‘The Francis James Factor, Sydney Morning Herald Magazine, 21/5/1994, pp. 24-32.

38 Gregory Clark, ‘The Real Mfrancis James Story’, Independent Monthly, October 1992, pp. 5-6; Nikki Barrrowclough, ‘The Francis James Factor, Sydney Morning Herald Magazine, 21/5/1994, pp. 24-32.

39 Quoted in John Spooner,The Golden See: The Diocese of Ballarat: The Anglican Church in Western Victoria, Sydney, 1989, p. 240.

40 For a wider treatment of this issue, see Ellen Warne, ‘’Tell Them!’ Anglican Mothers and Sex Education 18901930’, in People of the Past, The Culture of Melbourne Anglicanism and Anglicanism in Melbourne’s Culture, ed. Colin Holden, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 19-40. Neither Ellen Warne, nor other historians who have investigated Melbourne’s 37

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from the growing discipline of psychology that could be presented in a way compatible with orthodox Christian theology and anthropology. Farnham Maynard, in counselling penitents, used specifically Christian terms to discourage repression of the truth about motives and actions, identifying self-acceptance as an important element of healing. Penitents with whom he corresponded regularly included a wide range of men and women, including a handful of gay men.

With several other like-minded priests, he published a series of journal articles encouraging a positive dialogue between psychology and Christian pastoral care. 41 On a discussion of homosexuality in 1968, one of that early group, the Revd W.G. Coughlan, could write ‘we are coming to see that all sexual need, attitude and expression is inseparable from the total personality, and reflects that personality with remarkable faithfulness’.42 Another remarkable priest, Roy Lee (1899-1981), whose racial origins was a mixture of Anglo-Celtic and Chinese, was another such.

Discriminated against in his early career in Newcastle diocese before World War Two, he went to England, where he became among other things the first director of overseas broadcasts for the BBC. In a distinguished academic career, he published titles on psychology such as Your Growing Child and Religion (1963, Macmillan, later Penguin).43 Meanwhile, back at home in Australia, as director of the Melbourne Diocesan Centre, and later as an assistant bishop, Geoffrey Sambell had persuaded the state government of the importance of hospital chaplaincy, and secured government funding for chaplaincy in major city hospitals. The model he promoted combined British and American elements. The British was represented by the conviction that it was the Anglican church’s role to minister to the wider community beyond its own membership (and excluding those who positively affiliated themselves with other churches); the American, by insisting that those involved in chaplaincy should be trained through courses drawing on the most recent pastoral theory to emerge from America, particularly that of Rogers and May. The trainers were often Australian priests with American postgraduate experience, such as Roy Bradley. This comparative openness to modern psychology by some of the Anglican hierarchy could also be fictionalised. In 1968, Frank Dalby Davidson, an active communist party member, published his novel The White Thorntree, paying considerable attention to the sexual and social behaviour of several couples from different backgrounds. To Davidson, it seemed reasonable to portray one couple as people with a formal institutional Anglican connection. Soon after their engagement, he pictured the man and woman separately purchasing the same sex instruction book, Happy Sex Life; its acceptability was indicated by the presence of a commendatory introduction by a prominent Anglican divine. 44 Later in the novel, a nonconformist Sunday school superintendent is pictured giving an unrealistic lesson in repression to adolescent boys. By contrast, while being Anglican didn’t seem to mean taking the religious side very seriously, at least Davidson thought its leadership to be more liberal over sexual issues. Given the currents to which I have so briefly alluded, it is hardly surprising that in the 1960s and 1970s, with the understandable (inevitable?) exception of the Sydney synod, all other metropolitan synods around the country contained

history of health and sex education in this period, such as Judith Smart and Janet MacCalman, are aware of any earlier publications on sex education published as an initiative by any of the churches.

41 See E. H. Burgmann, ‘The Analysis of the Soul’, Austral ian Church Quarterly , June 1940, pp. 32-5; ‘The Salient Points of the Various Schools of Psychotherapy’, ibid., September 1940, pp. 14-19; H. Linton, ‘Pastoral Psychology’, ibid., December 1940, pp. 26-31. On Maynard’s treatment of penitents, see particularly correspondence quoted in Colin Holden, From Tories at Prayer to Socialists at Mass, St Peter’s Eastern Hill 1846-1990, Melbourne 1996, pp. 183-98.

42 W.G. Coughlan, ‘The Church and the Homosexual’, in The Responsibility of the Church regarding Homosexuality, Church and Nation Committee of the NSW Presbyterian Assembly, 1968, p. 4.

43 On Lee, see the obituary by the Rt Revd David Garnsey in Church Scene, May 1981.

44 The White Thorntree, Angus and Robertson Classics 1975 edition, vol 1, p. 119, and compare p. 3.

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sufficient members, clerical and lay, whose position was liberal, to enable the passing of motions in favour of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. 45 Criticism of government: social policy - labour and employment One of the instruments of a degree of liberalism on social and political issues among Anglicans at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century was the Christian Social Union. Though founded in England, a Melbourne branch had been created by Reginald Stephen by 1897. Significant founding members were John Stephen Hart, ES Hughes and CE Drought. It is hardly a coincidence that Anglican parishes which Melbourne Punch described as shining models of democratisation all had CSU members as their incumbents. CSU members created the Diocesan Social Questions Committee. 46 Its Melbourne branch had an office in the Trades Union building.

Among other issues, it encouraged unionisation and could be sympathetic to strikes. As he edited a journal The Mitre from 1897 to 1900, ES Hughes, a member, he included a column headed ‘Labour Notes’. By 1900, he was one of a team of CSU members who were compiling, in consultation with the Trades Hall Council and the Anti-Sweating League, a ‘white list’ of Melbourne businesses. His response to outbreaks of inner-urban vandalism was to join the Trades Hall in pressing the Lord Mayor for city gyms and for classes in the principles of trade unionism.47 L.V. Biggs, editor of the Age, was a CSU member who by 1899 was pressing for the creation of a Trade Union service at St Paul’s Cathedral; and from the union side the May Day Committee was encouraging a Labour Sunday sermon.48 Predictably, Reginald Stephen and John Stephen Hart, deans of Melbourne 1910-1914 and 1919-27, both encouraged the observance in the cathedral of an ‘eight hour day service’ in which current social and political issues were treated in the sermons; Melbourne was not unique in this respect, as the same observance was instituted in St Andrews Cathedral by A.E. Talbot, dean in WWI period, a competent Hebrew scholar, Cambridge graduate and friend of two Labor premiers. But it was Hart was the object of repeated criticism in the Argus for what that paper regarded as his obviously labour views. The height of its critical comment was reached in 1923, when he supported the police strike. While the state government claimed that it was using the strike as a way of ridding the police force of corrupt elements by enabling it to dismiss all who went on strike, Hart stated that corrupt elements could be brought to heel without causing needless suffering to many other police, their families and the general public. Having obtained the support of the Diocesan Social Questions Committee, he addressed a meeting at the Trades Hall supporting the selective employment of dismissed police, and on the government side, met with the Chief Secretary. 49 Two years later, Hart’s support of the British Merchant Seamens’ strike was aid to have caused more comment in labor and related circles than anything else since George Higginbotham sent a 50 pound cheque to the Trades Hall in support of the dockers’ strike. 50 At the other end of the eastern seaboard, at All Saints Brisbane, F.E. Maynard preached from the pulpit of All Saints Wickham Terrace, identifying the merchant seamens’ demands as ones for basic justice that were consonant with the standards of the gospel. His address to unionists at Brisbane’s Exhibition Hall led to claims that he was nothing more than a communist agitator. 51 The subsequent history of Hart and Maynard is suggestive. In 1927, Hart was unanimously elected See particularly Graham Willett, ‘Into the Present: Anglicanism and Homosexuality in the 1970s’, in People of the Past?, pp. 65-88.

46 Hart’s biographer, T.B. McCall, identifies Hart as the leading figure behind the Committee’s formation: T.B. McCall, The Life and Letters of John Stephen Hart, Sydney, 1963, p. 40.

47 Mitre, 15/6/1898, p. 7, 1/11/1899, p. 6, 1/12/1899, p. 4, 1/2/1900, p. 4, 15/3/1900, p. 10, 1/4/1900, p. 10, 1/5/1900, p. 10, 15/5/1900, p. 8, 15/6/1900, p. 5.

48 Mitre, 1/12/1899, p. 10; 1/5/1900, p. 9.

49 TB McCall, Life and Letters of John Stephen Hart, pp. 71-74; 50 TB McCall, ibid., pp. 77-8, 80.

51 FE Maynard, Maynard Defends the Strike of British Seamen, Brisbane 1925, reprinted from Brisbane Daily Standard, 7/10/1925.

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bishop of Wangaratta, an election less a response to his churchmanship than to his profile in the mainstream press on social issues. Wangaratta’s synod then contained a proportion of successful selectors, men who in their earlier years had supplemented their income from small properties by working in the Riverina - the seat of unionisation of the shearing industry in the last decades of the 19th century. Maynard was pressed by influential friends including Reginald Halse, then bishop of the Riverina (later Brisbane) as well as E.S. Hughes, to accept the incumbency of St Peter’s Eastern Hill.52 While the churchmanship profile was a significant factor here, so were attitudes on social issues of a liberal kind. The Christian Social Union was one of a number of ways in which Christian socialist attitudes influenced Australian Anglicanism. In Melbourne, in the inter-war years, a number of staff members at Anglican and other church schools expressed Christian socialist ideals, often, though not always, through the Student Christian Movement.53 Despite the development of government arbitration systems, the profile presented by liberal Anglicans in this period ensured that bishops were invited by workers to act as conciliators and arbitrators in industrial disputes. In Perth, C.O.L. Riley remonstrated with the premier, Frank Wilson, for failing to honour the terms agreed with striking tramway men in 1918. In 1919, supported by his Roman Catholic counterpart, he recommended that the Nationalist government create an agreement with wharf labourers within a strict time limit. He was chief arbitrator in the Christmas-New Year’s Day railway strike of 1920-21, and mediated effectively between the industrial disputes committee and the commissioner for railways. A rather different response from that of Melbourne labor to Hart greeted him: Katherine Susannah Pritchard lumped him together with capitalist newspapers as one of those who ‘pose as generous and noble patrons of the poor’.54 Despite Pritchard’s identification of the church with capitalists and exploiters, attitudes of Anglicans outlined above were those of a group who had moved well beyond the union of parson and squire, or a church that could be equated with a conservative party at prayer. Their acceptance of active resistance, implied particularly in support for striking workers, was another element paving the way for the for adoption of passive resistance methods by those of the following generation like Frank Coaldrake, G.K. Tucker et al. Helen Baillie whom we have already met, may have seemed a little incongruous as she got herself to Wonthaggi to stand alongside striking coal miners; but in this situation she anticipates the later protest against Vietnam, in which those from traditionally conservative backgrounds often marched side by side with those from more obviously radical politics and different class origins. They also helped create a profile for the church in which it was seen to be engaging alongside others in the wider community over social justice issues. Perhaps most important of all, they laid foundations for more recent criticisms of various governments by Anglican church leaders. I think here of clashes between Sir John Grindrod and Jo Bjelke-Petersen, Geoffrey Sambell and Charles Court in Perth; and the broadly collectivist principles underlying criticism of Kennett government by Victoria’s churches including the Anglican church.

Not that Australian Anglicans had all presented such a sympathetic face to Labor, unionism and strikes. A cautionary illustration of other attitudes is provided by another NSW scenario. At As bishop of the Riverina, Halse brokered one of the last examples of episcopal mediation between employers and workers at Broken Hill in 1930. He billed Maynard as ‘keynote speaker’ at a conference of members of the Broken Hill Trades Hall, communists and mining magnates. Copies of Maynard’s 1929 plea for social justice, Economics and the Kingdom of God, had also been provided to Riverina clergy as compulsory reading before diocesan synod, which preceded the conference. J.H. Chauvel to F.E. Maynard, 15/10/1929 and R. Halse to F.E. Maynard, 24/10/1929, archives, St Peter’s Eastern Hill.

53 See Janet McCalman, Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle-Class Generation 1920-1990, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 104-5; Gwendolen Kent Lloyd, nee Hughes, a niece of E. S. Hughes, was a significant staff member of MCEGS and was married to a member of the Communist Party.

54 Peter Boyce, ‘The First Archbishop’, in Four Bishops and Their See: Perth Western Australia 1857-1957, ed. F. Alexander, p. 92.

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Rothbury on the northern NSW coal fields, police fired on miners killing one and wounding others - the consequence of an overzealous police commissioner appointed by the Premier. The Hunter Valley Anglican clergy offered no comment. Charles Chandler, curate of St Barnabas, a broad churchman influenced by English Christian socialists from various streams, rather than a card carrying Anglo-Catholic, headed north to address the miners. J.C. Wright, archbishop of Sydney, warned Chandler that he would be disciplined; a crowd attempted to storm NSW’s state Parliament House. Chandler addressed the miners; Wright revoked his license. Nevertheless Chandler held services in the Old Rialto Theatre, Pitt St, to an all male working congregation: presenting socialist hymns and lesson from sources as diverse as Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, Henry Lawson, Jack London. It was only when John Hope, incumbent of Christ Church St Laurence, offered to find him a place on his staff that Wright relicensed Chandler.55 Race and culture: maintaining essential differences I now want to turn to some aspects of our record on issues of race. In the face of the oft-repeated claim that until recently Australian Anglicanism has been a church centred exclusively on AngloCeltic culture and values, there is a need for a thorough account of part of our history that offers an important qualification. I refer to our dealing with members of the Orthodox and oriental churches.

It is a record of support and interest of an unusual kind. It commences as soon as members of such communities appear: the diaries of Henry Hutton Parry , bishop of Perth who died in 1893, show him welcoming the first members of the Assyrian church to arrive in Western Australia. It extends across Anglicans of all kinds of churchmanship. In the 1920s, G.E. Aickin, sometime principal of Ridley College and dean of Melbourne, made translations for Australian Anglican journals of major contemporary theological statements issued by the patriarch of Constantinople; his Greek text of the liturgy of St John Chrysostom sits on my study shelves.56 It embraced Anglicans from one end of the continent to another, from Perth to Melbourne to Brisbane, where Canon George Garland, a staunch promoter of Anglican-Orthodox relations, was acknowledged through the bestowal of significant decoration by the Orthodox.57 Neither public statements nor private correspondence that I have read indicate any interest in turning the members of these communities into Anglicans let alone making them imitate Anglo-Celtic ways. Rather, there were many encouragements to maintain individual cultural traditions: in 1934, there was Cretan and Kalamatan dancing, speeches and singing in Arabic in the parish hall at St Peter’s Eastern Hill.58 That same year, on the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, R.H. Moore, Dean of Perth, and WA representative of the Anglican and eastern Churches Association, handed over St George’s cathedral to the orthodox community for obsequies: a description in the press contained an unintentional gaffe: ‘As Fr Manessis in full robes attended the church, preceded by two Greek boys in albs . . .the Rev LE Webb, in the capacity of MC, handed the thurifer [sic] to Fr Manessis, who after approaching the high altar, censed the catafalque. Then he returned the thurifer to Fr Webb . . .’.59 The Orthodox funeral office was rendered in Byzantine Greek. It was a phenomenon that embraced rural as well as urban Anglicanism; to this day the Macedonian community in Shepparton preserve a particular relationship with the Anglican parish. It not only involved the making available of halls or churches for services on occasional or regular basis, it involved Anglican clergy visiting Orthodox churches and Orthodox clergy processing and sitting in the sanctuary at various Anglican functions. The 1600th centenary of the council of Nicea (1925) was marked by celebrations in Anglican cathedrals around the country, in which Orthodox clergy often were preachers.60 When the Syrian Orthodox patriarch, L.C. Rodd, John Hope of Christ Church Saint Laurence, p. 95.

Church Standard 1/5/1925, p. 616 re the authority of Greek bishops abroad; 57 See John Moses, ‘Canon David John Garland and the ANZAC Tradition’, St Mark’s Review, 1993, pp. 12-21.

58 For more details of such contacts, see Colin Holden, From Tories at Prayer to Socialists at Mass, p. 174-5.

59 Church Standard, 9/11/1934.

60 ibid., 26/6/1925, p. 729, 3/7/1925, p. 5.

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Gregory IV, wrote to encourage Anglicans to care for isolated Syrian Orthodox in 1927, the kind of activities I have mentioned were the result.61 The consistent encouragement given by Anglicans to the preservation of culture and identity is probably unique in the period before World War II, and anticipates some of the aspects of more recent multicultural policy.

Reconciliation Nor was this the only direction in which Australian Anglicanism anticipated later attitudes on issues of race and culture. If Australian Anglicanism had offered little critical comment during the Pacific conflict, post-war contact between Australian Anglicanism and Japan implied a willingness to move across cultural and racial barriers, as well as the beyond the inheritance of war, that foreshadow more recent attitudes toward the Asian pacific region The first Australian civilian to enter Japan after its surrender was an Anglican priest - Frank Coaldrake, and two bishops from Australia (Halse from Brisbane and Cranswick from Tasmania) made an official visit soon after. By 1950, the presiding bishop of the Anglican church in Japan, Michael Yashiro, made a return visit to Australia.62 While the RSL hierarchy expressed a predictable rejection of the visit, the church’s official attitude was one of welcome. Yashiro was defended by Bishop C.L. Riley of Bendigo (son of C.O.L. Riley of Perth), a former AIF chaplain general; he described the purpose of Yashiro’s visit as being ‘to help heal the wounds’. When Yashiro visited St Paul’s cathedral in Melbourne and stayed with Archbishop Booth, a CEMS conference meeting in Leongatha, many of whose members were returned servicemen, sent welcoming greetings.63 While Yashiro himself responded to the protest of the acting federal president of the RSL by suggesting that ‘Australians had better look out that they don’t develop a complex which they might not be able to get rid of’, another laymen we have already met, Martin Boyd, then living in rural Victoria, wrote in the Age ‘the sacred and enduring ties which should unite a Christian bishop to another of the same communion transcend any racial division or temporal loyalties’.64 Subsequently, a handful of Japanese ordination candidates studied in Australia in the 1950s. Australian Anglicanism was now taking a position radically in advance of a secular pressure group such as the RSL. If World War Two represented a point at which Australians at large became aware that its primary ally in defence was not Great Britain but the USA, there are indications that prominent Anglicans were aware before that point of what might be described as a changing network in intellectual and cultural alliances; and equally, there were prominent Australian Anglicans whose international involvements increasingly reflected this. On attending his first Lambeth Conference in 1930, John Stephen Hart concluded that the British bishops were on the whole backward-looking, moulded chiefly by the academic world. As he offered a gentle criticism of British imperialism, he saw the future of Anglicanism lying in the hands of those outside the Anglo-Celtic world.65 In the post-war years, Geoffrey Sambell’s growing international connections act out Hart’s earlier perception. By 1956, he had travelled overseas twice, but it was not from Britain, but from America on his 1956 trip that he returned with what was to become an important innovation for funding social service initially for the brotherhood of St Laurence, and eventually for other organisations: the recycling of salvage. In 1961, the Anglican primate, Hugh Gough appointed Sambell director of an Australian committee that was part of an international Anglican network created to replace mission based outreach in developing nations with genuine partnership. As he worked as part of an international team, his preference for those who were not British only increased. Sambell also made significant and lasting contacts though attending the Conference of South East Asian churches in Bangkok in 1964, and was appointed to the Anglican Consultative Council, another body created after the 1968 ibid., 19/8/1927.

Church of England Messenger, 16/6/1950, pp. 203-4, Age 13/6/1950, p. 3.

63 ibid, 8/6/1950, p. 5, 13/6/1950, p. 3.

64 ibid, 13/6/1950, p. 7, 14/6/1950, p. 2.

65 TB McCall, The Life and Letters of John Stephen Hart, pp. 120, 124.

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Lambeth Conference to strengthen international Anglican networks. Following his election as archbishop of Perth in 1969, he initiated a number of projects in his archdiocese, including one that reflected his awareness of a wider cultural ambit than the Anglo-Celtic world - an Asian Community centre with a social worker/counsellor. Eager to break a strong sense of regional isolation, he sent theological students to be trained at interstate theological colleges, and some also undertook placements in centres in Asia. His initiative for a diocesan programme, Celebration ’75, included an Easter Day Eucharist attended by major prelates from developing nations around the world Pacific, West Indian, African, and South East Asian - including Uganda’s Janini Luwum. Meanwhile his links with the Christian Conference of East Asia, and visits to various Asian church leaders, led to Australia being granted full membership status in 1976. Sambell’s network was a far more advanced one than that of some federal politicians, and anticipated aspects of multiculturalism, a policy that was already being enunciated during the Whitlam era by Al Grassby, though the author of many of Grassby’s policy statements on this subject was another committed Christian of Presbyterian background, Jim Houston, later ordained as an Anglican priest in 1987 by David Penman. Penman, in turn had developed extensive and significant involvements in the Arabic and Islamic world before his election as archbishop of Melbourne through his work at the American University in Beirut.

During a period of Anglo-Celtic cultural dominance, Australian Anglicanism also expressed inclusive attitudes concerning race and culture through an often neglected medium. I am referring to some of its visual arts. Many of these occur in cycles of stained glass windows: in St George’s Malvern, one substantially devised by Josiah Tyssen (incumbent 1916-49), showing missionary bishops and others with indigenous people, from of Bishops Heber and Broughton in India and Australia, to George Maclaren and Copeland King in New Guinea; an important set by Norman St Clair Carter in St Andrews cathedral Sydney commissioned in 1942 includes Samuel Marsden preaching to the Maoris, and other Anglican missions in Melanesia, New Guinea, Tanganyika and China; or the cycle devised by Canon P.W. Robinson in St Mark’s Camberwell, which has a similar range to the St Clair Carter series in Sydney. Not all images of this kind are confined to this medium.

The dramatic mural from 1923 by the theatre set artist Philip Goatcher in All Saints Collie has the enthroned Virgin and Child at its centre, accompanied by St Paul, St Augustine of Canterbury and St Boniface. But on the fringes of the mural are Australian aboriginal figures, as well as other contemporary or near-contemporary figures of European origin.

At worst, the images in them can be interpreted as depictions of the dependency of inferior races on a superior one (particularly with the 1924 and 1925 windows in St George’s Malvern). But many are patent of a more positive interpretation. These range from the remarkable window by Napier Waller formerly in All Saints Bendigo of the Indian Christian Sundar Singh who visited Australia in 1920; to the New Guinea martyr windows at St Peter’s Eastern Hill in which Napier Waller shows the New Guinean people in heroic poses, despite the continuing element of dependency. Significantly free of any such suggestions are windows such as Napier Waller’s The Souls of the Righteous in Holy Trinity Williamstown (1965) in which the souls in the hands of God have idealised faces of many different racial types. Similarly, the cycle at St Marks Camberwell includes Napier Waller’s The Triumphant Christ, accompanied by the words ‘He made and loves us all’, and featuring Christ as the focus of unity for people of all races and ages.66 But the uniting of people across racial and cultural differences was not envisaged as a state to be achieved only in the world to come. One of the Carter windows, that commemorating the 1936 centenary of W.G. Broughton’s appointment as bishop of Australia, shows visiting Japanese, Indian, Maori and Chinese bishops as well as the (Anglo-Celtic) primates of Ireland, India and New Zealand. Even the more overtly colonial images On the St Mark’s windows, see Marrgaret A. Hookey, St Mark’s Camberwell: The First Seventy-five Years, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 40, 85-96. On the Waller windows at St Peter’s, see also Colin Holden, From Tories at Prayer to Socialists at Mass, p. 220.

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in this range still present an element of inclusiveness, which becomes more and more prominent with the passing of time. While I stand to be corrected on this point, I am unaware of the frequent appearance of cycles of this kind in the buildings of other major denominations. Whatever the intentions of the devisers of the cycles, or the individual convictions of the artists who designed them,67 they form a coherent group through which Australian Anglicanism offered some dramatic visual images of inclusiveness, far more so than contemporary state or federal governments, foreshadowing some later stances on issues of race and culture.

Indigenous peoples In the area of aboriginal issues, our record is often poor. Yet even here there is a sometimes very thin line of deeply convinced individuals whose position contrasted with that of most others in the wider society, as well as of most other Anglicans. Their position often led to criticism of government policy or action (or failure to act) in specific situations; to that extent, it too can be categorised as liberal or radical. The specifically religious motivation that impelled a number of Anglicans to criticise or reject government policies or prevailing community indifference to issues concerning aboriginal peoples needs to be acknowledged. By contrast, in This Whispering in our Hearts, which contains the record of many Anglicans who demanded justice for aboriginal peoples, Henry Reynolds deliberately chooses to subsume all whom he chronicles under the broad umbrella of ‘humanitarian’.68 While the Revd D. Seddon could state in 1856 that the aboriginal peoples were in no way inferior to Europeans, a far more representative statement as far as broad community attitudes were concerned was that of the lawyer, Frederick Pohlman when he disagreed with those who suggested that by settlement, Europeans were trespassing on aboriginal land.69 Elsewhere, general public apathy to social justice issues (‘welfare’) concerning aboriginal peoples was generally admitted. 70 Given the apparent general indifference, it is perhaps all the more surprising that Mathew Hale, then archbishop of Brisbane and the most senior bishop on the Australian bench at the time, should have made a frank statement to the first Australian Church Congress in Melbourne in 1882, in which he admitted a degree of liability on the part of the Church of England for failing to motivate the wider society in the direction of social justice for aboriginal peoples.71 In my rather limited reading in this area, its tone as well as its content is the closest to an apology that one could find in a 19th century document. Hale had already shown serious interest in aboriginal issues during his earlier years in South Australia.

Typical of outspoken and atypical stances, despite everything to deter them, were those adopted by Helen Baillie and Alf Clint. Stirred by what she read of aboriginal communities, Helen Baillie set out on a personal tour of investigation in 1932, covering 7000 miles by chauffeur driven car across For example, the connection between the racial inclusiveness of Christian Waller’_s windows may have been a consequence of her involvement in the cult of Father Divine, which stressed racial inclusiveness and obliged its members to take an anti-racist vow; or a previous inclusiveness, reflected in some of her windows, may have accelerated her attraction to the Father Divine cult. Art historians differ in the extent to which they interpret her output in terms of her individual beliefs. Compare Caroline Miley, ‘Towards the Light: Christian Waller’s Stained Glass’,, in The Art of Christian Waller, exhibition catalogue, Bendigo Art Gallery, 1992, pp. 43-8 with Nicholas Draffin, ‘Shared Symbols, Private and Public: Christian and Napier Waller’,, ibid., pp. 49-51. Even if this element in her windows derives from her particular convictions, this does not explain the inclusiveness found in windows by other designers.

68 Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, Sydney, compare pp. 1-2 and xvii.

69 Church Record for Victoria, January 1856, p. 51; October 1857, p. 105.

70 Melbourne Church of England News, July 1867, p. 189, August 1868, p. 178, Church of England Messenger, 2/6/1879, p. 5.

71 ‘The Responsibility of the Church of England as regards the Aborigines of Australia, the Chinese, and the Polynesians, given at the 1st Church Congress, Melbourne, 1882, Church of England Messenger, supplement, December 1882, pp. 20-1.

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northern Australia.72 She published a short article in the Australian Church Quarterly, and created the Aboriginal Fellowship Group in Melbourne with the aim of educating and raising the awareness of Europeans. She was a foundation member of Victorian Aboriginal Group along with others including Valentine Leeper (who said that a sense of the part of her Western District ancestors in destroying aboriginal people and culture was an important motivator); she was a speaker at its opening function in 1933. While other existing groups had no aboriginal members, and focused entirely on communities in north of country, she sought out local aboriginal people, befriending them, inviting them on social outings and to church, and using the funds of the Fellowship Group for their needs. When two visiting friends visited her unit in South Yarra and were turned away by the landlady, she immediately sought a new address; the insult they had suffered was more important than her location. In 1938, she drove Doug Nichols and others to Sydney for Aboriginal Day of Mourning on 26 January 1938, celebrated by Europeans as 150 years of Australian history.

Her activism was too much for the Anglican hierarchy; a regular correspondent and friend of F.E. Maynard, she was turned down by G.H. Cranswick, the Bishop of Gippsland, when she applied to work at Lake Tyers in 1933.73 1954 saw the creation of a venture marking a radical departure from the church’s hitherto paternalistic policy in dealing with aboriginal issues, with no parallel in secular or other religious administration in Australia. Noted only in Anglican, Labor and Cooperative publications, it was perhaps deliberately ignored elsewhere - I refer to Father Alf Clint’s creation of the Lockhart River Aboriginal Christian Cooperative Ltd. He was motivated by the success of cooperatives in Papua New Guinea initiated by Father James Benson, with whom he had worked. Though it was largely a false premise that the cooperative movement, which harmonised well with some aspects of the New Guinean culture, reflected aboriginal cultural values, it was initially a financial success, and two years later a cooperative based on wolfram mining was created on Moa island (Torres Strait). By 1958, Clint had obtained Tranby, a large Sydney home, which became a centre for training aboriginal people in running cooperative ventures. Students entered nursing, engineering and commerce; one continued his education on a UNESCO scholarship. It was another twenty years before the concept of training for self management was taken aboard by either state or federal governments.

The cooperative approach did not founder in the end just, or primarily because of a depression in the trochus shell industry, round which the Lockhart mission project was based. Rather, it was the inability of others within and outside the structures of Carpentaria diocese and ABM to accept the autonomy and independence that this increasingly gave to aboriginal people. Clint’s background made it easy for the anxious to brand him as a covert communist troublemaker. As a boy, Clint attended classes run by the Balmain Communist Party classes while worshipping at St Thomas’ Rozelle. Sent to CCSL. Involved in 1930 shearers strike as a bush brother in Bathurst dio. In 1957, the newly elected conservative state government decided that the AMB’s sally into cooperatives was a communist front, and Clint a CP ally; Ian Shevill, bishop of North Queensland, declared him unwelcome at Yarrabah, and SJ Matthews, bishop of Carpentaria, with state government backing, banned him from entering missions in Carpentaria in 1961.

What made Clint’s projects into a threat was that they required ownership of land and a source of production on part of aboriginal people. The time that the state government backed the bishops in She wasn’t the only Melbourne Anglican to journey far from home to see for herself: the artist Violet Teague visited the Hermannsburg Mission in 1933 and as a result, proposed that Melbourne artists should create an exhibition as part of the 1934 centenary celebrations to fund the cost of connecting mission with fresh water.

See particularly Jeanette Hoorn, ‘Hermannsburg’; in Violet Teague, 1872-1951, eds Jane Clark and Felicity Druce, 1999, pp. 97-106.

73 ‘One Woman’s Concern for Social Justice: The Letters of Helen Baillie to Farnham Maynard, 1933-1936’, in Anglo-Catholicism in Melbourne: Papers to mark the 150th Anniversary of St Peter’s Eastern Hill 1846-1996, ed Colin Holden, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 85-97.

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banning Clint from access to missions coincided with the discovery of minerals on adjacent land.

The church relocated most of people elsewhere. Nevertheless, Clint went on to inspire a cooperative at Cabbage Tree Island (which lasted into the 1980s) and a cooperative bakery at Yarrabah in 1974.

Described by one writer as ‘the only surviving link between the Church of England and the working class’, something of his profile is indicated by an incident just prior to the papal visit in 1970. Of 3300 people surveyed with question ‘Who is leader of the Catholic Church in Sydney?’, 13% of the 15-24 year olds answered Father Clint.74 Closer to the present, overt criticism and opposition to government policy was offered by Geoffrey Sambell as archbishop of Perth. In August 1977 he received a token fine of $95 in August 1977 in the Midland court, after being charged by the Swan Shire Council for allowing a group of fringedwelling people to camp in the grounds of St Matthew’s Guildford - basically the people were being harassed by the council. Sambell’s response in court was to state ‘We broke the law to preserve the peace . . . when the notices were served we could have asked the police to eject the people but I believe that this could have been accompanied by violence.’75 He commented that he saw no reason why aboriginal people shouldn’t be allowed to live in tents, just as some of the white community lived in caravans.76 Robert Bropho, the leader of the aboriginal group, commented afterwards, that while others were ‘boundary riding around the paddock, [Sambell was] riding around the middle’.77 A cartoon in the Sunday Times linked Sambell’s fine with the subsequent earth tremor, with the subtext ‘If you insist on fining an archbishop, what do you expect?’78 Anglican health and Welfare opened its first Nungah shelter in mid 1978, with Michael Challen in charge of the aboriginal services for Perth diocese. Behind the situation of the fringe dwelling people at Midland lay a state government decision in 1975 - it returned $4 million to Canberra that had been allocated for Aboriginal housing, angering both Aboriginal leaders and concerned Europeans.

As early as 1974, deaconess Francis Northrop was seconded to the Minister for the Community Welfare’s department to report on the aboriginal population of the metropolitan area in Perth, but her work was also significant in providing a basis for Sambell’s and Challen’s initiatives. Sambell stood out again against the state government in 1980 over the Nookanbah issue, along with the Uniting church moderator and Roman Catholic archbishop, and again received a blast from the premier, Sir Charles Court, for meddling in affairs that were supposedly none of his business.

The Present Moment: the Only Moment? Visual images again There is also a group of visual images that emphasise the potential of the present, to invite an engagement with the contemporary setting. A pair of lancets in Wangaratta cathedral clearly makes this claim. In the top panels, a vested priest, accompanied by a server, stands at an altar, offering the eucharist; accompanying this subject is the text ‘here we offer and present unto Thee O Lord our souls and bodies’. Below them, the bulk of the space shows a series of landscapes, commencing with pioneer settlement, but going on to show a 20th century town and housing, a modern factory and farm equipment. Here is where the offering continues; the present, with its capacity for sanctification, is the focus.

Noel Loos and Robyn Keast, ‘The Radical promise: The Aboriginal Christian Cooperative Movement’, Australian Historical Studies, 1992, pp. 286-301; L.C. Rodd, John Hope, pp. 99-103.

75 West Australian, 19/8/1977, p. 3.

76 Ibid., also synod charge, 1977, p. 19.

77 Australian, 19/8/1977, p. 1.

78 Sunday Times, 21/8/1977 74

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Cycles such as those already mentioned in St George’s Malvern and St Mark’s Camberwell can also be interpreted in the same way. Though they begin with Romano-British saints such as Alban, and Anglo-Celtic worthies, the procession comes close to the present as it extends to Australia, the Pacific and Africa. Nineteenth century founding bishops such as Perry and Broughton appear in such series, and elsewhere as well,79 and there are windows featuring other 19th century colonial clergy, such as T.B. Garlick and J.H. Gregory in the former All Saints Bendigo or W.N. Guinness in Christ Church South Yarra. The treatment of such figures is admittedly often one that involves a romanticisation of the pioneering period. But the sheer range of 20th century figures that appear in Anglican stained glass points to a communion concerned with more than just idealising either an Anglo-Celtic or local pioneering past. Sir John Forrest, garbed as an explorer, appears in the Goatcher mural in Collie, but so also do contemporary local miners, and Frederick Goldsmith, the diocese’s first bishop, who had returned to England only six years before the mural was painted.

An overt claim to the capacity for sanctity in the modern world lies behind the windows to the New Guinea martyrs in churches such as St Peter’s Eastern Hill and St Mark’s Camberwell;80 and equally the capacity for saintly lives to be lived on this land mass as much as anywhere else, lies behind Cedar Prest’s very recent window in Holy Trinity Church York of John Ramsden Wollaston, pioneer WA archdeacon (d. 1856), following the Western Australian province’s declaration of Wollaston’s status as a hero of faith with the title blessed, and with a day set aside for his annual commemoration.

While some 20th century figures who appear in windows were the object of hero cults with no specifically religious content such as Edith Cavell (Ninian Comper, St Mark’s Camberwell), we still have to account for the appearance of individuals such as Eve Curie, in a tribute to science, who appears in St Paul’s Frankston; Charles Gore, a key figure in the Christian Social Union, accompanied by ragged children in a British industrial landscape in the 1949 war memorial windows

by Napier Waller in St Peter’s Eastern Hill; Sir Philip Strong and Archbishop Wand of Brisbane in the Waller New Guinea martyr windows in the same building; or Bishop Donald Redding, as bishop of Bunbury, shown administering confirmation, in the window by Gowers and Brown in St Boniface’s cathedral, Bunbury. Occasionally there are less public figures: at St Mark’s Camberwell, Christian Waller’s 1943 window showing, not an unknown serviceman, but a specific individual, the AIF serviceman Andrew Seton Campbell, or at St John’s Bairnsdale, a memorial given by his parents showing David Lethbridge 1944-67 with symbols of sport and education.

They may be read as statements concerning the present moment and of all kinds of lives and situations as bearers of the presence of God. That is, I take it, the orthodox theological truth that they all share. Even at that explicitly Christian level, there is no equivalent in the iconography of windows (or indeed other visual arts) in other major churches. They are a distinctly Anglican creation, embodying a particularly Anglican focus - a certain kind of pragmatism and practicality, rather than a more visionary strain (though this is not entirely absent, and is represented in other images).

They might equally be read as a religious equivalent of some popular Australian values: the pragmatism, the distrust of the visionary or enthusiast. Many of them are visual embodiments of the sanctity of what a 19th century Anglican termed ‘the trivial round and common task’. But E.g. Charles Perry in St Paul’s Gisborne, and WG Broughton in a cycle in St George’s College Perth created by Heaton, Bayne and Butler, UK, comprising Sts Augustine, Aidan and Boniface. Information supplied by Dr Caroline Miley.

80 Vivian Redlich is depicted in a window by Joseph Stansfield in St Mark’s Camberwell; Sir Philip Strong considered the windows at St Peter’s to show the following martyrs: Sisters Lilla Lashmar and Margery Brenchley, and carpenter John Duffill on Buna Beach, and in the other martyr group, Vivian Redlich, Henry Holland and Henry Matthews, The Rt Revd P.N.W. Strong, The Good Shepherd, sermon preached on feast of New Guinea Martyrs, 1981, Melbourne 1983, p. 9.

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wherever Australian culture has left institutionalised religion behind and sought to build a secular community bonded by an ethical code, it has generally seen common tasks and trivial rounds as the arena in which ethical behaviour is to be tested. To that extent, and to the extent that they represent a blessing of the present moment and setting, a component of the visual arts that the Anglican church has patronised has given a religious expression to values that have been more generally accepted in the wider culture. And it may well be here, in continuing what in many ways is a spirituality that is very much traditional to Anglicanism, that it has also helped to confirm the wider culture in similar values.

Conclusion I have pointed to some issues and attitudes now firmly entrenched in mainstream culture, which have antecedents in some streams in Anglicanism earlier in the century. Most of those who presented such issues then were considered in their day to be to some degree liberal, if not radical.

Some were regarded as eccentric. The inheritance within what I have described as the liberal intellectual stream was not all consciously and deliberately handed on, by gurus or leaders to disciples. Many Anglicans who were part of anti-Vietnam war protests were doing so as part of a protest within the wider community, unaware of the critical comments of our involvement in earlier conflicts by dissenters such as Reginald Stephen, Helen Baillie, F.E. Maynard or Martin Boyd. But there were also significant lines of communication, and of descent. In the first half of the 20th century, two journals with a national readership, the Australian Church Quarterly and the Church Standard provided a forum in which those of a liberal cast of mind could publish and exchange ideas; not only did editors and authors correspond and meet, but also created a readership. If the liberalism of the Tuckers was something that was handed on in successive generations of the family, G.K. Tucker’s creation of the Brotherhood of St Laurence offered what was at once an anchor and a network through which others could be influenced. Despite strong differences of opinion between G.K. Tucker and other major figures such as Frank Coaldrake and Geoffrey Sambell, the Brotherhood was to foster and attract new generations of intellectually liberal Anglicans. Frank Coaldrake, Geoffrey Sambell, Michael Challen and Peter Hollingworth have each helped to modify and keep alive the Brotherhood, while eventually moving beyond it to work in other contexts. And through spearheading the creation of the Melbourne Diocesan Social Questions Committee in the first decade of the 20th century, the Christian Social Union created a body that would continue to raise consciousness of issues, most significantly by raising questions over particular issues in the diocesan synod, and through reports prepared for the diocesan synod on a wide range of issues.

Here, a liberally inclined organisation created a mechanism through which influence at a high organisational level could be maintained, as it has to the present.

The impact of a liberal intellectual tradition within Anglicanism is thus neither one of utterly unbroken, continuous evolution, nor yet of totally unrepresentative and isolated individuals struggling against an overwhelmingly hostile or indifferent body. The case of Charles Chandler represents one of many situations in which the more liberal have been swimming against a strong tide of conservatism from some of the hierarchy. Nor has the liberal intellectual tradition always represented a united front against those from whom it has differed. It has also suffered from its own internal divisions. A significant loss for the strength of the liberal voice in Sydney occurred, not as a consequence of any action by more conservative Sydney Anglicans, but as a result of pressure from another, generally radical, thinker. When Stuart Watts, the editor of the Church Standard, published a series of articles during World War Two in which he interpreted the scriptural references to the brothers of Jesus so as to question the traditional expression of the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin, F.E. Maynard launched a series of attacks from the pulpit of St Peter’s Eastern Hill which caused the editorial board of the Church Standard to demand Watts’ resignation. The journal remained in circulation for another decade, intellectually eviscerated; Maynard’s commitment to radical political and social theories was accompanied by doctrinal 21

conservatism. Whether Maynard was aware that his criticism would cause a substantial blow to the liberal cause in Sydney is unclear; that it did, is unquestionable.

Today, in an increasingly pluralist society, the ground once occupied by such liberals belongs to those in a more central position. What does this have to say to us today? Does this mean that these traditions are now irrelevant for church? As these values become part of a new orthodoxy (political correctness) is there a need to move to more radical expressions of the same message, or indeed totally new issues? Is this, for example, the way to interpret the recent statement of the primate on safe injecting rooms?

In the current anxiety about numbers and the fashion for number-crunching, it should be recalled that a few individuals may exert an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. While some in the past who appeared to be swimming against the current did so with little notice being taken by the wider church or community, the influence of voices such as Maynard or Hart was strong, and extended beyond both the boundaries of churchmanship within Anglicanism, and into the wider community. Closer to the present, we might find parallels in the influence exerted by a somewhat rebellious and nonconformist Australian Anglican priest, Peter Thompson over Tony Blair (described as ‘the Reverend Tony Blair’ by Private Eye), or the role played by Geoffrey Sambell in the discussion which compared the different strengths of government welfare and social service delivery and that of the churches. Two Sydney clergy, David Smith and John McKnight, exerted what appears to have been a powerful influence on the Israeli dissident, Mordecai Vanunu, kidnapped from Rome, and undergoing an extended gaol sentence for his exposure of Israeli nuclear installations. Vanunu visited Sydney in 1986, where he was baptised, after a three-month catechesis

by Smith, who has remained a regular correspondent of his one-time catechumen. 81 But it is not just a matter of offering encouragement concerning the potential influence of individuals. For the larger unit, the church as a whole, smaller numbers, which are a legitimate cause of concern, need not automatically be equated with ineffectiveness. Recently in this state, the consistent critical responses of the churches to aspects of the Kennett government’s social policies were influential, though it would be difficult if not impossible to measure precisely their weight in the face of a recent claim by a political reviewer that they were the most effective opposition group in precipitating a change of government.82 What can be said is that the former premier himself acknowledged that the he found more difficulty in dealing with responses of the churches compared with most other groups. While not apparently powerful, the effectiveness of the churches’ criticism stands in stark contrast to the general silence from the supposedly responsible and intelligent elite of universities and tertiary institutions, whose very power, tied to funding from corporate, business sector, creates weakness. The Anglican church, and other churches, can take heart from recent events that indicate they still have an effective role to play in contemporary culture; they need to recall that such a role is one is one that has evolved over a period of time. It was already forged in several respects at the beginning of the 20th century, and is a significant means through which we have contributed to our nation's culture.

See David Leser, ‘The Insider’, Age Good Weekend, 25/9/1999, pp. 26-32.

See Graham Little, ‘Baptists and Beyond’, Saturday Age Extra , 11/12/1999, p. 7. Other analysts consider criticism of the Kennett regime to have largely been ineffective, for example, Nick Economou and Brian Costar, The Kennett Revolution: Victorian Politics in the 1990s.

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Vote of Thanks by the Dean and Deputy Warden, Dr Stewart Gill The Australian story is something like a fun-fair. The same things happen again and again. Ferris wheels go round and round, hurdy-gurdies grind out the same tunes, swings and see-saws move up and down. Everyone appears to have something to spend. Worries are left behind and troubles are forgotten. People press from one side-show to another eager to sample everything. The biggest crowds throng around the lucky dips where anyone may draw a winning ticket.

From outside the scene appears featureless and dull. The shouts and laughter are too carefree and light-hearted. Apart from the showmen no one seems more important than anyone else. What is the purpose of it all? How can a fun-fair give a young nation an inspiring history?

From the final chapter of Douglas Pike's Australia: The Quiet Continent written in 1962 as a metaphor for Australian history from the 1880s. The colour and excitement of the early pioneers had given way to a Victorian blandness that has continued down into this century. By the late nineteenth century it was becoming clear that sport was one of the few areas where Australians had a distinctive contribution to make. Amidst the noise and hubbub of the fun-fair only the leaders stood out from the crowd. The spires that had once dominated Australian cities were replaced by the towers of commerce and the new gurus the political economists rather than the theologians or even the scientists of earlier generations. The general theme of creeping secularisation from the midnineteenth century with its concomitant marginalisation of the churches has been the major thrust of most general histories of Australia. Dr Holden reminds us that churches, and the Anglican Church in particular, had an important role in being a prophetic witness and in the shaping of public policy.

Victorian Protestantism emphasised the separate and sacred character of religious institutions, and then from this high ground tried to use the State in order to create a moral atmosphere for a secularised society. The churches sought to create a series of social sanctions that would help the people to find a Christian pathway through the hazards of a hostile world. This outlook was one of the hallmarks of Victorian Protestantism and deeply coloured the Sunday Schools, colleges, temperance societies, and missions that reached out into every corner of English-Australian culture.

It was also embodied in the physical fabric of the churches themselves. For example, in nineteenth century Victoria all these Protestant denominations built in revived Gothic style - a metaphor that proclaimed the dominion and power of the sacred in the secular.

Dr Holden has provided us with a vivid and colourful paper on the contribution of the Liberal intellectual tradition of Anglicans to national culture particularly in the area of social criticism.

What is meant by Christian social criticism? It embraces the efforts of the Church to influence and transform social and economic structures and institutions so that they will better serve human needs and uplift community and national life. It seeks to address the root cause of social problems (e.g. poverty, unemployment, the quality of housing, health and social services, a just distribution of national wealth and income, world peace and development, etc.)

The demand laid upon the Church to maintain a constant criticism of the whole of human life and society flows from the very nature of the Gospel. Prophetic social criticism is firmly rooted in biblical and theological understanding of God's past and present activity in the world. The Church's mandate to engage in prophetic social criticism derives from the basic conviction that God has 23

revealed himself in Christ not only in a saving way of life for individuals but also His purposes for the just ordering of society. Jesus Christ is Lord, Lord of every Christian, Lord of His Church, but also Lord of the world. This implies that the Church and Christians are to be radical critics of every aspect of human life and society. Colin has provided us with a masterly survey of how this has been manifest in the Anglican Church from the late nineteenth and through into the twentieth centuries.

It is true that the Church can never be fully and completely faithful to its prophetic calling and tradition. In each and every age Christian social thought, because of the Church’s ‘humanity’, is always strongly conditioned by historical and sociological factors which tend to militate against the faithful exercise of genuine social criticism. Since it cannot escape the effect of such influences in its preaching and teaching, the most effective action the Church can take is to be conscious of the existence of such factors and of the direction in which they influence, and thus endeavour to minimise their harmful tendencies and prevent false distortions in its social thought. Perhaps, through the study of history the Church can become aware of its own hidden biases and make allowances for the areas in which it often finds itself sociologically imprisoned. Dr Holden’s paper points us in this direction - we need perhaps more meddlesome priests and Anglican laypersons who are prepared to publicly critique contemporary Australian society and culture.

Dr Holden on behalf of the Trinity College thank you for your most stimulating and challenging lecture. In other works you have made an outstanding contribution to our understanding of Anglican history and this lecture adds to our knowledge.

Please join with me in showing our appreciation.

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