An Australian View

In 1963, soon after I crossed the Tasman Sea from New Zealand to take up a research scholarship in the department of Pacific History at the Australian National University, I began subscribing to Australia's two main history journals: Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand (now Australian Historical Studies) and the Journal of Religious History (JORH). In 1986, I published the first of several articles in the JORH and from 1995 to 2016 I was an associate editor. Before the 1960s, historians in Australia's universities published very little scholarly work on the nation's religious history. The general histories of Australia published during these years gave little attention to religion, partly because of the paucity of significant published work on the subject but also because the authors saw it as of minor importance. There were numerous biographies of church leaders and histories of particular denominations, mostly produced for a centenary or some other jubilee, but their quality varied and few of them provided critical analysis. One of the first university-based histories was published in 1957. This was Four Bishops and their See (ed. Fred Alexander), a collection of essays by a group of historians on the first 100 years of the Anglican diocese of Perth in Western Australia. The first general history of a major religious denomination was Patrick O'Farrell's history of the Catholic Church in Australia, published in 1968 (3rd ed. revised, 1992). This pioneering work led the way for histories of Anglicanism in Australia (ed. Bruce Kaye) in 2002, Australian Baptists (by Ken R. Manley) in 2006 and Methodism (ed. Hilary M. Carey and Glen O'Brien) in 2015. The foundation of the JORH in 1960, drawing upon work from ‘as broad a field of interests as possible’, ‘including especially Australasian history’, gave a huge boost to Australian scholars in the field. They now had an accessible specialist journal in which to publish. Bruce Mansfield, the founding editor, sought to include in each issue at least one or two articles on Australian topics. I was one of many young historians whose horizons were enlarged by the JORH. The 1960s and 1970s saw a huge expansion in the Australian university sector with the foundation of new universities, a surge in enrolments of both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and many new appointments in history. A growing number of masters and doctoral theses were undertaken on Australian topics, some of them by clergy or former clergy and by Catholic religious sisters who now had an opportunity to do higher studies. During these years, the JORH published many articles drawn from postgraduate theses. The expanding pool of scholars in the field led the Association for the Journal of Religious History to hold the first conference on Australian religious history in Sydney in August 1975. This drew 200 participants from around Australia and some from New Zealand. I was one of those who attended; it was an exciting opportunity to hear papers on a range of topics and exchange ideas with others in the field. By the 1980s, almost every Australian university had on its teaching staff one or two historians with a research interest in a particular area of religious history. Alongside the universities, every major denomination had a theological college in each state, usually with a lecturer in church history on the staff. Some of these developed an interest in Australian Church history. With the increased availability (and professionalisation) of denominational archives, much of the published work in this period was on ecclesiastical institutions and their transplantation and adaptation to the Australian environment, but new questions and new approaches were also being explored. The first major works were published on the history of women and the church in Australia, on lay spirituality and on the relationship between Christianity and Aboriginal Australians. Was it the case, as some historians claimed, that religion had always been marginal in Australian life so that Australia had become ‘the first genuinely post-Christian society’? To what extent and in what ways had Christianity shaped Australian society? During its first 20 years, between 1960 and 1980, the JORH published articles by some 70 historians teaching in Australian universities; about 40 of these (almost 60 per cent) were on Australian or Pacific Islands topics. The contributors comprised a significant proportion—about one fifth—of the number of academic historians at that time. The foundation of the Religious History Society in 1998 (now the Religious History Association) both reflected and assisted the emergence of a cohesive network of scholars in the field. It organises a religious history stream at the annual conference of the Australian Historical Association and publishes an annual newsletter TheRHA which lists publications by Australian scholars. Since the 1990s, the landscape has changed. Between 1989 and 2022, the number of academic positions in history in Australian universities declined by some 30 per cent, despite a huge growth in the university sector in the same period. Reflecting this downward trend, university history departments have shrunk in size and, in many universities, the history discipline has been absorbed into a larger academic unit. Very few history departments offer courses in any area of religious history and the number of postgraduate students in the field has much diminished. Most of the scholars who once dominated the field of religious history in Australia have died or retired. The research interests of their successors embrace a wide range of topics in the history of religion but not many of them include Australia. Meanwhile, the centre of gravity in religious history and Church history has shifted to tertiary institutions that focus on theological education. From the late 1970s, denominational theological colleges in Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth formed consortia of colleges affiliated with a public university that awarded degrees in theology taught by the colleges. In Sydney, building on the precedent of the degree-granting Melbourne College of Divinity (1910), a group of theological colleges formed the Sydney College of Divinity, accredited by the state government to award degrees in theology. These developments and the connection with the universities boosted the research culture of the theological colleges. It led to a big growth in the number of postgraduate theses and scholarly publications, some of them in the field of Australian Church history. During the last 10 years all but two public universities—Charles Sturt University and the Australian Catholic University—have withdrawn from awarding degrees in theology. The theological colleges have either evolved into institutions that are accredited to award their own degrees or affiliated with interdenominational colleges that have been granted university status. The largest of these are the University of Divinity (successor of the Melbourne College of Divinity) and the Australian University of Theology. However, because the structure of primary degrees in theology is shaped by the priorities of students preparing for the ordained ministry, they focus on systematic theology and biblical studies. Most of them include only a small component of church history and do not allow for a sustained study of the subject. History topics generally do not attract large enrolments and, as a result, the number of full-time teachers in religious history is small. Another significant trend has been the emergence, alongside existing associations, of a network of historians committed to exploring the history of the evangelical movement. Founded in Sydney in 1987, the Evangelical History Association holds conferences and publishes a biannual journal, Lucas: An Evangelical History Review. Stuart Piggin, Mark Hutchinson and Geoff Treloar have published major work in this area. Hutchinson has also pioneered historical scholarship on Pentecostalism, an influential force in world Christianity since the 1960s. In a neighbouring field, the Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, Footprints (Journal of the Melbourne Catholic Historical Commission) and Tjurunga: An Australasian Benedictine Review publish articles exploring the rich history of Australian Catholicism. Since the 1980s there have been a number of substantial publications on the life of religious sister Mary MacKillop (canonised in 2010) and the extensive work of the Sisters of St Joseph which she co-founded. The JORH has done much to shape the study of religious history in Australia. From its foundation it promoted a new concept of religious history: the study of the history of religion—beliefs, institutions and behaviour—that was anchored in the societies of which it was a part, connected to broader historical processes, and also ‘the bearing of religion on human history in general’. This is now the standard approach to the subject. From Australia, Ian Breward, Hilary Carey (a former editor of the JORH), Edwin Judge (one of the founders of the JORH), Constant Mews, Rowan Strong and others have contributed significantly to international scholarship in religious history. In addition to his published work, Strong was general editor of the five-volume Oxford History of Anglicanism. Historians of religion have diminished in number, but their scholarly activity is vigorous and innovative. This is demonstrated by their continuing contributions to the JORH and the collections of articles published in September 2014 on secularism in Australia and in December 2019 on religion in the mid-nineteenth-century Victorian goldfields. Open access publishing facilitated by Flinders University, as part of the Wiley - Flinders University agreement via the Council of Australasian University Librarians None of the authors have a conflict of interest to disclose. The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.