- Title
- Religious nationalism and clerical emigrants to Australia, 1828-1900
- Creator
- Carey, Hilary M.
- Relation
- ARC.1082140
- Relation
- Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World p. 82-106
- Relation
- http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719089565
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- This chapter addresses one of the thornier problems in the history of emigration and colonisation to the British settler colonies, namely why did Australians remain attached to Britain for so long? Historians have rightly stressed that the nature of the relationship between Australia and Britain was one of contestation and insecurity as well as emulation and adulation, a reflection of the cultural and emotional tussle that afflicted those who sought to build a new colonial society while remaining citizens of a wider empire. However, there has been less success in attempting to identify the sources for the cultural and emotional bonds to the British homeland which endured for well over a century after the Australian colonies became more or less self-governing. While it is clear that cultural institutions such as the monarchy and sport have been at least as influential as political, military and economic ones such as the constitution, Parliament, and the legal and monetary systems, we really know very little about the way in which such complex discourses were transplanted from British to colonial soil. Like the English language, it is generally assumed that adherence to Britain was part of the invisible cultural baggage that emigrants stowed away without the need for particular mechanisms of transference and control. The plan here is to take a rather different approach to this question, focusing on one of the most important (but generally underestimated) of all British colonial institutions, namely the emigrant churches. Although the story of the dependence of Australian Catholics on Irish emigre clergy has been well studied, to the extent that the contribution of other ethnic groups to the Catholic community and of the large number of Irish who contributed to Australia's Protestant churches tends to be overlooked, it is less well known that all the major churches were heavily dependent on British-born clergy until well into the twentieth century. This chapter provides an analysis of some of the consequences of this patterning of ethnicity, profession and religion, which would appear to be unmatched by few other professions or migrant groups who came to the Australian colonies. It is argued that clergy were one of the key components in the transmission of a sense of British identity to churchgoing Australians, and that their role makes explicable the surge of empire-mindedness at the time of the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901. Yet, as with other cultural institutions, the influence of religion did not act entirely in one direction from metropole to colony but rather, as Catherine Hall has emphasised, drawing on the work of Frantz Farron, colonial subjects and objects were 'mutually constituted' and to some extent create each other. To what extent was religion used to reinforce the loyalty of colonists in the way that Hamish Ion has argued was axiomatic for the British defence forces? To address these questions, this chapter is divided into four sections: the first section gives an account of the historical background to religious emigration from the British Isles and the responses of the churches to the crisis of personnel created by mass migration; the second section considers the role of colonial missionary societies in promoting religion and imperial loyalty; the third looks at the characteristics of clerical migrants to the Australian colonies of New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria as their numbers peaked in the 1880s and 1890s; the final section looks at the development of colonial religious nationalism, typically ardently patriotic to Britain, as this is reflected in church periodicals in the colonies.
- Subject
- empire; colinisation; emigrant churches; clerics
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1054397
- Identifier
- uon:15742
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780719089565
- Language
- eng
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