Anglicanism and the Republic: A Historical Perspective
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's Eastern Hill
Grafton February 8, 1883
Perhaps when this temporary end is pulled down to make room for the extension of the church, Grafton will be a very different place to what it is today. Instead of a few thousand scattered here and there, there will be a vast multitude of people. The iron horse will be snorting through the town, the streets lit by night and various other improvements necessary to make a city. Perhaps separation with Sydney, or, better still, a federation of all Australia into a vast empire, casting off the British Empire, and forming a democracy of our own, like America, for the days of Kings and Queens in all civilised nations are numbered for Kings were never intended by God, for the first King that reigned in Israel (Saul) was given in God's wrath.
So ran the opening of a document placed in a mustard tin, buried under the temporary west wall created when the first part of Grafton cathedral was built in 1883. It was unearthed in 1937 when the west end of the cathedral was completed.
When debaters over the republic refer to Australian history, they often do so in a way that assumes that until recently, representatives of 'establishment', which I presume to include leading Anglicans, have unquestioningly supported the maintenance of all kinds of dependence on Britain, while their critics, presumably social opposites, sought to 'cut the cable'. Race, culture and religion are sometimes treated as though alignments in these areas offer simple keys to different positions over the matter of political autonomy. A recent contributor to the letter columns of the Australian implied that Irish Catholic could often be equated with republican, and some proponents of the republican point of view discuss the issue as though a desire to maintain the relationship with the crown was peculiar to middle class Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Anglicans, easily dismissed as 'the establishment'.
Given the oppression suffered by many of the Irish during centuries of English domination, and the attitudes of many of the Irish Protestant ascendancy towards working class Irish Catholics, it is hardly surprising that a positive support for a republic should come from many Australians of Irish Catholic descent. But any simple analysis on the basis of race, religion or culture breaks down when other factors are taken into account. There is no simple grid that can be placed over migrants from a many parts of Europe, Asia, Africa and America. Some have come from cultures in which totalitarian regimes had replaced corrupt monarchies during our own century. For some Australian citizens with such a background, a constitutional monarchy represents a system that offers the freedoms that were lacking under both unrestricted monarchy and dictatorship. For others, a republic offers an alternative to both dictatorship and monarchy. A Vietnamese Catholic may be highly supportive of a monarchy, while a central European member of a Protestant church may equally be an enthusiastic supporter of republicanism.
While the issue of an autonomous Anglican church is not the same as that of an Australian republic, there are many ingredients in the history of our Australian church's movement toward autonomy that contradict some assumptions about Australian history in general, and issues of race and culture, that surface from time to time in discussions of the republican issue-most of all, any suggestion that those of English birth and education always sought to maintain the highest degree of dependence on Britain and British institutions; and equally, the implication that the members of organisations of English origin have been uncritically accepting of all things English.
In Melbourne, a mixture of confidence in the professional qualifications of the Australian-born, and impatience at the appointment of Englishmen as archbishops, was being expressed in the first decade of this century. Melbourne Punch, whose religious affairs columnist was of Anglican background, commented acerbically that the new rural dioceses of the province of Victoria had Australians as their bishops-their capacity for hard work was recognised. As he pointed to the supply of Australian trained men in other professions, he hoped that Archbishop Clarke would occupy his office for a decade or two, since by then, there would be a sufficient number of well-qualified Australians to make the election of an Englishman an anachronism.
When Australian Anglicans as a whole were informed in 1911 that their church was in no way autonomous of the Church of England, this legal opinion was received after a decade of discussions at General Synod and in diocesan bodies concerning the issue of autonomy. The legal decision brought an end to uncertainty and confusion, though it was far from bringing satisfaction. A key figure in General Synod debates had been Frederick Goldsmith, dean of Perth(1888-1904) and bishop of Bunbury(1904-1917). After putting forward a trial proposal in Perth synod in 1899, in 1900 he introduced a motion to General Synod, pressing for the abolition of the title 'Church of England in Australia and Tasmania' as something that would be 'exotic and foreign' to future generations of Anglicans in Australia. 'Was the name of Australia never to be an inspiration; were they never to have a history of their own?' he asked. He invited migrants from England to observe the 'symptoms . . . of a self-contained nation and church', and asserted that an independent Australian church would become 'the spiritual home of the Australian people'. His intention was to ensure the resolution of any ambiguities over the status of the church in Australia that might arise from its title: though expressed in careful and guarded terms, his speeches promoted an independent Australian Anglicanism.
The defeat of his motion was attributed by several sources, including the English Church Times, to the vote of the Australian laity. The voting pattern over this issue showed one remarkable and fairly consistent feature: although there were Australians who favoured the formation of an autonomous Anglican body, the pressure came from English born and trained clergy. Certainly this tendency was noted at the time, and evoked a sense of puzzlement. One West Australian cleric wrote that he would have considered Goldsmith's motion 'revolutionary', had it been proposed by an Australian, and in 1912, the governor of Tasmania could not understand how 'any bishop of the English church' could favour an autonomy movement. The reasons for this apparent enthusiasm on the part of English clergy in Australia are complex, but still forms an instance in which the supporters of a more independent and nationalistic outlook were not Australian born, but English. This in turn should invite us to ask the question: does support for political autonomy in our own day represent a radical departure from British cultural origins, or is it rather a growth with roots within that inheritance, transcending the narrower framework of origins implied by some participants in the debate?
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