and Charles Birch’s work in process thought are two obvious
cases. However, Australia is a more secular country, and Eric
Sharpe, the first chair of the religious studies department at
the University of Sydney (1977–1996), was by no means a
practicing theologian. Sharpe secured the Sydney chair pri-
marily on the basis of his work Comparative Religion: A His-
tory (1975). This volume established him as one of the
world’s leading methodologists in the comparative and his-
torical study of religions, a reputation that emanated from
Australia and was consolidated by such later works as Under-
standing Religion (1983) and Nathan Söderblom and the Study
of Religion (1990).
An Englishman, Sharpe had strong connections to the
University of Manchester (especially John Hinnells) and
Lancaster University (especially Ninian Smart) and served as
chair of the history of religion department at Sweden’s Upp-
sala University from 1980 to 1981. Although Sharpe could
have been enticed back into the transatlantic center of theo-
retical debate, he decided to remain in Australia and consoli-
date his new department. He consistently published research
on Western interpretations of Hinduism and brought to
Sydney brahmin Indologist Arvind Sharma, who founded
the journal Religious Traditions in 1978 and the Journal of
Studies in the Bhagavadg ̄ıta ̄ in 1981. Sharpe also continued
conducting historical studies of Christian missionary ap-
proaches to other religions. At the 1988 Chicago symposium
on his opus, Sharpe acquitted himself artfully against youn-
ger critics’ suggestions that he was a closet theologian, and
as the years went on he defined himself more as an historian
of ideas about religion than anything else. Interestingly, in
1995 his first academic appointee and protégé Garry Trompf
took a chair in the History of Ideas beside him at the Univer-
sity of Sydney.
Trompf had previously held the first of two lectureships
in religious studies in Australia, in the not-yet-independent
Territory of Papua New Guinea, where he taught alongside
the Semiticist and fellow Australian Carl Loeliger. Australia’s
north was to yield the earliest formal developments in the
discipline, with the first autonomous department emerging
at the University of Queensland in 1975, before Sharpe ar-
rived in Sydney. Although begun under the early leadership
of the Englishman Eric Pyle, Queensland was to wait until
1981 for an established chair. That the Australian-born
Francis Andersen took the position was significant national-
ly, but it was also indicative of the weight of interests in the
department. He was a fine biblical scholar amid others, in-
cluding the American Edgar Conrad as a fellow commenta-
tor on Hebrew prophetism and the Irishman Seán Freyne
and the German-Australian Michael Lattke as scholars of
New Testament times. Queensland, however, was also to se-
cure a special reputation for Buddhist studies. Buddhism had
already been of wide attraction, including the popular writ-
ings by the early feminist-lawyer Marie Byles from 1957 to
1965, the founding of the Journal of the Oriental Society of
Australia in Sydney in 1963, and the various textual studies
and translations, especially those of Peter Masefield. Special
distinction was also given to the work of the Australian Phil-
ip Almond on the history of Buddhism’s Western interpreta-
tions and Rod Bucknell’s work on meditative practice.Almond, who succeeded Andersen as professor after the
latter moved to the University of California at Berkeley, can
be credited with a distinctly Australian contribution to the
theory of religion. He was crucial among revisionist thinkers
in deconstructing Western scholarly reifications and popular
representations of significant Eastern traditions. In The Brit-
ish Discovery of Buddhism (1988), he argued that Buddhism,
as it is popularly defined in most textbooks, was a Western
invention. At a slightly later stage, Almond went on to pon-
der the Victorians’ invention of Islam, and his work com-
pared with Edward Said’s deconstruction of Orientalism. In
other writings, especially Mystical Experience and Religious
Doctrine (1982) and those appealing to the methodological
insights of Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Almond doubted that
mysticism could be apprehended with the kinds of objectivist
treatment beginning to dominate his discipline.
At the University of Sydney, research into the religions
of Oceania was a forte, with Trompf returning to Australia
in 1978. Like Sharpe and Almond, Trompf was, admittedly,
better equipped to write on Western theoretical ideas. A
practicing historian who later served as a professor of history
at the University of Papua New Guinea from 1983 to 1985,
he was the beneficiary of a very strong tradition of religious
history in Australia, if one considers such lights as the Ger-
man Hermann Sasse, the Britisher John McManners, the
New Zealander Edwin Judge, and the Australian Bruce
Mansfield, who founded the internationally acclaimed Jour-
nal of Religious History from Sydney in 1960. This back-
ground helps explain Trompf’s books on Western historiog-
raphy and religious ideas, particularly his volumes on The
Idea of Historical Recurrence (1979). However, prior training
in prehistory and ethnohistory and over ten years of intensive
research in Melanesia (Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Is-
lands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia) allowed him to pro-
duce the first major monographs—Melanesian Religion
(1991) and Payback (1994)—to address one of the most
complex religious scene in the world. A distinctively home-
grown contribution to the theory of religion developed from
these combined interests that dealt with “the logic of retribu-
tion” (i.e., those aspects of religious life concerned with re-
venge, reciprocity, and the explanation of events in terms of
praise and blame, reward and punishment).
Scholarship set on understanding Melanesia’s religious
life seems to have involved one of the largest conglomerates
of social-scientific endeavor ever undertaken. Important the-
oretical positionings were forged out of the region’s great cul-
tural diversity: the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Mali-
nowski’s school of functionalism derived from his
Trobriands research; the English proto-structuralist A. M.
Hocart read Fijian chieftainship as a basic model of sacral
leadership; in his studies in Houailou, New Caledonia, Lévi-STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA 8769