only ever the fantasy of a small minority of the population. Certainly there
was a small and active group of‘infidels’or secularists, including E. W. Cole
and H. K. Rusden in the 1860s and 1870s in Melbourne (Gregory 1973,
pp. 107–12), and many of theBulletinschool in the 1890s had a rather
jaundiced view of religion and the clergy (Docker 1991, p. 39). But, then,
the 1890s and early twentieth century was a highpoint of Protestant political
activity in Australia, with such issues as Sunday observance and local option
regarding hotels high on the political agenda (Bollen 1972).
4.4 Religion, the State, and Education
From one perspective, the real issue in nineteenth-century Australia was the
need to Christianize the population, to ensure that they did not slip beyond
the grip of whatever church, or chapel, to which they were connected. Any-
one who visits country towns in inland Australia can see how successful that
operation was; almost all towns have churches of a variety of denominations.
The churches were built and people attended them. Australia was not a de-
Christianized society, and religion continued to play an important role in its
social and cultural life. For example, clergymen played a significant role in the
intellectual life of nineteenth-century NSW, as naturalists, political thinkers,
and newspaper editors (Gladwin 2015; Williams 2015). Thefirst work of
philosophy published in Australia was a series of lectures delivered by the
Rev. Barzillai Quaife (1872), who also tutored the young George Reid, the
future NSW premier and Australian prime minister. Philosophy in Australia
long continued to have strong links to religion (Franklin 2003).
State support for religion and for religious schools was followed by the
development of state schools. John Gascoigne (2002, p. 30) has argued that
the withdrawal of state funding for the churches, and the state supplanting
the Church in education can be seen as an indication of the workings of the
Enlightenment in Australia. To an extent this is true, but it can also be seen as
a belated recognition within European culture of the futility of attempting
to impose religious uniformity and homogeneity. Most of the other world
civilizations had not attempted to impose religious unity; for example, the
Ottoman Empire had developed the millet system (Finer 1997, pp. 1196–7),
under which particular Christian and Jewish religious communities ran their
own affairs according to their own laws with the proviso that Islam was
dominant, as a way of dealing with the multiplicity of religious groups within
its borders. The growing power of the state and its desire to control education
was a solution to a problem. If the citizens of an increasingly democratic
country were to be educated to a satisfactory level then this could not be
achieved unless there were means to ensure that certain standards were met.
Greg Melleuish and Stephen A. Chavura