The establishment of universal primary education was a massive undertaking,
comparable only to the building of the network of railway lines. The number
of schoolteachers employed by the government in NSW increased from 370 in
1858 to 1,825 in 1878 (Golder 2005, pp. 197–9). This was an issue requiring a
practical approach, but practical did not mean a radicalism grounded in
secularism and utilitarianism. The states’approaches to the issue of religion
in education varied. Victoria was the most radically secular in that it seem-
ingly excluded religious instruction from its schools. But, then, Victoria was
also the centre of radical secularism amongst the Australian colonies, which
probably owes a lot to the type of person attracted to Victoria by the gold
rushes. In Victoria, clergymen,‘along with judges, felons and traitors’, were
prohibited from being members of parliament (Gregory 1973, pp. 148–51). In
a bizarre development, in what today would be described as‘political correct-
ness’, religious phrases were removed from the readers used in state primary
schools in the 1870s (Austin 1961, pp. 230–1). But this did not mean that
Victorians were necessarily laicists. Indeed, the question of religion and the
Bible in schools was not a‘settled’issue such as protectionism. For example,
Alfred Deakin (Parliament of Victoria 1898, pp. 1–8) would petition parlia-
ment in 1898 for the introduction of general religious instruction within
normal school hours; and battles to either introduce or remove Bible readings
from school lessons would continue up to the First World War. J. S. Gregory
(1973, p. 217) shows that there was a greater blurring of the division in thefirst
half of the twentieth century in Victoria, including the introduction of the
following,‘I love my God and my Country’, in a state school pledge as late as
- Certainly this concern for the secular purity of state schools did not
prevent nineteenth-century Melbourne from having a reputation as a dour
place which imposed a rigid Sabbatarianism—except for a short time in the
1890s—including the need for omnibus drivers to walk their vehicles past
churches during Divine Service on a Sunday (Moore 2009, p. 3). In fact, a fairly
strict Sabbatarianism remained in force in most of Australia until the 1960s.
There is a paradox here. It confirms that secular schooling was not meant to
lead to the creation of a secular society. It confirms rather a particular view of
the role of religion in society and its relationship to the wider culture; one
which accepted that Australia was essentially a Christian, and predominately
Protestant, country (hence Sabbatarianism) while recognizing that enforcing a
particular religion was not the role of the state. It makes perfect sense if one
accepts that the culture of the Australian colonies was British, and hence
Protestant.
Public schooling in NSW was not as exclusive of religion as Victoria but was
still, at its core, secular. Its chief architect, William Wilkins (1865, p. 6), has
provided us with a well-reasoned rationale for ensuring that:‘The proper
function of the primary school is to teach the elements of secular knowledge.’
Utilitarianism contra Sectarianism