was expensive and inefficient, it was difficult to ensure quality control, and
there was a need to reach children in every part of the colony. It might be
argued that such considerations involve a utilitarian mentality, but it would
be truer to say that this concern with efficiency and economy was part of the
civic element of Britishness andfitted easily with the country’s Protestantism.
It is ironic that the other reason given by Parkes in 1866 for a government
system of schools was to prove to be the opposite of what happened when,
ultimately, governments decided to no longer fund denominational schools.
The Catholic Church rejected the basis on which this model of schooling was
based. The consequence was to‘engender jealousies and uncharitable feelings
among the different sections of society’. From the viewpoint of the various
British Protestant denominations, the idea of a state-run and funded educa-
tion system was acceptable. Even the Church of England, which had been
originally hostile to such an arrangement, accepted it. It can be argued that
this was because the Church of England accepted the version of the nature of
religion, and its relationship to the wider emerging British–Australian culture
which Wilkins had explicated. Whereas the status of the‘secular’in Victorian
education legislation was (probably deliberately) ambiguous, the 1880 Public
Instruction Act in NSW explicitly stated that‘the words“secular instruction”
shall be held to include general religious teaching as distinguished from
dogmatical or polemical theology’. To be a good citizen one did not have to
jettison one’s Protestant religion; one’s religious identity and one’s civic
identity were just two sides of the same coin.
4.5 Being Protestant, Being British
One can get a sense of how religious and civic life reinforced each other
amongst British Protestant Australians in a recent study of members of the
Enmore Tabernacle of the Church of Christ in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century (Hayward and Nutt 2014). The Church of Christ was a small
Protestant denomination in Australia, and appealed largely to what might be
described as the lower middle class. This group was composed of businessmen,
politicians, and educationalists, of whom the best known was Reginald Marcus
Clarke, the department store owner. Members combined a strong commit-
ment to their Church with an equally strong engagement with the civic
culture of which they were part. The group included two men, D. R. Hall
and John Hindle, who were, at various times, Labor politicians.
For such individuals, their Protestant religion and their engagement with
the secular world were mutually reinforcing. Referring to John Bardsley,
another member of the congregation, G. T. Waldron wrote that‘Bro. Bardsley’s
life proves that a man can be a keen and successful businessman, and also an
Utilitarianism contra Sectarianism