the heady elixir of Englishness and came to embody it in Australia as an
Anglophile Scot.
Menzies was very reassuring as an icon of British Protestantism in Australia,
but somehow there was a certain lack of passion, unlike that shown by Billy
Hughes. A good comparison might be with Margaret Thatcher, who has been
characterized as the last great voice of non-conformity in British politics (Filby
2015). Mrs Thatcher breathedfire, but it came at a time when what she stood
for no longer resonated with many people in Britain, which may explain why
she encountered so much opposition. For Menzies, Britishness did not mean
non-conformist zeal but rather something very Humean, an avoidance of the
excess characterized by both superstition and enthusiasm. It was not devoid of
belief but it was belief constrained by moderation (Menzies 1958). It was a
style founded on restraint. The big problem was that style could come to
dominate belief and passion. There was a certain puritanism about Menzies,
just as there was of Thatcher. But it can be argued that it was this very British
characteristic which was slowly dying during the course of the twentieth
century. He was the last great politician to exemplify the cultural Protestant
embrace of the secular. He (Menzies n.d., p. 1) was pleased to be asked to
deliver a speech entitled‘The Christian Citizen in a New Era’because such a
topic‘starts off by reminding us that...you cannot separate what is sacred
from what is secular; and...you cannot above all things have a Christianity
which begins only on Sunday morning and ends on Sunday night’.
4.6 The End of Protestant Australia
In his seminal study,The Passing of Protestant Britain, S. J. D. Green (2009)
treats secularization in England in terms of the fate of Protestantism, includ-
ing its powerful puritan element. It makes sense to consider the Australian
experience in similar terms, and to see the decline of the Australian Protestant
churches in terms of the decline of British Australian culture, especially since
the 1960s. Of course there were other factors at work, including a new more
comfortable and secure world which came into being in both Britain and
Australia in the 1950s, and also the reality that it was women who ceased to
play the religious role that they had previously played (Brown 2012, ch. 6).
Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that the decline of Protestantism in
Australia occurred in tandem with the decline of Britishness which, of course,
is related to the end of empire. In an‘age of comfort’(Melleuish 2014b), and
with the loss of the élan which went with being part of an empire on which
the sun never set, Protestantism made less cultural sense than it once did.
In 1930 W. K. Hancock could still write of‘Independent Australian Britons’
even if he made no mention of the Protestantism of those Britons; his
Utilitarianism contra Sectarianism