Malinowski moved on to the Trobriand Islands. Although
Oceania was home to a quarter of the world’s discrete reli-
gions and research material was plentiful, this profes-
sional tension lasted through the years leading up to World
War II.
In a number of places, missionary scholarship was utter-
ly determinative. For example, the Dutch relied on church
initiatives to carry missionaries into Irian Jaya, the far and
dangerous frontier of Indonesia. The church also had a sin-
gular influence across equatorial Polynesia as illustrated by
the work of Wyatt Gill in Rarotonga (the capital of the Cook
Islands) and Father Sebastian Englert on Easter Island. Else-
where a mixture pertained, and government-sponsored an-
thropology was sometimes evident. In the more colonized
Polynesia, for example, the one-time British governor of
New Zealand, Sir George Grey, adopted a policy of collect-
ing Maori lore that lasted up until the 1890s, and during the
1910s the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, otherwise focused
on mainland cultures, encouraged Nathaniel Emerson to
document the Hawaian hula. Between World War I and
World War II, Francis Williams, the most reputable of all
government anthropologists, worked in coastal parts of Aus-
tralia’s Territory of Papua (now Papua New Guinea), al-
though his brief included cooperation with the missions. The
Anglican cleric Adolphus Elkin, who served as a professor of
anthropology at the University of Sydney from 1934 to 1956
and founded the journal Oceania, was welcomed by the Aus-
tralian government as adviser on Aboriginal issues during the
1940s.
EARLY INTELLECTUALS. Interest in the wider world of com-
parative religion came late in the colonial histories of Austra-
lia, New Zealand, and also Hawai’i, which matched other
southeast Pacific museum constructions with its own Bernice
P. Bishop Museum as early as 1885, before American annex-
ation. A key impetus to study other religions was provided
by the Theosophical Society, starting in Australia by 1895
and possessing an impressive center in Sydney during the
1910s. In New Zealand during the 1920s, a circle of study
formed around Elsdon Best, cofounder of the Journal of the
Polynesian Society in 1898, who likened the Maori cult of Io
to a removed Gnostic-looking deity with layers of beings that
separated him from the earth. At the same time, more critical
scholarship emerged: The Australian surgeon Grafton Elliot
Smith became a chief instigator of the Egyptocentric Diffu-
sionist school in the 1920s, after having been anatomy pro-
fessor in Cairo, and Samuel Angus of Scotland, a graduate
of the universities of Princeton and Berlin (under Adolf von
Harnack, 1851–1930, and Gustav Adolf Deissmann, 1866–
1937), took up a professorship in New Testament and his-
torical theology at the University of Sydney in 1915 and
quickly emerged as an eminent authority on Greco-Roman
mystery religions.
This coming and going of “imported” and “exported”
intellectuals was typical well into the post–World War II pe-
riod. Scholars writing on non-Christian traditions usually ar-
rived from outside. Among provocative Germanics was the
economist Kurt Singer, who wrote from Sydney that the Zo-
roastrian stress on the battle between good and evil added
to problem of human conflict, and Peter Munz, who sought
to better the theories of myth formulated by James G. Frazer
(1854–1941) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) from Dun-
edin, New Zealand. British scholars Raynor Johnston (com-
parative mysticism) and John Bowman (Samaritans) went to
Melbourne, and George Knight (Semitics) went first to
Dunedin and later to Suva, the capital of Fiji. In return, Aus-
tralia and New Zealand lost various experts in Christianity
to overseas postings, including the theologian Colin Wil-
liams to Yale University, where he became dean of the divini-
ty school; the church historian George Yule to the University
of Aberdeen; the New Testament specialists John O’Neill
and Graham Stanton to the University of Edinburgh and
Cambridge University, respectively; and the interfaith spe-
cialist John D’Arcy May to Dublin University. Some expatri-
ate dons came as long-term (and often highly productive)
visitors; yet, as time went on, homegrown scholarship firmed
up and the Pacific eventually became established on its own
as a region of scholarly prowess.
EARLY ACADEMIC PROGRAMS. With university courses in
Asian studies—especially on Middle Eastern and Indic civili-
zations—being set in place during the late 1950s and the
1960s, the time was ripe for historical and comparative
studies of religions to enter the academic forum. Among the
faculty of Australian National University’s new oriental
studies program were Indologist A. L. Basham, Buddhologist
Jan De Jong, and Islamicist Antony Johns, as well as the re-
gion’s leading scholar in the sociology of religion, Hans Mol.
Similar studies were also implemented at the University of
Melbourne, where the journal Milla wa-Milla: The Austra-
lian Bulletin of Comparative Religion made its appearance in
1961 and the first of the Charles Strong Lectures, designed
by a liberal Protestant cleric to be on non-Christian tradi-
tions, took place. These were followed up by the publication
of Essays on Religious Traditions of the World, initiated in
1970 by the Anglican priest George Mullens, a scholar in
Japanese Buddhism. The first department of religious studies
in the region, however, was not institutionalized until 1971,
and then at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand,
although New Zealand’s programs at the University of Can-
terbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the University
of Otago in Dunedin foreshadowed this, with Albert
Moore’s 1966 University of Otago lectureship in the history
and phenomonology in religion being the discipline’s first
generically significant appointment for Australasia. The
foundation professor at New Zealand’s University of Wel-
lington was Lloyd Geering, a renowned liberal Christian
theologian.
Intriguingly, Geering remains the only memorable clas-
sic-looking theologian born and bred in the whole South Pa-
cific region. Theologically engaged Australians who possess
genuine international acclaim have simply not worked on
mainstream matters—John Eccles’s work on synaptic theory8768 STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN AUSTRALIA AND OCEANIA