participate in, a democratic society, but to accept the‘British ideology’was
simply a bridge too far. This refusal was to have quite significant implications
for the history of twentieth-century Australia.
The ascendancy of the ideal of Britishness in Australian political culture,
and culture more generally, can be seen in the Federation debates of the 1890s.
It is quite clear that a dominant theme of the debates was the desire to keep as
close to the model of the British constitution as possible, and consequently to
ensure that the constitution could evolve and adapt as circumstances
changed. The constitutional debates were largely carried out in a discourse
that came out of English common law and had profoundly Burkean elements
(Chavura and Melleuish 2015).
This Britishness is equally illustrated by the attitude taken by the delegates
on the issue of religion in the Constitution. This primarily revolved around
two proposals: the inclusion of a reference to God in the preamble, and some
guarantee of religious freedom. Both eventually were adopted, but their suc-
cess did not mean that the Australian Constitution affirmed the ideal of
Australia as a‘Christian country’. Most of the drive to have God included in
the Constitution came from Protestant groups, particularly of the evangelical
variety, and the 1890s represents a high point for such groups in this country
in terms of activism on issues such as preventing gambling and excessive
alcohol consumption, not to mention votes for women and Sabbatarianism.
Such groups did believe that Australia was a Christian country. The primary
opposition to having God in the preamble came from the minute Seventh-day
Adventists who, having their Sabbath on a Saturday, feared that the pre-
amble’s inclusion could be used to impose strict Sunday observance (Ely
1976, ch. 6). They found their effective champion in Henry Bournes Higgins.
What Australia emerged with was God in the preamble and Section 116,
which prevented the federal government from being able to enforce any
religious observance on the people of Australia. It was a neat compromise.
Parliament also came to be opened by prayers. Officially Australia was not a
Christian country, but it was a free British society in which religion could
flourish. The debates also contain this statement of the situation by Edmund
Barton, who opposed putting God into the preamble:
The whole mode of government, the whole province of the State, is secular. The
whole business that is transacted by any community—however deeply Christian,
unless it has an established church, unless religion is interwoven expressly and
professedly with all its actions—is secular business as distinguished from religious
business. The whole duty is to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and
unto God the things that are God’s. (Barton 1897, p. 1187)Yet the irony of the situation is that, as Alan Atkinson (2014, pp. 296–8) has
argued, and which was acknowledged at the time in the debates (National
Utilitarianism contra Sectarianism