My thesis is about Queensland’s Bible in State Schools referendum of 1910. It is part of a bigger story which started with the introduction of ‘free, compulsory and secular’ education in Victoria in 1872. The Victorian parliament stopped funding religious schools and ordered that secular education only should be given during regular school hours. South Australia passed a similar act in 1875 as did Queensland. The ambition was to create a State school system to which all parents would be happy to send their children, whether they were Protestant, Catholic or Jewish. It was the beginning of the era of universal education in Australia.
New South Wales also passed a ‘free, compulsory and secular’ education act in 1880, but they continued to allow ‘general’ religious instruction given by the classroom teacher and ‘special’ religious instruction where clergy visited the shcool and gave denominational religious instruction. Of the bigger states, New South Wales was the only state remaining that allowed religious instruction. In Victoria, South Australia and Queensland agitation started for the adoption of the ‘New South Wales system’ in their states. Tasmania adopted the New South Wales system of religious instruction from visiting clergy in 1885. After campaigning led by an Anglican priest, Rev D J Garland in Western Australia that state adopted the New South Wales system in 1893.
Rev D J Garland. Source: John Oxley Library.
The campaign for religious instruction in state schools in South Australia led to that state holding the first referendum in Australia in 1896 (‘South Australian Referenda‘). Victoria held a referendum in 1904 on the issue (The Argus, 16/6/1904, p4). Neither of the referendums passed. I was interested in the Queensland referendum in 1910 because it did pass. Referendums are only held on matters of great concern to a society and as we know, referendums rarely pass in Australia. I thought there must be an interesting story behind the Queensland referendum, and my research has supported my expectations. There were some very interesting personalities involved in the Queensland debates about religious instruction. Rev D J Garland moved to Queensland from Western Australia and led the campaign for religious instruction in Queensland as the organising secretary for the Bible in State Schools League. After the referendum he moved to New Zealand and led a very effective campaign for to reintroduce religious instruction in New Zealand state schools, but World War I intervened and he became a chaplain for the troops. Afterwards he was instrumental in establishing ANZAC day in Australia and New Zealand.
You will note that the published references I have drawn on for these comments are mostly old. This reflects the lack of interest in the nineteenth cenutry religious instruction issues by Australian historians over the last thirty years. Given the prominence of the religious instruction debates in parliament and society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries I believe that it is time to revisit this historical issue.
Sources
- A G Austin, Australian Education 1788-1900: Church, State and Public Education in Colonial Australia, (Carlton, Vic: Pitman Pacific Books, 1972).
- A G Austin, Select Documents in Australian Education 1788-1900, (Melbourne: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd, 1963).
- Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia, (New York: Nal Penguin Inc, 1987).
- J S Gregory, Church and State: Changing Government Policies towards Religion in Australia: with particular reference to Victoria since Separation, (North Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1973).
- Wendy M Mansfield, ”Garland, David John (1864 – 1939)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8, Melbourne University Press, 1981, pp 619-620.
- Photo of Rev D J Garland. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.Neg 193923.
- South Australian Referenda, State Electoral Office, South Australia, 2005.
That is definitely a timely topic. A little while ago I was exploring the secular movement in universities in the USA, which according to what I was reading ousted the strong religious hold over university posts in the late 18th to mid-19th centuries . I am still meditating on what I found, but what I have settled on so far is that the secular push in universities depended upon having an ossified or entrenched opposition. Its claim to have triumphed over religion once and for all time actuallyundermines its own purpose, which it hadn’t fulfilled before declaring victory. I wonder how much of what is happening now is reflected in the past. I think secularism stumbled and wasn’t providing a sufficiently cohesive approach to the general idea of education, and as a result the arguments for religious instruction in schools have found justification for returning. The major issue arising is that secularists might, out of fear of losing educational power, resort to methods which are counter-productive for the grand design of the secular ‘project’, only a step away from the insidious anti-religious, anti-intellectual pogroms of dictatorial regimes. If secularism hadn’t lost its way, which I think it did by being as unjustifiably absolutist as the religions it was rapidly supplanting, then religions wouldn’t have had a chance to resurrect their influence.
Thankyou Peter for your considered response. The issue of religious education in schools is certainly not a clear cut one. I was astonished when I first delved into the history of this debate in Australia to find that it has been a prominent issue debated in the public sphere on and off since the European settlement of Australia. It has been a very contentious issue and as you have noted in the case of the universities in the United States, the participants have generally, but not always, have taken entrenched positions from which they have refused to budge.
I am currently reading Veit Bader’s, Secularism or Democracy? Associational Governance of Religious Diversity (Amsterdam University Pres, 2007). While I have only read the first couple of chapters so far Bader gives a deep and nuanced analysis of the handling of religions in western democracies. He challenges the binary thinking behind the debate about separation of religion and the state and argues that nowhere is this truly practised (even in France and the United States).
It is encouraging to find thinkers like Bader who are digging beneath the politics of it all and seeking a response that will accommodate the myriad of world views in a society while upholding basic principles of justice, tolerance etc. Absolutist thinking from anyone, irrespective of their worldview, is an impediment to this process.