Episcopally Led and Synodically Governed

Book Review:

Episcopally Led and Synodically Governed : Anglicans in Victoria 1803-1997, by James Grant. Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. ISBN 978-1-921509-40-7 RRP $55

It is impossible to name anyone with a more detailed knowledge of the intricate social networks of Melbourne Anglicanism, past and present, than the author of this book. It has been a long time coming. Bishop Grant has chosen the convention of setting his history around the leading episcopates. He is able to sketch effective portraits of the leaders so that, for example, we learn how the first Bishop of Melbourne, Charles Perry, was someone ready for the challenges of a wild, new country, while at the same time being painfully narrow-minded in his ideas about religion.  James Moorhouse introduced tolerance of all church parties and an honesty about the larger issues facing Victorian society. It is Moorhouse who showed the worth in all forms of Anglicanism, thus setting in train the variety of Highs and Lows that flourish to this day. The book is a timeline of names and events, handy for those who need to mark the changes. It is in many ways what Edmund Campion, the Sydney Roman Catholic historian, calls Headquarters History, a literature all too common in that Church. This is alright if you enjoy the view from Bishopscourt and have a nose for the buckets and bouquets of Synod. However, this reviewer was left wanting something more and I’m sure Bishop Grant would agree that there is still much to be said.

My first thought upon seeing the title was the desire to add an extra adverbial phrase: and Parochially Based. After all, it is the local and the peculiar that helps define personal identification with church. It is critical that our own city church of St. Peter’s be explained to the general reader and the Bishop supplies enough colour there. But parish churches and their life are noticeable by their absence. Obviously not every parish can be mentioned, but the character of individual parishes, and their sheer diversity, has been a major contributing factor to the meaning of Melbourne especially as the most expressively varied and therefore most truly Anglican of any of the Australian dioceses. A post-modern history is waiting to be written that analyses the diocese through the life of significant parish times, incumbents, and individual parishioners –their inspirations and motivations.

The Aborigines are no small point. Australian style for the past twenty years dictates that the native peoples of Australia are always capitalised, i.e. Aborigines, Indigenous. No-one calls a person from London a londoner. Small-a Aborigines play a quiescent, almost anonymous role in this history. This is an imaginative and historical absence that needs to be filled by a younger historian.

A third concern is the relationship with Britain, and England and Ireland in particular. It is central to the narrative, yet how that relationship works, and the many questions good and bad that rise out of that reality are hardly raised. Some of the most interesting issues in the church history of Australia, for example how Australian is the Australian church and how culturally-bound are its manifestations, reside at the margins of this book. Post-colonial history teaches us to address in new ways the imperial constructs of our own societies. This is not something to be afraid of, indeed what such questions open up are central to our self-understanding. What surprised me most about this history was how little is made of the Anglican Church’s enormous influence on, indeed centrality to, modern Australian life.

-- Philip Harvey. This review first appeared in the parish paper of St. Peter's Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne.