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Australia

Australia, a large island nation in the southwest Pacific Ocean, is a multicultural society. It contains numerous religions and spiritualities developing under their own impulses as well as through the impact of the media, immigration, and links with overseas authorities or movements. This variety is mostly quite recent, though, and a majority of Australians still identify with Christian denominations introduced from Great Britain and Ireland. Many now reject formal religion, and religious sentiment is usually unobtrusive, but it can sometimes be very public and controversial. Indigenous Australians include Aborigines on the continent and Tasmanian and Melanesian Torres Strait Islanders; the latter are mostly Anglicans.

Aboriginal Australians

For at least 45,000 years, continental Australia was inhabited by hunter-gatherers, speaking more than 200 languages and forming perhaps 500 cultural groups by 1788. Attempts to reconstruct Aboriginal religion are frustrated by the disruption, adaptation, and cultural extinction wrought by colonization, but a key feature was the linkage between tribal groups and their places of origin. A concept now called the Dreaming (less accurately, the Dreamtime) was, or became, almost universal. In the Dreaming, more linked to place than to time, both social mores and the natural environment were formed by powerful ancestral beings. These left traces of themselves in the features and forces of the heavens and the landscape as well as in its people and other inhabitants. The Dreaming—and the cosmos itself—was perpetuated through retelling myths, performing rituals, and adhering to ancestral mores. Knowledge of traditional beliefs and practices was commonly restricted by age and gender, with an individual's passage to adulthood typically marked by initiation in a sacred place.

Disease, massacres, and land seizure drastically reduced the Aboriginal population. Early efforts to promote “civilization” (settled agriculture and Christianity) were usually underresourced and undermined by cultural and linguistic incomprehension. Some successes were achieved where viable settlements were established and missionaries learned the local language. Interaction with Europeans led to reworkings of traditional myth and practice incorporating elements of Christianity or to maintaining both religions simultaneously without reconciliation. More recently, many Aborigines have integrated traditional art and dance and respect for Mother Earth into evangelical Christianity, and the proportion of Christians is comparable with the national average.

European Settlers

Britain established a penal colony at Sydney Cove in 1788, and similar settlements followed until transportation ended in 1889. From the First Fleet, there were also free settlers, whose arrival accelerated from the 1830s. Until World War II, immigrants overwhelmingly came from Great Britain and Ireland, though in numbers that created a unique mix of religious affiliations. In proportions varying from place to place, English Anglicans mingled with Scottish Presbyterians and Irish Catholics (and other combinations) as well as with increasing numbers of Methodists (augmented by revivals), not to mention Baptists, Congregationalists, and Quakers. Most British Protestants shared an evangelical ethos, as did Lutherans, who, dissenting from the newly established Prussian state church, were unusual both as Continentals and as religious refugees. Missionaries representing new American churches and sects, such as Seventh-Day Adventists, also had a marked impact. Reacting principally against Chinese immigration, Australian governments developed a “White Australia” policy—largely endorsed by the churches—that limited immigrant diversity before the 1970s. More varied nationalities began to arrive in the interwar and postwar years, however, such as Italian and other Catholics, Greek and other Orthodox Christians, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, and Dutch settlers both Catholic and Reformed.

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