Prior to the 1820s it was accepted that the Anglican Church was the established Church in Australia. Roman Catholic convicts were expected to attend Protestant services and have all baptisms, marriages and funerals performed within the Church of England tradition. Several Irish priests had been transported to NSW as convicts, primarily for their involvement in the 1798 rebellion against British rule. One of these men was James Dixon, who arrived in Sydney in January 1800. Keen not to stir up anti-British feelings within the Irish population, the then Governor King agreed to Dixon’s conditional emancipation and permitted him to conduct mass and to minister to Roman Catholics in the colony. By this time there were 2086 Irish convicts, nearly all Roman Catholics – a substantial proportion of the population of New South Wales. This was cause for concern to Samuel Marsden, who held the view that they represented “the lowest class of the Irish Nation, who are the most wild, ignorant and savage race that were ever favoured with the light of civilisation . . . . extremely superstitious, artful and treacherous”.2
The first Roman Catholic mass was celebrated in Sydney on 15 May 1803. According to Governor King’s regulations, Dixon was then to travel to Parramatta and the Hawkesbury every other week. These regulations articulated the strict behaviour required of the priest; among other things he was to see that the congregation return to their respective homes straight after the proceedings. To ensure this, police were stationed around the area where the mass was being conducted.
The rebellion on the evening of 4 March 1804, a Sabbath, at Vinegar Hill (situated opposite the Rouse Hill shopping centre just 9 kilometres from our Sydney church, in Riverstone) of the predominantly Roman Catholic Irish “croppies” led by Phillip Cunningham and William Johnston3, vindicated in Marsden’s mind his opposition to the release of Father James Dixon and the tolerance shown to Roman Catholicism by Governor King 12 months previously. The rebellion was put down by Major George Johnston with 29 of the NSW Corps, who were force-marched from Sydney, and with the assistance of about 47 armed, civilian militia. Fifteen rebels were killed and a further nine were hung for their part in the rebellion. Two hundred and thirty-three rioters had apparently been involved, according to the Sydney Gazette of the day. As a consequence, Dixon’s salary was suspended and the public masses discontinued. Marsden remained utterly opposed to Roman Catholicism, believing that toleration would only lead to further political subversion, for schemes of revenge for transportation – as a consequence of the uprisings, in the late eighteenth century, against British rule – were hatched with the covert assistance of the priests.
Roman Catholics continued to meet for prayers when there was no priest in the colony. Services were held in private houses, such as James Dempsey’s house in Kent Street, which had a converted chapel room. When the French ship Uranie arrived in port in 1819 with a Roman Catholic chaplain on board, local Roman Catholics rushed to him with requests for marriage and baptism according to their rites.
In 1820, Irish priests Philip Connolly and John Joseph Therry arrived in NSW authorised to minister to Roman Catholics; however, there were limitations on what they could do. According to Governor Macquarie’s instructions, the priests were allowed to baptize and marry Roman Catholics, but they were not allowed to proselytise Protestants or agree to marry couples where one of them was Protestant.
The Erastian4 Church of England had worked with the state since 1788 to maintain order and organise education; however, with the appearance of other denominations, the influence of the Anglican Church began to diminish. This shift in power and influence created tension between the different denominations and between church and government. Both Brisbane (Governor 1821-1825) and Darling (Governor 1825-1835) were sympathetic to the Roman Catholic and Wesleyan churches that provided support to free settlers and convicts. However, it was not until 1836 that Darling’s successor, Richard Bourke, showed practical sympathy for the role of other denominations through the Church Act of 1836, which provided financial assistance to denominations other than Anglican.5 In this Act; drafted by the reformist Attorney General, John Plunkett, the Church of England lost its legal privileges in the Colony of New South Wales. The Act established legal equality for Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians and was later extended to include Methodists.6
1The first section was printed last month: “Insurmountable Difficulties – in the Absence of Faith”.
2Samuel Marsden, A Few Observations on the Toleration of the Catholic Religion in N South Wales, ML MS 118 (1807), pp 1,2,3,14, quoted in Yarwood, Samuel Marsden the Great Survivor.
3Cunningham was a veteran of the 1798 conflict in Ireland and the mutiny of the convict transport ship Ann.
4Erastian – believing that the state has authority over the church in ecclesiastical matters.
5http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/discover_collections/history_nation/religion/index.html.
6Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020299b.htm.
The first Methodist ministers appeared in NSW in 1816 with the arrival of Samuel Leigh, followed by Walter Lawry, in 1818 – although some would argue that Richard Johnson was more “Methodist” (in the Calvinistic tradition) than he was Church of England. The itinerant nature of the Methodist preaching circuit and the introduction of a lay ministry meant that Christian teaching (in a broad sense) was brought to a wider audience than the Anglican Chaplains had been able to reach regularly hitherto. It would seem the theology of these early Methodist preachers was Wesleyan and Arminian rather than in the tradition of the Calvinistic George Whitefield. Samuel Leigh preached in NSW for 13 years, in two periods separated by 12 months in England, during which he married.
It was a distinguishing feature of the early Methodist preachers that, unlike the Anglicans, they did not wish to become comfortable settlers, but were content with a missionary approach. Samuel Leigh’s preaching circuit extended to 240 km (150 miles) which he covered on horseback every ten days. Fourteen preaching stations and six classes demanded his attention – three being in Sydney, one in Parramatta, one at Windsor and one at Castle-reagh. Iain Murray, in his excellent book, Australian Christian Life from 1788, informs us that there were 14 missionaries, 736 communicants and 1000 children in schools when Samuel Leigh finally left the Southern hemisphere in 1831.7
The first Presbyterian minister in Sydney, John Dunmore Lang, arrived in May 1823. Born on 25 August 1799 at Greenock, Scotland, he was educated at the Largs parish school and the University of Glasgow, winning many scholarships and prizes and graduating MA in 1820. He later remembered the divinity professor, Stevenson Macgill, as his most influential teacher, but was perhaps even more impressed by Thomas Chalmers, then minister of the Tron Church in Glasgow. Lang was brought up within the Evangelical tradition which was beginning to challenge the prevailing moderatism within the Church of Scotland. He was licensed to preach the gospel by the Presbytery of Irvine in 1820 but, having an “Evangelical aversion” to the common system of lay patronage, considered emigrating overseas. After being assured by his younger brother, who was already resident in Sydney, that a suitable field of labour awaited him there, he sailed for Australia in 1822, arriving in May 1823.8
In 1802, a small group of immigrants settled in the Hawkesbury region of Portland Head, not very far from Windsor. The party consisted of seven couples and two single men mostly from the Scottish/English border. Having emigrated to NSW, arriving on June 13, they set about developing and farming the 100 acres of land that had been guaranteed to each of them. They gathered for worship in Ebenezer under the guidance of Presbyterian elder James Mein in the shade of a eucalypt tree, part of which still survives today. These families came from Church of England, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Calvinist and even Roman Catholic backgrounds. In 1809, these people opened the stone church they had built for worship, and it remains today the oldest church building in Australia and the first to have been built purely by voluntary contributions.
It is believed the itinerant Methodist Samuel Leigh was the first ordained minister to preach in Ebenezer Church, although J D Lang visited them in 1824, and again on August 1 that year, when he conducted the first Presbyterian communion service to be held in Australia. In his memoirs, Lang said about that first communion service: “There were 20 communicants on the occasion; and considering the very peculiar circumstances in which the ordinance was administered, in the little church on the banks of the noble river and on the edges of the interminable Australian forest, after so long an interval from their leaving the mother country . . . it was the most solemn and deeply interesting service in which I was ever engaged”.9
7I H Murray, Australian Christian Life from 1788, Banner of Truth, 1988, p 49. He has provided much interesting information concerning Samuel Leigh.
8Ken Inglis, Australian Colonists, Melbourne, 1974, p 24. (It should also be noted that the Presbyterian minister Archibald Macarthur had settled in Hobart Town in December 1822.)
9Rev Alan Russell & Ted Brill, The History of Ebenezer, 1977, pp 1-4.