At last, a genuine antipodean episcopographical opus tumultuarium. In just a few years, a medieval historian, Thomas Fudge, has researched and written this study of the last sixty years of the diocese of Armidale in the Anglican Province of New South Wales, Australia. He has drawn on 255 interviewees and correspondents, witnesses on just one narrow aspect of that history: the conquest by the Evangelicals, over those who favoured high, liberal or Anglo-Catholic Anglicanism. The context here is also narrow: this grim exercise in ecclesiastical politics is all about theology. Fudge feels this gives him permission to draw on any aspect of church history in the past 2,000 years. He chronically allows himself to pursue these analogies which, along with repetition, are the principal reasons for the length of the book. There is much here about the virtue of short sermons, but he sees no virtue in short histories. He set himself not only a big task, but a hard, probably impossible, one: to tell the story from the perspective of the vanquished whilst insisting that he personally is entirely independent of any party having no investment whatsoever in the outcome. There are so many voices and so many opinions and no thesis since he is not trying to prove anything (apart from his primacy of theology proposition). The result? It is absolutely fascinating, desperately sad and genuinely enlightening. It is sad to observe how binary it all was, how little attempt was made to bridge the divide, how few said with the Revd James Holbeck, that ‘liturgy should be conducted with the reverence of the Catholic, preaching delivered with the zeal of the evangelical, and the entire service conducted with the enthusiasm of the charismatic’ (p. 461). Fudge’s repeated insistence that Bishop Moyes was naïve and unwise to foster polychrome churchmanship in his diocese is also sad: are ‘confusion’ and ‘tolerance’ worse than judgementalism and sectarianism? The moral of Australian Anglican history is that the defence of monochrome dioceses also causes chronic pain. In Armidale, the clergy, being subject to the bishop, were vulnerable and, in the main, withdrew from the fray, while the laity put up a surprisingly robust resistance for a demographic allegedly without theological knowledge. Fudge’s story is one of protracted agony ‘requiring a half century before foaming rapids gradually gave way to relatively calm waters’ (p. 467). Two recurring subjects are threaded through the otherwise-disconnected narrative: the copious, unpublished, candid and therefore invaluable, diaries of Evan Wetherell, dean of Armidale (1960–70), appeasing in public, raging in private, and the stalwart histories of St Mary’s, West Armidale, and of St John’s, Tamworth, ‘the last parish to convert’ (p. 601). On p. 661, Fudge reveals that he represented the view of St Mary’s that Scripture alone was not to be determinative of such matters as female ordination and same-sex marriage, which, of course, confirms readers’ wariness of his claim to impartiality. Impartial it is not; informed it is.