Michael Gladwin has done the history of Anglicanism in colonial Australia a valuable service in this revision of our understanding of the lives of clergy by reinserting them into the national narrative. In doing so, he makes a significant contribution to Australian history writing. To date there has been a kind of received orthodoxy concerning Anglican clergymen: images abound of the ‘flogging parson’, the ‘moral policemen’, the ineffective and incompetent penal chaplain, and colonial equivalents of the English ‘sqaurson’. Gladwin has set out to reassess this historiography, his aim being to discover ‘how Anglican clergymen went about pursuing their clerical vocation in the unique circumstances of colonial Australia and its wider imperial context; and, more specifically, the extent to which Anglican clergymen were more than agents of the colonial and imperial state’ (p. 24).

There are three notable strengths in this study. The first is the strong methodology employed to bring some order to the biographical details of the 234 clergymen who served in Australia up to 1850. Gladwin has used the tools of prosopography (collective biography) capably and creatively to avoid the subjectivity of impressionistic assessment. This approach has been buttressed by the book’s second strength: the extensive primary sources on which it draws. The resources of English and Australian libraries and archives have yielded a rich harvest in the form of personal letters and diaries; the correspondence files of colonial and imperial offices, bishops and church organizations; and official documents of both imperial and colonial governments. Aided by the electronic resources of Trove, the search engine of the Australian National Library, Gladwin has accessed an impressive range of colonial newspapers. Altogether, this large resource base has provided a great deal of detail about the lives and ministries of this clerical cohort.

The book’s third strength is the way in which Gladwin has made use of a broad contemporary historiography to make his study accessible to a wide readership; it is not narrowly focused. It should be of interest to any historian interested in colonial-imperial politics, intellectual history or social and cultural history. It is not simply an apologia for colonial Anglican clergy.

The first three chapters explore the metropolitan backgrounds of Anglican clergy. Here the strengths of the prosopographical approach come to the fore as Gladwin quantifies some of the information he has gleaned on national identity, social background and educational qualifications. He reveals some interesting facts, such as the diversity of the national identity of the clergy, especially the strong representation of Ireland as a recruiting field (perhaps representing the influence of Anglo-Irish military pensioner settlers); the importance of local ordinations, when bishops were able to identify locals with clerical potential; and the generally high level of education of candidates. The rich primary sources have filled this picture out by identifying the qualities recruiters were seeking and the motives for colonial service.

The central four chapters cover the clerical contribution to colonial life in their ecclesiastical functions, their civil roles as penal chaplains and magistrates, as public intellectuals, and in relation to indigenous people. This section, apart from the clergy’s limited involvement with indigenous Australians, is strongly revisionist. The image of the ‘flogging parson’ based on a couple of high-profile clergymen, and the incompetent and ineffective penal chaplain of Allan M. Grocott’s book, Convicts, Clergymen and Churches: Attitudes of Convicts and Ex-convicts towards the Churches and Clergy in New South Wales from 1788 to 1851 (Sydney University Press, 1980), are exposed to be inadequate and largely unjustified when applied to all. Some clergy have merited opprobrium but even then, their actions and attitudes need to be assessed in the context of whole careers, contemporary values, and the lives of scores of clergy whose ministry did not receive negative public attention. The role of clergy as public intellectuals gets a more favourable assessment than in the past, and their contribution to science, philanthropy, letters and newspapers (as journalists, owners and editors) sheds new light on colonial cultural life.

In the third section of the book, of three chapters, we meet the clergy in more intimate roles in the domestic sphere and as they came to terms with evolving voluntarism. The overview of the financing of salaries, parsonages, churches and schools reveals some of the struggles clergy had to make ends meet, both personally and as the parish officers. The account of family life, especially concerning ‘the parson’s wife’ and a clergyman’s children, is valuable new work, as is the brief section on the provision of life assurance and pensions.

Gladwin has filled an important gap in Anglican historiography and raises some interesting areas for further exploration, such as Anglican preaching and its contribution to public discourse; and more substantive work on clerical wives and families. This reader has reservations about Gladwin’s critique of the ‘Englishness’ of the colonial Anglican Church. His case for the early colonial period is well argued but there are differences which may relate to time and region. Englishness is not simply about national identity or a metropolitan ecclesiastical strategy for the expansion of the Anglican Church, but is a cultural construct. One could argue that the principal modes of Anglican discourse at this time were rooted in English culture: High, Broad, Low, Evangelical and Tractarian. More needs to be taken into account of everyday parish life; the place of music in the liturgy; the liturgy itself; church architecture; and, especially, the attitudes and values of the laity. Perhaps what this study reveals most urgently is the poverty of scholarly research concerning the Anglican laity in Australia. The difficulty here is devising methodological strategies that make use of sparse primary sources.

Gladwin has a light touch, which makes reading enjoyable. The vision of the Revd John Cross ‘pootling’ about Port Macquarie in his retirement (p. 200) will remain with me; likewise Revd W.B. Clarke’s one-liner about Protestant cows and papal bulls (p. 171). These little vignettes give life to the stories about Anglican clergy and their place in colonial Australia. This is a book to be read, reread and enjoyed.