The island of Tasmania, located off the south-east of the Australian mainland, is Australia's smallest state in both area and population and has its highest proportion of self-described Anglicans: some 30 per cent in the last census. Tasmania's European history began in 1803 when a British settlement was planted on the Derwent River in the south of the island. This evolved into Hobart Town which in 1813 became the administrative centre of the colony of Van Diemen's Land. Its labour force and the majority of its settlers were transported convicts or ex-convicts.
Following the foundation of the diocese of Tasmania in 1842, the Anglican Church expanded its ministry to embrace almost every township and settlement, and by the end of the nineteenth century the island had more Anglican churches in relation to population than anywhere else in Australia. The Church had a comfortable relationship with the landed gentry and the island's business and political leaders. The prevailing pattern of church life was conservative and low church, rather parochial, often somnolent and inert; but occasionally the Tasmanian Church led the way. The first branch of the Mothers’ Union in Australia was founded in a rural parish in Tasmania in 1892, and in the 1970s the diocese pioneered youth synods as an arena for young Anglicans to have their say on religious and social issues.
Several books have been published on the history of Anglicanism in Tasmania. The sesquicentennial history of the diocese by Geoffrey Stephens (1992) was idiosyncratic in its coverage and left many areas of church life uncharted but it included a potted history with a photograph of every church on the island – a valuable record. The two books under review, very different in approach and style, are significant works which illuminate large tracts of the history of Anglicanism in Tasmania. They also explore wider issues that are relevant to Anglicanism elsewhere.
Peter Boyce's God and the City is a comprehensive and lively survey of the history of St David's Cathedral in Hobart, the state's capital. The first St David's Church, opened for worship in 1819, was given its dedication not because of a Welsh connection but to honour the first lieutenant-governor, David Collins. The first section of the present cathedral, designed by the great English architect, G.F. Bodley (the second bishop's brother-in-law), was opened in 1874 and completed in 1936. It occupies a prominent position at the centre of Hobart.
The author, a distinguished political scientist and former vice-chancellor of Murdoch University in Perth, is a long-time parishioner of the cathedral and a former member of the cathedral council. He therefore writes as an insider but with a critical eye, sensitive to the views of independent-minded lay people and to the sometimes fraught relationships between bishops and deans. He also examines areas of church life which tend to get overlooked in histories of parishes and cathedrals: governance, property and finance, and the social composition of the congregation.
In the recent history of St David's Cathedral a series of unhappy episodes brought it to a low point in the early 1990s: whatever could go wrong did go wrong, and much of the congregation drifted away. All cathedral deans (and bishops) could read with profit Boyce's judicious account of this period.
Boyce shows how each dean has set the tone for his period of office and left a distinctive mark on the cathedral. For example, Charles Dundas (1885–95) began a weekly service of Holy Communion and introduced ceremonial practices which gave the cathedral its reputation within Tasmania for being ‘high church’. Eric Webber (1959–71) was a liberal-minded scholar and an accomplished preacher. Harlin Butterley (1972–80) was a civic figure, active in the wider community and a popular after-dinner speaker. The present dean, Richard Humphrey, an energetic Evangelical from Sydney, has pushed the cathedral in new directions.
This history reminds us of the important civic role that Anglican cathedrals once filled in Australia's capital cities and how this has diminished during the last forty years. In the early nineteenth century, when St David's was Hobart's principal church, the Sunday congregations comprised government officials, military officers, townspeople and convicts: up to 2000 people each Sunday. Later in the nineteenth century the cathedral was the church favoured by prosperous urban dwellers and business and political leaders who appreciated dignified liturgical worship and a high standard of church music. Pew rents, abolished during the first part of the twentieth century in almost all other Australian churches, were retained at St David's until the 1950s. Successive organists and choir directors, such as James Scott-Power (1907–39), built up an excellent choir of men and boys and played a central role in Hobart's musical life. That choir collapsed in the 1990s. Although St David's Cathedral has continued to be a venue for state funerals and civic and memorial services – notably the nationally televised memorial service for the 35 victims of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 – there is little likelihood that it will be able to reclaim the position in the city which it once occupied. Tasmanian society has changed, Hobart is a small city, and the pool of Anglicans who are attracted by cathedral-style worship has shrunk.
Over the last 170 years there have been eleven Anglican bishops of Tasmania: in personality, theology and political outlook they have been a remarkably varied crowd. Only one of them gained a significant reputation outside the island state. This was Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, the subject of Robert Withycombe's Montgomery of Tasmania. Bishop Montgomery led the diocese from 1889 to 1901, then returned to England to become secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a post he occupied with vision and vigour until 1918.
As bishop of Tasmania, Montgomery saw his role in military terms as a commander and strategist, directing and pushing along the church's missionary activity. (His famous son, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, spent his early years in Hobart.) This is the central theme of Withycombe's study of his Tasmanian episcopate. He examines each of the areas in which Montgomery sought to fulfil his missionary vision. These include his unsuccessful attempt to override the prevailing diocesanism of the Australian Church and create a strong central primacy, his role in founding a missionary diocese in New Guinea (1897), his attempt (resisted by Evangelicals in Sydney and Melbourne) to have the Australian Board of Missions accepted as the sole missionary arm of the Australian Church, his interest in Aboriginal missions and in the Aboriginal people of Tasmania who had been resettled on islands in the adjacent Bass Strait – intervention which recent historians have assessed as less than enlightened – and his readiness to trudge through rain-soaked bush to minister to miners and timber-workers on the isolated west coast of Tasmania. Always on the go, he was sometimes away from home for 180 days a year.
The book includes two chapters on Maud Montgomery, Henry's wife and daughter of Dean Farrar of Westminster. These show how a colonial diocese gave opportunities for an energetic and capable bishop's wife to undertake philanthropic work and initiate fund-raising for church enterprises that would have been less open to a bishop's wife in England.
Montgomery of Tasmania is a valuable study, based upon detailed research on Australian and English records. However, I would like to know more about the Tasmanian context of Montgomery's episcopate and how the Anglican Church fitted into Tasmanian society and its religious culture in the 1890s.
