Michael Gladwin has written the first in-depth study, based on prosopographical methods, of the Anglican clergy of all the colonies of colonial Australia. As this denomination was the largest Christian Church throughout the period of colonial Australia, his study offers valuable insights and resources for other scholars investigating the influence of Christianity in British colonial societies. As such, it supersedes the only other published monograph on Australian clergymen in the period, that of Michael Grocott in 1980. But there are some infelicities. Gladwin claims that the clergy's ‘identity and self-understanding is unexamined’ (p.17) in the literature, which rather overlooks at least one such article cited in the book's bibliography, but unexamined in the text. In addition, while the study of the regular parochial clergy is an invaluable addition to our understanding of British colonial religion, and an area very largely unresearched, severing the clergy completely from colonial bishops in the study has resulted in a distortion. Gladwin also questions the existence of an Anglican imperial design in the second British Empire as little more than a theory without any real existence. But this interpretation makes it difficult to understand the totally unprecedented existence of colonial bishoprics supported by the state after 1783 in Canada, India, the West Indies and Australia; and then further voluntary episcopal extension created from 1841 by the Colonial Bishoprics Fund. However, there is little doubt that Gladwin brings important insights and evidence to bear on many other understandings of the colonial religion of the period. The stereotype of the ‘flogging parson’ uncritically supporting established authority is replaced by a much more varied and genuine engagement by Anglican clergy with convicts, emancipists and settlers. Gladwin explores thoroughly the social background of the clergy, and they emerge less as gentlemen and more capable of engagement in colonial conditions and with ‘the bush’ than previous historiography has claimed. Their education, however, did make these clergymen important cultural contributors to emerging colonial societies, not just as social commentators, but as journalists and writers on a number of subjects, including science. This study seriously and validly questions the view of older histories that these clergymen were mere unquestioning agents of British imperialism. Instead Gladwin sees them either in their cooperation with colonial authorities, or in their opposition to them, as being guided by their own vision of a colonial society and Church that was informed by their Christianity. Both the data of Gladwin's research presented here, and his interpretations based on his exhaustive primary research, will guide subsequent research on the important Christian contribution to the social development of the colonies of the British Empire.