ABSTRACT
The question of whether the Commonwealth of Australia, federated in 1901, was founded as an already secular nation has occupied the attention of historians since the widely influential work of Manning Clark in the 1960s. This introductory chapter outlines some of the background to this debate, beginning with a brief discussion of the work and life of Australian poet Charles Harpur, whose philosophy of ‘moral enlightenment’ was identified by Clark's student, Michael Roe, as the dominant belief system of nineteenth-century Australia. In connection with that narrative of an early and broad-based secularisation, the Australian temperance movement was identified by Roe as a key example of the influence of moral enlightenment thinking in Australian culture. The final section of this chapter introduces the six temperance activists whose stories make up the case studies examined in the rest of the book and makes a case for the value of such case studies in offering a nuanced and contextually situated version of the development and influence of religious belief (including the evangelical Protestantism of five of the six biographical subjects) in nineteenth-century Australia.
