ABSTRACT

Changed relations with Britain, Australia’s other ‘great and powerful friend’, forms the context of Chapter 4. The anxieties about Australia’s lost place in the world expressed by Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Marcus Loane (1911–2009) around the 1970 Bicentenary of Captain James Cook’s ‘discovery’ of Australia animates the challenges of articulating an evangelical identity amidst the erosion of British Protestant symbols and memories. The first papal visit to Australia, later in that same year, also confronted Loane with the new realities of civic pluralism. Yet rather than view him as a nostalgic relic of a bygone imperial and sectarian era, this chapter argues that Loane’s concern about the lost verities of civic Protestantism was borne of complex and nuanced engagement with the nation’s heritage and destiny. His enthusiasm for engagement with post-imperial Southeast Asia sat alongside his plea that Australia’s British inheritance be preserved.