A ‘peculiar colony’

When the British arrived at Sydney Cove in 1788 – Warrane, the local people called it – the continent had been richly inscribed with the Dreaming stories of about 250 language groups and 500 clans of Indigenous people for around 50,000 years. Stories of the Ancestral Beings, whose travels had created land forms, people, animals, plants, sea and stars, provided both an explanation of origins and a law to govern behaviour. The ancestral beings connected Indigenous people to specific sites, but Christianity was a mobile faith. Its all-powerful, all-knowing God was a personal companion who accompanied his people on trips of exploration and guided their acquisition of new lands. Unlike the early seventeenth-century settlement of ‘pilgrims’ in Massachusetts, however, religion was not foundational to the formation of New South Wales. This colony was a government outpost, a repository for criminals and a potential base for trade with Asia. Its first chaplains were part of the military apparatus, dependent on the goodwill of the governors. They were also evangelicals, products of the revival that swept England in the eighteenth century, with its radical critique of the established church; they preached a gospel that prohibited most of the pleasures available to the British lower orders.

It is unsurprising, then, that narratives of doom surrounded the first years of the Christian history of New South Wales. Certain stories are retold because of their symbolic power: Richard Johnson, the first chaplain of the colony, was given no support to build a church and when he built his own in 1796, the convicts burned it down; when the New South Wales Corps took charge of the colony in the early 1790s, its drum sergeant humiliated Johnson by summoning the convicts to parade halfway through his sermon. The governors disagreed with the chaplains about religion's role. Governor Phillip urged Johnson to confine his sermons to ‘moral subjects’ but Johnson wanted to preach a message of salvation through personal conversion.