Anglicanism in Australia is an important contribution to our social history. Its authors have moved beyond biography and histories of individual congregations to create a broad, complex, layered history. They assess Anglicanism's contribution to Australian social, political and cultural life. The book begins with a fascinating and thoroughly researched narrative account - which moves from the arrival with the First Fleet of an Anglican military chaplain, right through to the 1990s. Along the way it charts the nineteenth-century church buffeted by the pendulum swings of 'state aid'; the nationalistic fervour of wartime, and the political radicalism of the 1960s. In its second half, Anglicanism in Australia looks at Anglicans dealing with a broad spectrum of issues: the family, questions of gender, Indigenous peoples, the visual arts, the search for a national identity.
