Postcolonial history has taken a great deal of interest in the missionary endeavours of the church throughout the Empire, especially the work of Protestant/evangelical mission societies. Apart from attention to organisations like the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) and to some extent the work of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the work of Anglican High Churchmen has sometimes been overlooked.1 In fact, High Churchmen were very concerned about the role of the Church of England in the expanding empire during the mid‐nineteenth century. They were keen to bring the extension of the church under institutional control and to co‐operate with the imperial parliament as closely as possible. The activity of the SPG and the foundation of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund (CBF), which provided clergy, schoolmasters, catechists, and bishops as agents of Anglicanism and Englishness, can be seen as part of this strategy.

Chinese men began emigrating to the Australian colonies from the 1840s onward. Past historiography has been sceptical of the impact of Christianity on these Chinese immigrants. This paper revisits this theme, placing it in the wider context of mission to Chinese immigrants in other anglophone countries. It documents the ministry of the Anglican Church among Chinese settlers in colonial Queensland, and especially the role that Chinese converts played in the evangelisation of their fellow countrymen. It provides a new perspective on the ways in which the Chinese embraced Christianity, and their contribution to the evangelisation of their countrymen.

Gender ideologies have been shown to be an important element in creating national identity. The settler population of early colonial Queensland was largely drawn from Protestant England and Scotland, and Catholic Ireland. In the process of social formation, Anglican men contributed to building a Protestant hegemony that strove to marginalise the Irish Catholic part of the population. In doing so they bracketed Tractarianism with Catholicism in an attempt to assert the essentially Protestant nature of Anglicanism. This paper explores three debates that took place in the public domain in the period 1855–65, and their impact on the local Anglican community and on social formation in the fledgling colonial society.

Freemasons formed their first lodge in Brisbane in 1859 and the craft grew and spread quickly through Queensland. In studying associational life in Britain, Peter Clark has drawn attention to the relationship of freemasons to the development of the popular press. This paper explores the involvement of individual freemasons with the Press; the ways freemasons used the Press to promote the craft; and to try to determine, from the material published about freemasonry, how freemasons positioned themselves in Brisbane society.

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