Catholic Emancipation and the Idea of Religious Liberty in 1830s New South Wales

Abstract

Historians do not typically associate the use of concepts like “civil and religious freedom” and “liberty of conscience” with colonial New South Wales. Indeed, for many years, historians assumed that the people of New South Wales were largely indifferent to religious ideas, and often unthinkingly sectarian. The research presented here suggests we revise this assumption. When the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 passed through the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1829, it triggered a lively and genuinely intellectual discussion in New South Wales about religious liberty and its implications. Through a careful analysis of the colony's 1830s press, I argue that there existed a robust discussion about the nature of religious freedom: its theology, its history, and its relationship to the legal and political question of establishment. This period provides an interesting vignette of, and point of entry into, the broader issue of the role of religion in colonial New South Wales.

The Forgotten History of Religious Liberty. Richard Johnson Lecture, 2020*

“…My current research reveals that there was a rich debate in the public sphere in colonial Australia about freedom of conscience. 34 This debate was engaged in across the religious and political spectrums. All were keen to protect liberty of conscience.…”