User:Aemilius Adolphin/History of Australia Draft

Religion
The Commonwealth constitution formalised the separation of church and state while guaranteeing freedom of religious worship. At federation, about 95% of the white population declared themselves Christian of which about 40% were Church of England, 20% Catholic, 14% Methodist and 10% Presbyterian. Religion had a strong ethnic element: most Australian Anglicans being of English descent, most Catholics of Irish descent and most Presbyterians of Scottish heritage.

School education was divided into separate state and Catholic education systems, and private schools with strong ties to the Prostestant religions also provided schooling which mainly attracted more affluent families. About 40% of adults attended church regularly, and the family and social lives of many Australians revolved around the local church. In 1908, the papal decree Ne Temere declared protestant and civil marriage rites invalid which exacerbated divisions betwen Catholics, Protestants and secularists.

The First World War also sharpened the religious divide. The Protestant churches strongly supported the war, while the Catholic church was reluctant to aid Britain which they believed was oppressing Ireland. After the war, Catholics generally supported the Labor Party while the Liberals had stronger support among Protestants. Freemasonry flourished in business and politics and was generally pro-British and anti-Catholic.

Arts
In the first decade of the century, established writers such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson and new voices such as Steele Rudd Miles Franklin, Joseph Furphy and Henry Handel Richardson helped forge a distinctive national literature. The following decades saw the emergence of critically acclaimed poets such as Christopher Brennan, John Shaw Nielson and Kenneth Slessor. The Jindyworobak movement of the late 1930s sought to create a new Australian literature drawing on Aboriginal traditions.

Australian fiction in the 1930s and 1940s was dominated by popular novelists such as Ion Idriess. Eleanor Dark, Katherine Susannah Pritchard and Christina Stead attracted critical acclaim.

Painting was dominated by a conservative nationalism which prized Australian landscape painting in the Heidelberg School tradition. Albert Namatjira became famous for fusing western landscape painting with traditional Aboriginal concern for country. A modernist reaction to the Heidelberg tradition spawned the work of artists such as Margaret Preston, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and photographer Max Dupain.

Local cinema flourished in the first two decades of the century, with films about bushrangers such as The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) and rural comedies such as On Our Selection (1920) proving popular. Local film production, however, halved in the 1930s in the face of competion from Hollywood. Ken G. Hall and Charles Chauvel, nevertheless, were successful directors in this decade.

Before the First World War, Australian theatre was dominated by British drama, bushranger plays and rural comedies. Attempts to establish an Australian national theatre were short-lived, but Louis Esson's The Time Is Not Yet Ripe (1912) was a notable work. In the inter-war years, Australian drama was fostered by the overtly political New Theatre Movement and small repertory theatres. Katherine Susannah Pritchard's Brumby Innes (1927) is notable. Poet Douglas Stewart wrote successful verse dramas for radio in the 1940s.

Percy Grainger was a nut case.

Science and technology
The new colony was of particular scientific and technological interest in Britain. Up to 1820, Joseph Banks was the chief promoter of the colony's importance to botany and agricultural technology and he corresponded frequently with the early governors on these subjects. William Hooker also promoted the study of Australian botany, Roderick Murchison its geology, and Richard Owen its zoology and palaeontology.

Culture
Aboriginal groups continued the artistic traditions they had practised for thousands of years. They made art works on bark, stone and their bodies, and in the sand and earth of their land. They told stories of ancestral beings and the Dreaming. They performed their culture and its stories in song, music and dance. Songmen and women were skilled in correctly singing the songlines of the ancestral beings who created the landscape, and in passing on new songs sent to them in dreams. Aboriginal history, law and creation stories were transmitted orally through generations.

The colonists also transmitted their cultures orally and through song, music, art and performance, but also through writing. Governor Macquarie commissioned emancipist Michael Massey Robinson to write verse to celebrate the birthdays of George III and Queen Charlotte. Alongside such official verse, satirical verse written by convicts such as Frank the Poet flourished.

Religion
There was no established church in the colonies and the major churches were largely divided along ethnic lines, the Church of England's adherents being mostly of English heritage, Presbyterians mostly Scottish and Catholics mostly Irish. The decades from the gold rushes brought an increase in population and religion. Church attendance among Anglicans and Presbyterians doubled in the 1860s, but growth of Catholicism and Methodism was even higher. Chinese religions and Christian sects also gained a foothold. Nevertheless, some 30 to 40% of the population did not regularly attend church by 1871. Missionary organisations such as the Bush Missionary Society and the Bible Christian Bush Mission attempted to combat this. City missions were also established.

Education
In the 1850s, most schooling was conducted by religious organisations. The Catholic church ran colleges and convent schools in the major settlements and country areas which catered for both Catholics and Protestants. Protestant schools mainly catered for pupils from affluent backgrounds and emphasised preparation for the professions. In 1861, however, only half of school age children were literate and colonial governments became more committed to universal secular education.

Culture
Magazines and newspapers continued to be the major means of publication of Australian novels and poetry. Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life was serialised in 1870-72 before being published as a book in Melbourne and London a few years later. Rolf Boldrewood's Robbery Under Arms was serialised in 1882-83 before book publication in 1888. Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall and Adam Lindsay Gordon were prominent in attempts to establish a "national poetry" from the 1860s.

Sport
Spectator sports flourished over this period. Intercolonial cricket in Australia started in 1851 and the first cricket "Test Match" between Australia and England took place in Melbourne in 1877. Australian Rules Football began in 1858, and became popular in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. The 1890 Victorian Football Association final drew a crowd of 33,000. The first metropolitan Rugby Union competition was organised in Sydney in 1874 and the sport became popular in New South Wales and Queensland. By 1900, matches in Sydney drew crowds of up to 15,000. Boxing and horse racing were also popular. By the 1880s, the Melbourne Cup drew crowds of around 100,000. However, the first modern Olympics at Athens in 1896 attracted only one Australian competitor.

Historiography
The historiography of Australia refers to the publications produced by historians of Australia, and the sources, critical methods, topics and interpretations they have used and examined. Many 19th century histories were written by prominent settlers or commissioned by colonial governments intent on influencing British policy in the colony or promoting British investment and immigration. Professional academic history began in the 1890s, dominated by "imperial" interpretations in which Australia was seen as a successful example of a flourishing British society in a new land.

20th century historiography up to the 1960s was dominated by competing imperial and nationalist interpretations. Nationalist historians emphasised an independent Australian identity forged in war and a democratic ethos dating back to the goldfields of the 1850s. From the 1960s, these schools were challenged by historians using a variety of approaches including Marxist analysis of the Australian labour movement, geopolitical analysis of factors such as Australia's physical size and distance from Europe and America, and the role of luck and chance in shaping Australian society. From the 1970s, histories of marginalised groups such as Indigenous Australians, women, migrants and those with minority sexualities became more prominent.

At the turn of the 21st century, a series of public controversies dubbed "the history wars" sparked heated political and media debate over whether a "black armband" historical orthodoxy was overemphasising the role of racism, violence, inequality and environmental degradation in Australia's history. Historical practice, however, became more diversified and less centred in universities, with the flourishing of oral histories, local histories, family histories, interdisciplinary histories, and transnational approaches which analyse Australian history in a global and regional context.