All we like sheep ...(religious aspects in Australia)

I am afraid that he has not been in the inside of a church for many years; but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat. This shows that he has good principles.

THUS SAID Samuel Johnson about his friend Doctor John Campbell (whom elsewhere Johnson described as "the richest author that ever grazed the common of literature"). Johnson himself was devout and attentive to religious duties, but always ready to acknowledge the merits of those who did not go to church. He would have understood Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first prime minister.

The Church of England being legally established as the religion of the realm, Melbourne was obliged to give some attention to its affairs, such as the appointment of bishops to vacant sees--a duty that gave him little pleasure. Faced one day with the nomination of yet another bishop, he opined testily that they kept on dying "simply to vex him".

But this shrewd and worldly Whig did not underrate the civic significance of religion, nor the usefulness of its earthly apparatus, the church. He admitted wryly that his own attendances did not entitle him to claim to be "a pillar of the church". But he insisted that he was "a buttress", because he supported it from the outside. Lord Melbourne's insights from 150 years ago may have more relevance for us than we readily see.

In 1948, the year in which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, T.S. Eliot published Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. A brief quotation conveys one of its main themes: "If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes." That Eliot was being preposterous and perverse was apparent to me in an instant: had he gone mad? After all (I was then every bit of twenty-five, and a committee member of the Victorian Rationalist Society to boot) everyone knew that God was dead, that Christianity was expiring, and that the churches were crumbling into final irrelevance. Moreover, all modern-minded people knew that, without these superstitious survivals, the world would go ahead a great deal better.

Well, I can't complain that I didn't get what I asked for; nor can I deny that I was a slow learner.

For it was not until 1986, nearly forty years later, that I published an essay called "End of the Dreamtime". The manuscript (as I have written elsewhere) was commissioned by the ANU's multi-volume Bicentenary History project, and when it arrived they declined to print it. The reject was taken up by the late Robert Haupt, and soon appeared in the National Times. The essay actually won a prize, and was extensively reprinted in journals and newspapers around Australia. Such a thing had never happened to me before (nor since, if it comes to that).