Place and Presbyterian discourse in colonial Australia

This chapter explores the contested meanings of place and fractured identities which attached to Presbyterian discourse in the early years of European settlement in New South Wales and Victoria. Accordingly, Presbyterianism has been represented as the primary ‘vehicle for the transmission of Scottish identities’ in Australia as in other settler colonies in the Empire. Despite the presence locally of a significant number of Presbyterians, Hamilton was the first Presbyterian minister to arrive in Goulburn. Thus in 1846, when the Scottish Disruption finally forced the hand of Presbyterians in Australia, the sequence of events leading to the schism must have appeared unnervingly familiar. Using the colonial narrative of a foundational figure in Australian Presbyterianism, the Reverend William Hamilton, it has demonstrated the inchoate and conditional sense of self and place which the European experience of Empire might involve.