| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Ian Breward. A History of the Churches in Australasia. (The Oxford History of the Christian Church.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. xxii, 474. $95.00.

"Australasia" is an old-fashioned name for the area running from Australia, New Zealand, and West New Guinea to the South Pacific islands. European penetration of this area from the sixteenth century was initially accompanied by only tepid interest in carrying the Gospel to native inhabitants. Roman Catholic interest was given quasi-legal form by the 1661 creation of an Apostolic Prefecture of Terra Australis. Protestant involvement through the London Missionary Society accompanied British settlement in Eastern Australia in the late eighteenth century. The penal colony in Sydney was, for some decades, the principal depot for Protestant missions to the South Pacific and New Zealand. Distracted by ramifications of the French Revolution, the Church of Rome neglected the Protestant challenge until its creation of a Vicariate of Eastern Oceania in 1833. The nineteenth century has been called the imperial century; in the Pacific, it can as readily be called the missionary century. 1

Until the 1950s, Australia and New Zealand were predominantly Anglo-Celtic in ethnic terms and British-Protestant culturally. Aboriginal inhabitants in Australia were, in a civic sense, close to being nonpersons; however in New Zealand a large Maori minority proved capable of vigorous counter-assertion, both civically and religiously. The settler colonies also contained politically significant Catholic minorities, sometimes echoing Irish nativist resentment of British Anglo-Irish ascendancy and sometimes Irish-Catholic resistance to the Protestant ascendancy. . . .

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