The name - Church of Australia - revised : May 2010

The Church was established in Australia by the first Chaplain, the Reverend Richard Johnson, in 1788. The first service on shore was held at Sydney Cove on the 3rd February that year. And he and his wife might well be regarded as the apostles and first saints of Australia.

Until 1961 the Church in some sense was still part of the Church of England (or, for much of the 19th century, the United Church of England and Ireland). In the 19th century it was often also referred to as the English Church - not really appropriate for there was a considerable number of Irish people belonging to it, and often referred to also as the Episcopal Church, an appropriate name but probably too late to become the official name now.

(In passing it is worth noting that while Magna Carta referred to the ecclesia anglicana, literally "English Church", before that the term ecclesia angliae had also been used e.g. by S.Anselm, literally "the Church OF England" ! And in the later Middle Ages, even ecclesia Anglicana was usually translated as Church OF England. Our Church did not begin with Henry VIII !)

In 1961 the Church of England in Australia gained its own Constitution and became an autonomous Church within the Anglican Communion, remaining in communion with the Church of England although with its official name later changed to the Anglican Church of Australia.

As early as the 1880s, it was suggested that its name be the Church of Australia, a name proposed again by Archbishop Fisher on his visit in the 1950s. Such a name does not imply that it is the only Christian Church in our land, but it was the first Church, the "canonical" Church of Australia, and for much of its history, the largest Church. It deserves the title as much as, say, the Church of Ireland, the ancient and reformed Church of that land even though long since disestablished, and that name, Church of Australia would be much more readily understood than the present name.

The Primate of the Church is elected for a limited period and the present Primate is the Archbishop of Brisbane. The basic unit of the Church is the diocese (or bishopric) under the diocesan bishop. Most dioceses are grouped in provinces with an Archbishop at their head. For example, the Archbishop of Sydney is the Metropolitan of the Province of New South Wales which includes the Dioceses of Sydney, Newcastle, Grafton, Armidale, Bathurst, Canberra and Goulburn, and the Riverina. Tasmania and the Northern Territory are "extra-provincial".