Religion in Australian Society: A Place for Everything and Everything and Its Place

Abstract

Contemporary Australian expressions of religion and spirituality demonstrate a diversityand flexibility that is largely the result of the changes wrought by the dual processes ofsecularisation and multiculturalism, which have increasingly characterised Australianculture since the 1960s (Bouma 1999, 18-24). Prior to the mid-twentieth century,Australia’s spiritual and religious climate was dominated by the convict origins of thewhite settlers, interdenominational conflict between Catholic and Protestant Christians,and the systematic suppression of the indigenous Australian Aboriginal culture, includingAboriginal religion (Thompson 2002, passim).