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family ‘seem very near to us, so that we can hear their heart beats and find them of like passions with ourselves’. 5 Prayers, therefore, contributed to the idea, strong since George III’s time, that royals could be both ordinary as well as subjects for national celebration. They were exemplars too. In 1897 a Jewish rabbi echoed others when he commented on Queen Victoria’s ‘unstained life’, ‘womanly grace’, her ‘wondrous fidelity to the memory of the dead’ and ‘the purity of her domestic life’. 6 Mark McKenna has
failed to participate would face God’s ‘wrath and indignation’. Despite the threats, Featherstone Osler, an Anglican missionary, worried that the event would pass unnoticed. His ‘parish’, West Gwillimsbury, was 37 miles from Toronto, and back in early December, Osler, a fervent loyalist, had described the people of the district as ‘panic-struck’. Yet Osler’s memories of similar occasions in Britain led him to suppose that ‘days of thanksgiving and fasting are too often little attended to’. In the event Osler was happy to find
appointment of fasts and thanksgivings during droughts in the 1820s. 79 It is revealing, however, that such demands became more common from the 1850s. It could be that migrant clergy and settlers brought with them memories of the numerous fasts, prayers and thanksgivings that were appointed in Britain from the 1830s to the 1850s, and evangelical attitudes may have been important too. 80 The expansion of the press was another factor, and also significant was that the coming of representative forms of government helped
populations and the building up of meteorological data encouraged the formation of a ‘collective climate memory’. 53 This led to the idea that Australia’s climatic variations were patterned and cyclical. Edward Smith Hall, an evangelical editor in 1820s Sydney, drew on Genesis 41 and the account of Egypt’s seven years of famine and seven years of plenty when he said that ‘seven years of dry weather have hitherto been found to succeed seven of wet’. 54 Later in the century, Henry Chamberlain Russell, a government meteorologist
. 143 A. McCrossen, ‘Sunday: marker of time, setting for memory’, Time & Society , 14:1 (2005) , 35. 144 In March 1918 the governor general of South Africa made a new move when he requested towns to observe special services – not whole days – for ‘thanksgiving and intercession’: WCPA, 3/KWT, vol. 4/1/242, ref. ZE/2/40. Also see Eastern Province Herald [Port Elizabeth], 27 March 1918. 145 Sermon preached 12 November 1829, SLV, Docker Sermons, Box 1343
1887 royal jubilee. Following the monarch’s death in 1901 Webber told his fellow Queenslanders that the building would be a suitable ‘national memorial’ to her memory. For decades before then, Anglican churchmen, and some officials, had spread the idea that Anglican cathedrals were for everyone, not just the Anglican community. For example, at the laying of the foundation stone of St Peter’s Cathedral in Adelaide in 1869, South Australia’s Presbyterian governor, James Fergusson, remarked that the cathedral would be ‘a common