In Australia, as in many other parts of the world, ideas and practices that have come to be termed the Enlightenment shepherded in modernity and installed measures of value, frameworks for social decision making and yardsticks for public debate. The subject of our discussion below is the way in which Enlightenment ideas, often those from the British Enlightenment, came to form the terms and values of early New South Wales’ (NSW) public culture and social order, favouring some traditions while marginalising and suppressing others.

Enlightenment thought took shape in relationship to the traditions present in the colony, despite the difficulty much Enlightenment thought had in acknowledging other traditions as a condition of understanding and as valuable in their own right. The specific circumstances of Australian colonisation and the presence of both supporting and resistant traditions meant that the mainly British Enlightenment ideas in Australia took on specific characteristics.