Early backlash over Church of England's exclusive right to perform marriages in South Australia

A wedding party outside a cottage in Coromandel Valley, about 1910.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia

At the very start of the province, only Church of England clergy could perform marriages in South Australia. This upset Protestant Dissenters who were anxious that the Church of England would not be the established state church of South Australia.

The founders had wanted to make South Australia the first British colony not to have state support of religion. But, when the South Australia Act went through the British parliament, the House of Lords inserted a “chaplaincy clause” giving the crown the power to power to appoint “Chaplains and Clergymen of the Established Church of England or Scotland within South Australia.”

Only two chaplains were appointed this way and the clause was dropped with the passing of the South Australia Act 1838.

The Dissenters were satisfied when colony’s first Marriage Act 1842 extended authority to perform weddings to other Protestant (Congregational, Baptist, Methodist etc) ministers and to rabbis, who had to seek a licence for each marriage performed. Priests of the Roman Catholic Church got the same right in 1844.

Civil registration was allowed from 1842, and previous marriages were legalised. The scarcity of clergy prompted Marriage Act (1852, 1867) allowing civil marriage.

The Deceased Wife’s Sister Act 1870, permitting a widower to marry his sister-in-law, was an ongoing controversy: the British crown disallowed the four bills passed by the South Australian parliament on this matter from 1857.  Marriage for a woman to her deceased husband’s brother was legalised in South Australia in 1925.