Robin describes Jo Booth’s steady rise to the leadership of Melbourne’s Anglicans in Booth’s own terms – ‘independence gumption, and grit’, ‘making the most of every opportunity’. Born of sturdy Yorkshire yeoman stock in 1866 (his father had already died), orphaned at thirteen, he ran away from his uncle’s farm and quickly made a way for himself, first as a farm hand and then as a traveller for a chain of grocery stores. He soon realised that Edwardian England, with its ‘stiffly middle class prejudices’ offered few opportunities for a man lacking formal schooling or family connections. If he were ever to realise his ambitions – to be a man able to stand on his own feet and yet also win the confidence and friendship of his fellow men – it would be in the colonies, where enterprise could sometimes reap ‘surprising rewards’.

Perhaps because of the friendship of an Anglican family during his lonely years, he early formed a desire to enter the ordained ministry, and, as soon as he had the means, he entered the newly founded Ridley College, Melbourne. His strengths were not academic but pastoral, as his successful curacy at St Stephen’s Richmond proved. He found he could get on well with people of all kinds.

He was ordained priest at Christmas 1915 and almost immediately responded to the call for more men for the forces in Europe, serving as padre on the front-line trenches of France.

This is the best part of the book, perhaps because Booth’s letters reveal more of his anxieties and personal faith than they do in later life, perhaps because it is here that he emerges most strongly as a man of concern (if not deep compassion) for others.

A short stay in England at the end of the war confirmed his opinion that he was best suited for Australia. The English Church did not tempt him – of one local parson he said:

Very wealthy, surrounded by beautiful things, and yet in spite of all his appreciation of beauty, he had very little love for personalities. I do not enjoy arguments, but I really could not let pass, and acquiesce in some of the assertions he made.

            Characteristically, Booth’s protests did not go as far as making a definite, positive plea for the needs of people. Unlike his great contemporaries, Bell and Temple, he seemed unable to speak for: his concern for justice halted at the point of ‘not acquiescing’.

Between the wars he showed little awareness of the worldwide dimension of the problems and opportunities facing the Church, but his ready abilities as administrator and warmly accepted parish priest came into their own. The universal respect he enjoyed in both Church and community made him an obvious choice for Archbishop in 1942.

His reign as Archbishop fulfilled this progress. He could speak and act for a very wide range of people – it was he who was chosen to open the Olympic Games at what was perhaps Melbourne’s proudest moment. Yet this was the era of popular churchgoing, and Robin fails to bring out how little content there was in Booth’s work.

In 1946, at the time of the strikes, he wrote in the Church of England Messenger:

we are members one of another and if we cannot use the resources of this country wisely and happily we shall find that others will covet our opportunity and perhaps take our possessions.

He projected his personal philosophy onto society as a whole, but one cannot help asking whether there was not something rather unconcerned for others. Why did he stop short of calling on both employer and worker to cease grasping selfishly at resources? Granted the prophetic insight that selfish use of resources may well merit the coming of others to take them for themselves, why did he not make a prophetic call for repentance, challenging the nation to turn from desiring to be rich at the expense of others?

One feels that Booth lacked the spiritual basis from which to speak of becoming ‘poor, yet making many rich’ – that his philosophy of capitalising on the opportunity was fundamentally self-regarding. Booth’s words were so conventional, so much just what many people wanted to hear, because the idea of using resources ‘wisely and happily’ all too easily means using them for one’s own prosperity, prudentially securing one’s own well-being at the expense of others.

Booth believed that communism ‘flourished under discontent and poverty’, but he had little to say about alleviating that discontent. While Mowll of Sydney was challenging men to costly obedience to Jesus Christ, Booth had no vision capable of changing people.

It may be objected that considerations of this kind are beyond the scope of a memoir, yet a man who occupies the office of Archbishop affects the lives of many others for good or ill. He is to feed the flock, and one feels that the material presented in this book invites a more critical appraisal of a man in high office.