Douglas Price was a Church of England Minister born in Birmingham to a father who was a Society of Friends Minister. Price developed a strong religious commitment at an early age and attended the Roman Catholic and Church of England churches. He was baptised in the Church of England at eighteen and decided at twenty-two to take orders. Price took a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts from Durham University, then worked for five years as a curate at St. Mark's, Leicester. In 1903 he came to Queensland as Principal of the Brisbane Theological College and Rector of All Saints' Church.
In Australia Price became a mystic, abandoning the doctrines of the Trinity, the Atonement, the Virgin Birth, the physical resurrection and the deity of Jesus. He was also sympathetic to eugenics and reincarnation. Pat Buckridge (2006): 144 claims that Price 'made common cause with liberal Unitarians in Sydney and Adelaide, and with the Theosophists, whose world leader, Annie Besant, he publicly defended from attacks by Fundamentalists on the occasion of her visit to Brisbane in 1908'. Price greatly admired writers like Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walter Pater, Gustave Flaubert and Edgar Allan Poe. He also espoused the Greek ideal of Platonic love between men in The Earthly Purgatory (1912) and may have been the object of the poet Peter Austen's affections (Buckridge, 2006). Despite Price's strong following at All Saints, the Archbishop called for his resignation at the end of 1910. The local newspapers published letters and articles for weeks about the issue. Price admitted he was a Modernist at a meeting of the Congregation and said he had no logical or constitutional rights to fight on. The Congregation almost unanimously supported their Minister and a petiton to the Archbishop was drawn up but to no avail. Price left for England in April 1911; a strong plea was made for his return and in December 1911 he arrived back in Brisbane. He devoted himself to the cause of Modernism for the next five years, delivering two addresses each Sunday and mid-week lectures until his death
Price edited The Modernist (1912-1916), a 32 page bi-monthly journal which was really an extension of The Cygnet, the diocesan magazine he edited in his All Saints days. Many of his sermons were subsequently published in The Forerunner (1914-1916), edited by Price on behalf of the Modernist Association of Queensland..
(Source: Patrick Buckridge, 'Being Elsewhere: Aesthetics, Identities and Alienation in Peter Austen's Life and Poetry', Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 5 (2006): 133-150; A. Ralston, 'Biographical Sketch', in Meredith Atkinson The Place of Ethics and Religion in Education (1920): 5-17)
