The Right Reverend Associate Professor Tom Frame (born 1962, Sydney, New South Wales) is an Australian Anglican bishop, historian, academic, author, and social commentator.
Frame was raised in Wollongong by his adoptive parents.
He joined the Royal Australian Naval College, HMAS Creswell, as a 16 year-old Cadet Midshipman in January 1979. Frame was assigned to as a junior officer under training, and earned his helmsman's certificate that year, which he briefly describes in the preface to his history of the Royal Australian Navy, No Pleasure Cruise. He then studied Asian history at the University of New South Wales, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (honours), and was awarded the W.J. Liu Memorial Prize for Excellence in Chinese Studies in 1984.
Frame was the Inaugural Summer Vacation Scholar at the Australian War Memorial in 1985, then completed his training in HMA Ships Jervis Bay and Supply before serving in the shore establishment HMAS Cerberus as an instructor. He took on the additional duties as director of the base's museum and was a consultant to the Australian National Maritime Museum, meanwhile studying for a Diploma in Education from the University of Melbourne.
Lieutenant Frame was appointed Research Officer to the Chief of Naval Staff at Navy Office in Canberra during 1988. Two years later he undertook study in military history at the Australian Defence Force Academy leading to the award of a PhD in October 1991, taking as his thesis topic the Melbourne-Voyager collision. He served as a staff officer at the Headquarters, Australian Defence Force, then resigned from the RAN in 1992.
Ministry
Frame then completed a Master of Theology degree with a thesis entitled The Delphic Sword: Reconciling Christianity and Military Service in Australia, and trained for the priesthood in the Anglican Church of Australia in the Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn.
He was ordained in 1993 and appointed curate of St John’s Church in Wagga Wagga and a Visiting Scholar at Charles Sturt University. In 1995, he was inducted as Rector of St James’ church, Binda.
In 1996-97, he took leave in England and completed a Master of Arts (Honours) in Applied Theology at the University of Kent at Canterbury as the Lucas Tooth Scholar, and ministered in the United Benefice of Hever, Four Elms and Markbeech in the Diocese of Rochester.
He became Rector of St Philip’s Church, Bungendore, in January 1999 and was appointed Lecturer (half-time) in Public Theology in St Mark’s National Theological Centre at Canberra in 2000.
On 28 June 2001, he was consecrated bishop, and appointed as the fifth Anglican Bishop to the Australian Defence Force.
Academic career
In January 2007 he relinquished his position as Anglican Bishop to the Defence Force to commence a new position as Director (with the title of Associate Professor) of St Mark's National Theological Centre at Barton in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, a college of Charles Sturt University.
Tom Frame is a regular commentator on radio, notably the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on military history, church history, and social matters.
Bishop Frame was the only Anglican bishop to support the Government of Australia in its support for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. On 18 June 2004 he recanted that support in a newspaper article titled Forgive me, I was wrong on Iraq in which he said, in part, "... in the absence of any clear mitigation, there is no alternative to concluding that the March 2003 invasion was neither just nor necessary ... I continue to seek God's forgiveness for my complicity in creating a world in which this sort of action was ever considered to be necessary."
He married Helen in 1983. They have two daughters, Megan and Kelly and two granddaughters who all live in Canberra.
Frame met his birth mother in the late 1990s, but remains much closer to his adoptive parents, which he discussed in his autobiography, Binding Ties: an experience of adoption and reunion in Australia (1999).
He was convenor of the first Australian Naval History Seminar and co-edited its proceedings, Reflections on the RAN (1991)
Where Fate Calls: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy (on which the 1992 Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Four Corners television documentary The Cruel Legacy was based)
Pacific Partners: A History of Australian-American Naval Relations (1992)
HMAS Sydney: Loss and Controversy (on which the 1993 Channel 9 television documentary No Survivor was based)
Mutiny! Naval Insurrections in Australia and New Zealand.
Binding Ties: an experience of adoption and reunion in Australia (1999), his autobiography
The Shores of Gallipoli: Naval Aspects of the Anzac Campaign (2000)
Living by the Sword? The Ethics of Armed Intervention (2004) (second prize, 2005 Australian Christian Literature Society's Australian Christian Book of the Year awards)
The Life and Death of Harold Holt (2005). Allen & Unwin / National Archives of Australia. ISBN 1741146720.
He co-authored:
Where the Rivers Run: A History of the Anglican Parish of Wagga Wagga (1995)
Labouring in Vain: A History of Bishopthorpe (1996)
The Seven Churches of Binda: the history of an Anglican rural parish (1998)
A Church for a Nation (2000), a commissioned history of the Anglican Diocese of Canberra & Goulburn.
