Excerpt taken from "In the Ministry of Boggins: The History of the Urielates in East Australia and beyond", Archangel Press, Sydney 1987.
"…for this reason that the followers of the Ginead faith became known as Urielates even before landfall was made at Botany Bay. Initially judged a breach of discipline and a possible threat, they were harshly suppressed but the Word spread quickly amongst the convict population. The British officers soon noted the increased discipline and morals of Boggis’ flock, particularly compared to the lack of enthusiasm for discipline displayed by the marines. As overseers were picked, they were more often than not chosen from the ranks of the Urielates. In the harsh and alien environment of the new colony, the new faith began to spread through the convict population. There were many initial successes in this period, including the construction of the First Temple of Brickfields by the architect convert James Bloodsworth; and the missionary work of the negro prophet John Caesar among the aborigines.
Eventually, the power of the military in the form of the N.S.W. Corps became intolerable. Maintaining a reign of terror through the use of the vile rum imported illegally, the Corps clashed repeatedly with the Urielates until zealots were forced to rise against them. This uprising, brutally crushed, led to the exodus across the God’s Glory mountains to the west of Sydney of almost a thousand converts in 1809. The first Free Urielate city was founded there, Tabernacle, with the assistance of the local aborigines, many of whom had recieved the Word of the Archangel already thanks to enterprising bush prophets.
The labor shortages this caused in Sydney forced the authorities to bring in greater numbers of convicts, many of which eventually escaped into the bush and found their way to the holy community being built in Tabernacle. As time passed, three societies developed separately on the Australian continent and it’s islands. The first, the classist convict settlements of the East Coast, where marines, administrators and their descendants formed the ruling Exclusive class and freed convicts and their offspring, the Emancipists, were never treated as anything more than second-class citizens. In the interior, the blessings of God and the natural fertility of the land, combined with a respect and love for the native inhabitants, saw the holy community of the Urielates spread far and wide raising crops and droving cattle and sheep. Meanwhile, New Holland, Van Dieman’s Land and New Zealand were almost entirely settled by freemen, creating societies that were soulless but prosperous thanks to the so-called “Dutch Luck”.
The N.S.W. authorities regarded the Urielates as “squatters” and constant skirmishes were fought, often in the depths of the God’s Glory mountains where the coastal and interior cultures came face to face. In most cases, the zealots were victorious over the philistinic invaders, until the beginning of the reign of the Bitch Queen Victoria II in..."
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The above text gives most of the information you need, but to make it clear: a convict named William Boggins recieved a visitation from the archangel Uriel while being transported to the Botany Bay penal colony for the crime of stealing a bedsheet. His revelations spread through the convicts aboard the vessel, and a holy book is composed. The religion, while heavily derivative of elements of Anglicism and Irish Catholicism, diverges much further from Christianity than, say, Mormonism. The Urielates believe in an orthopraxic faith wherein Right Action and following the Law is more important than belief, where there is a single unitary God, wherein prophets (including Jesus, demoted from Son of God) recieved the word of archangels who are the intermediaries between man and the awesome creative/destructive power of God.
The Urielate community swells in the penal colonies and runs afoul of the colonial authorities, forcing them to flee into the outback. They spread throughout the interior region before British colonials can get there by intermingling with the aborigines (All men are equal before the glory of God | Prejudice of language or skin is the tool of Satan - Book of Caesar 28:12-13) and maintaining a high birth rate. Continual wars with British colonials eventually were brought to an end by the might of the British Empire, but this eventually led to Urielatism spreading into the cities in the early 20th century as the faithful were pressganged into factories and ports of the coast to assist with war efforts.
Eventually, the Union of East Australia (despite multiple attempts, successful federation with New Holland, Van Diemen's Land and New Zealand always failed, due to various economic and social reasons and a fair dose of prejudice) became a "Gineadian" democracy. With an elected government overseen by powerful matriarchs and patriarchs, it is reasonably comparable with OTL Iran. To an OTL observer, East Australia is hard to judge as good or bad. On the one side, the aboriginal population is much higher and racism is unknown (contrasting strongly with New Holland, which has always had a strong "Yellow Peril" paranoia and is recieving influxes of former white minority ruler classes from southern Africa), and East Australia has helped to bring New Guinea economic prosperity. On the other hand, it's highly religious and has enough odd doctrines (mandated female circumcision at birth, f'rex) to give some pause.
Then again, if you like to go down to the beach to swim, surf and cook sausages and fish on the barbecue while watching adulterers, homosexuals and outspoken evolutionists being hanged, you'll probably love it.
