This article examines the knowledge-creation project called Sociology that was launched in Australia between 1955 and 1975. An energetic founding group created a network of departments, assembled a workforce and were rewarded with rapid growth. Their intellectual project emphasized data collection, scientificity and social reform, closely modelled on sociology in the global metropole. Underneath was a mostly functionalist concept of ‘a society’ and a strong conviction that Australian society was a case of modernity. They succeeded in creating an empiricist science, which played a role in Australian reformism in the 1970s and 1980s, and reached a high point in the work of Jean Martin. However many younger sociologists were dissatisfied with the founders’ science and launched other knowledge projects in the following decades. The founders’ strategy for making sociology in Australia led to a deep contradiction about Australian coloniality, unresolved in contemporary sociology.