German Missionaries in Australia

Born in August 1799 in Greenock, Scotland, Lang grew up amidst the hustle and bustle of industrial towns on the banks of the river Clyde. His family being of modest means, Lang’s mother dedicated him to pursuing a life in the ministry from his infancy and raised him accordingly. Aged 12, Lang commenced his divinity studies at the University of Glasgow, where he won several prizes, and was influenced by Evangelical minister Rev. Dr. Thomas Chalmers, who aside from instructing Lang in scripture, appears to have also inspired an interest in social welfare and the natural world.[1]

 

In April 1820, John Lang was granted the degree of Master of Arts and was ordained by the Presbytery of Irvine in September, 1822  [2] In 1821 Lang’s younger brother, George had made his way to Australia where he was granted 1000 acres of land by Governor Macquarie. Observing the lack of Presbyterian ministers in the colony, John obtained permission from the Scots Church to commence the first Presbyterian ministry in Sydney.  [3]  One month later on board the Andromeda bound for Australia, he befriended an Anglo-German family from Hamburg by the name of Leakes. Wishing to learn German, he conversed with them often and made it his daily routine to transcribe seven chapters from their German bible into English each day. Whilst onboard, Lang also ministered on the Sabbath and was a keen observer of the natural world, particularly when stopovers permitted the passengers to go ashore.[4]

 

He spent three weeks in Hobart then transshipped on the Brixton reaching Sydney on 23 May 1823. Clearly, a great deal of evangelical work lay ahead of him. His first impressions of the natural beauty of the town were soon blighted by his observations of its social condition. He decried Sydney as ‘old in vice, and young in virtue’.[5].

 

 

Lang’s first project in the new colony was the establishment of the Presbyterian Church which began with the building of the Scots Church in Sydney. This project like many after it, found Lang embroiled in church politics and colonial power struggles. Matters were often complicated by his tendency not to keep conventional financial records. He regularly used funds raised or borrowed for one project to begin another, without thought of how to repay or keep records, his personal notes revealing his intention for God to provide and sort out the matter. On a few occasions this approach landed him in gaol.[7] In 1826 Lang was awarded his Doctor of Divinity from the University of Glasgow. He hoped that this might strengthen his negotiating power with the colonial authorities.[8]

 

Lang was keenly interested in recruiting suitable Protestant migrants to potential new areas of settlement to stem the tide of expanding Catholicism, and he was mindful that both new settler communities and the Aborigines whom they displaced required pastoral care. In 1824 a penal settlement was established at Moreton Bay. Lang’s interest in a mission to the Aborigines of Moreton Bay began around 1831.

 

At that time only two missions existed in New South Wales, behind the Blue Mountains (Wellington Valley) and at the Newcastle convict settlement (Lake Macquarie) in charge of Threlkeld, a former actor. In Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) G.A. Robinson, a former bricklayer, had acquired some reputation for a ‘journey of reconciliation’ in 1830. He commenced Wybalenna mission in January 1835, by which time another mission had started at the Swan River penal colony (Western Australia). Both it and the Wellington Valley mission now had German staff.[9]

 

In that year Lang launched an attack on the lack of qualifications among missionaries in Australia. It was like

 

‘taking Tom Dick and Harry from their benches, their lasts and their looms and transforming them all at once into the Rev. Mr Thomas, and the Rev. Mr. Richard, and the Rev. Mr. Henry’.[10]

 

His vituperation was generally understood as an attack on Thelkeld, and Lang was convicted of libel. He soon started to recruit German missionaries (whose training equally had been fast-tracked for heathen mission), and later established an Australian College at which a number of them obtained their high school certificates. This suggests that his criticism was not so much directed at the training of the missionaries, but at their denominational background.

 

Lang initially sought to interest Scottish missionaries, but they could not be enticed, since the British colonies offered more fruitful mission fields. During a European voyage to recruit migrants to New South Wales in 1837 Lang met with a banker who enquired about the prospects for a contingent of German missionaries to travel to Australia. 11] These missionaries were trained by the Reverend Johannes Gossner, a pastor in the Bohemian church in Berlin. Lang described Gossner as a former Roman Catholic, who, due to a doctrinal difference of opinion, had converted to Presbyterianism and a belief that the church should be a ‘free servant of the Lord’, a sentiment with which Lang heartily agreed.[12]

 

Lang secured the sum of £450 from the British government to contribute to the cost of transporting the missionary group from Berlin to Scotland and then on to Sydney and finally to Moreton Bay. His brother Andrew contributed a further £150 obtained from the Colonial government under the bounty system which was set up to encourage skilled immigration to New South Wales. Still, because of the size of the group, there was a ‘considerable deficiency’ in the available funds. Lang borrowed further finance, and the group departed from Lang’s home town of Grenock in September 1837 to establish Queensland's first Aboriginal mission at Zion Hill.[13]

 

Among the handful of Aboriginal missions then operating in the Australian colonies, Germans were already involved in the Swan River mission at Mt Eliza since 1836, at Pt. Lincoln near Adelaide, and at Wellington Valley in the Blue Mountains (since 1831, see Earliest Missions). In 1838, when the Gossner missionaries arrived at Zion Hill, two other German missionaries from Dresden were established in South Australia. In both New South Wales and South Australia these missionaries preceded large-scale immigration from Germany.

 

Lang had secured assurances in London that the colonial government’s Land Fund would match any public contributions to the German mission at Zion Hill on a pound for pound basis.It was Lang’s intention to raise awareness of the mission throughout the colony and raise money to continue its work. However in early 1839, church business and his efforts in securing emigrants to Australia took him to Britain and Europe for two years. Lang lamented the difficulties that his absence caused the mission. Although he had always recommended the scheme to the government as being run 'along Moravian lines’ (aiming to be self-supporting) he pointed out that the lack of financial security meant the missionaries had to labour to supply their own ‘necessities of life’ and that this distracted them from their mission work. 16]

 

Before leaving for England, Lang addressed the annual meeting of the society in aid of the German missions at Moreton Bay referring to the violent treatment of Aborigines at the Myall Creek massacre in June 1838, emphasising that such actions ‘increased tenfold the obligation of Christians to provide them (the Aborigines) with the gospel of their Saviour’.[17]

 

Whilst in London in October, 1839 Lang made a public appeal throughout Great Britain for ‘whatever sums may be contributed for the German mission’, after giving a detailed account of the difficulties faced in the mission work based on ‘epistles’ sent from Reverends Eipper and Schmidt. In particular he emphasised the responsibility that Great Britain should feel toward the Aborigines of New South Wales noting that their land had been taken without payment , their people contaminated and ruined by European vices and that they were subject to random acts of violence despite their general character being ‘helpless and unoffending’[18]. Lang declared that he remained personally indebted in the sum of £350 for the initial missionary venture in October 1839. He needed, moreover, more missionaries, and therefore more donations.

 

That same month he secured £150 pounds from the Agent General for New South Wales for the ‘outfit and passage’ of Reverend Rudolph Krause who was to replace Moritz Schneider as the medically trained member of the Zion Hill staff. Reverend Krause had also trained at the Berlin Missionary Institution, like the other Zion Hill missionaries, and studied medicine at the University of Berlin.[19]

 

Lang’s return to Australia was fraught with trouble. He was the subject of attacks by the Presbyterian Church hierarchy who complained of his frequent absences from his pulpit. Affronted by the discipline of the Presbytery, Lang resigned from the synod but his parishioners successfully defended his right to stay at the pulpit.[20]

 

During 1842 and 1843 Lang continued to take an interest in the German mission. Apparently the mission received an annual grant from the missionary Society in Berlin.[21] Its public subscriptions had dwindled during his absence. Lang reorganized the committee along interdenominational lines in March 1842 but in October 1843 the government, and the committee, withdrew their funding. [22] 

 

Reverends Eipper and Schmidt sent Lang detailed accounts of their missionary work at Moreton Bay. Although he had never seen the place himself, Lang continued to praise the work of the mission, citing others who did the same, such as explorer Ludwig Leichardt, who visited the mission in 1843 and wrote,

 

 

In November 1845 Lang made his first trip to the settlement at Moreton Bay, twice visiting the German mission at Zion Hill. By this time Eipper had left, and Schmidt was disillusioned. Only some of the lay missionaries were still hopeful, having made a living for themselves and their families and formed an attachment to the place. A number of them later attended his Australian College. After his visit to Moreton Bay Lang’s attentions were often turned elsewhere. He composed a poem about his feelings about missionary work. [25]

 

 

 

In 1850 Lang commenced the Australian College, for which he recruited William Ridley (1819-1878) from Essex. Ridley had intended to work as a missionary to Aborigines, and was ordained by Lang, and married Isabella (nee Cotter). He later began an itinerant ministry in New England, which he extended to Moreton Bay in1855, attempting to interest Haussmann in the scheme. Ridley undertook linguistic work on Kamilaroi and Turrbal, and later became a journalist.

 

Lang became a member of the Legislative Council of New South Wales for almost 25 years, campaigning for responsible government and manhood suffrage. He became heavily involved in immigration schemes, emphasizing that middle-class Protestants would stabilize and enrich colonial society. He continued to preach and was involved in the affairs of the Presbyterian Church until his retirement in 1872. Lang wrote extensively and was completing his autobiography, Reminiscences of my Life and Times at the time of his death from a stroke on 9 August 1878.[26]

 

Lang devoted his life and energies to many causes, and suffered a great deal of personal tragedy throughout his life; only 3 of his children survived him and he was left without grandchildren to carry on his name. His sister Isabella, however, bore a son who was to head a family of several generations. Peter Muir, the eldest son of the sixth generation since Isabella married Pukunga of the Ngalia tribe in Western Australia in 1968. Together they had three children, Kado, Talbot and Zabar.[27] And so the bloodline of the Scot who had been so devoted to the cause of the Aboriginal mission, joined with that of the people whom he had intended to save by bringing them the word of God.

 

The indigenous people of York’s Hollow in Brisbane were finally displaced with the arrival of Lang-initiated migrants in January 1849. Some 550 pious Protestant dissenters arrived on the Fortitude, Chaseley and Lima during that year, finding that their land orders were not underwritten by the government, and ‘armed to the teeth’ took up temporary encampment at York’s Hollow, later called Fortitude Valley.[28]

 

 

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