Missions of Australia and Pacific Islands

Missions of Australia and Pacific Islands.

BY DR. SEYMOUR B. YOUNG, PRESIDENT OF THE FIRST COUNCIL OF SEVENTY.

The mission to Australia was opened in 1849, when President Brigham Young sent Elders Alva Hanks and Augustus Farnum, as advance messengers from Salt Lake valley, to that distant field of labor. Elder Hanks lost his life on the return voyage, but Elder Farnum returned safely home, after a lengthy mission in that far distant land. In the year about 1875, Isaac Groo, John M. Young and several others were sent as missionaries to Australia, to carry the gospel message. They were not, however, as successful in making converts and establishing branches of the Church as the missionaries have been since that day. Australia is the largest island in the world, and is properly named the "Island Continent." It measures 2,500 miles in length, from east to west, and 1,950 miles in breadth, and contains an area of three million square miles, nearly as large as the United States of America, leaving out Alaska. It is surrounded, on the west, by the Indian ocean, on the east by the South Pacific sea, on the north, and separating it from New Guinea, by the Torez strait, eighty miles wide, and on the south by the Bass strait, one hun- dred and forty miles in width, dividing it from Tasmania. The island of Tasmania, formerly known as Van Diemen's Land, though discovered at an earlier date, was more thoroughly explored by Tasma, a celebrated navigator, in 1861. Owing to the position of these islands, being situated at the antipodes of the civilized world, the region has longer been the terra incognita or Ultima Thule than any other part of the western world.

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New Zealand, another large island, lies twelve hundred miles east of the southeast coast of Australia, while the islands of Samoa are situated eighteen hundred miles east of Australia. This portion of our globe, known as Australasia, and compris- ing the island continent of New Guinea, Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand, is set, as its name implies, south of Asia. In its archipelago New Britain, Solomon Islands, New Hebrides, are Loyalty Islands, and New Caledonia. Australia was known as New Holland for many years after its discovery by the Dutch, in 1605. On the island of Australia proper, we have the following subdivisions or states: North Australia, including the Tropic of Capricorn; and western Aus- tralia, with its capital city of Perth; South Australia, with the city of Adelaide as its capital; and eastern Australia, or New South Wales, with Victoria as its capital city; Southeastern Australia with Melbourne as its capital; and just north of New South Wales lies Queensland, with Brisbane as its capital city. These great cities of Australia, above named, with those of Tas- mania and New Zealand, form the greater portion of our extreme Southern Pacific Mission, and are our missionary headquarters of the Australian and New Zealand missions. Looking from the southeast coast of Australia directly south 140 miles across the Bass Strait we see Tasmania. Its capital city is Hobart. Then southeast 1,200 miles onto New Zealand, capital city, Auckland, and east 1,800 miles to Samoa; and in all these four great groups of islands, in their capital cities, we have missionary headquarters. Then further west we have the Society Islands, with missionary headquarters at Tahiti; and the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands northeast from Tahiti. Australia was successfully explored from south to north by a Mr, Stuart, making his third venturesome journey of discovery, starting from Adelaide in 1865 and crossing the Island of Austra- lia to the Indian ocean. Since that time the electric tele-

graph from Adelaide to Melbourne, Sidney, and other Aus- line

tralian cities, has been established along this route marked by Mr. Stuart. The greater cities of Australia and Tasmania, with the excep- tion of Adelaide, were founded by the convicts that were shipped

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from Great Britain, beginning in 1803; and continuing without interruption until 1836, consisting of political and poaching con- vict prisoners, and these island cities became the Botany Bay for convicc colonies from 1803 to 1865, when great Britain ceased alto- gether sending convicts and criminals to Australia and Tasmania, as a better class of people were settling up these two great coun- tries, and the descendants of the original citizens were found to be good, reliable citizens. The Society and Sandwich Islands were discovered by Captain Cook, and explored by him toward the close of the eighteenth century. We have a missionary headquarters at Sidney, with C. A. Orme as president, and forty-four missionaries; another one at Auk- land, New Zealand, with George Bowles, president, and fifty-three missionaries; another at Apia, Samoa, with William A. Moody president, and nineteen missionaries; also missionary headquarters at Tahiti, Society Islands, with William A. Seegmiller, president, and twelve missionaries; also on the Hawaiian Islands, with Sam- uel E. Woolley, president, with twenty-four missionary elders, four lady missionaries, and two native missionaries. This mission has a large sugar plantation, making it self-sustaining. The sugar plan- tation, as well as the missionaries are under the direction and charge of President W'oolley. On Van Diemen's Land, or the Island of Tasmania, a penal colony was established as early as 1803. The intention of Great Britain was to colonize the more dangerous political prisoners of her realm, more especially the Irish rebels of 1798, upon this island. For almost a quarter of a century it was known as a con- vict settlement under the immediate control of the Governor of New South Wales. In 1810 the population of this island num- bered only 1,300 souls. Bush ranging was rife, and there was no guarantee of safety for life or property. In 1825 Van Diemen's land had reached a population of 8,000, was separated from New South Wales, and made a separate colony under the governorship of Sir George Arthur, who continued to control until 1836. He was an autocrat and a very strict disciplinarian, at times, maybe too severe, but his discipline seemed necessary to control the con- victs, and to protect the colony and prepare it for the near future hwen the good among the convicts should be permitted to dom-

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inate. This brought about an uplift of the general situation, and opened the way for a cessation of convict transportation to that colony, which was practically realized in 1837. During these years of expansion and trial there was almost a constant war waged against the natives. This was called the Black War. An attempt was made by the white people to establish a cordon across the island and hem in the natives, but peaceful measures prevailed with them, and by a treaty the natives were finally relegated to Flinders' Island. Sir John Franklin, of arctic exploration fame, succeeded Sir George Arthur as governor, and the emigration of free people was encouraged. Thus for years the struggle continued against con- vict transportation. At length a league was formed by the other colonies, and in 1850 the iniquitous system that England had established of transporting convicts to Van Diemen's land ceased, and in order to efface the stigma attached to the island because of the terrible cruelties inflicted upon the convicts of earlier years of this penal settlement, the name was changed from Van Diemen's land to Tasmania, in honor of the great explorer Tasman. The wonder is that these penal stations were not broken up long before the mandate was made for their abolishment. The settlement of South Australia was, however, an exception to the convict rule. Here no penal colony was established, but a num- ber of London gentlemen secured a grant of a large tract of land from the government of Great Britain. Permission to enlist volunteers from the well-to-do classes of Great Britain to purchase this land in small farms for about twelve shillings per acre was obtained, and the money thus secured from the sale of this land, was used in paying the passage of these volunteers, consisting of laboring men and women, to this new colony. These immigrants were not only paid liberal wages for cultivating the land, but were allowed to purchase a few acres so that very early in its history the tillers of the soil became the owners thereof, and a measure was introduced into Parliament by the originators of the colony (and this measure soon became a law), that no poacher or political offender or person convicted of any misdemeanor or crime should be sent there. Hence the capital city, named Adelaide, became from the first a prosperous city, and was settled by a superior

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class to those who had settled Sidney or Brisbane or Melbourne or any part of Tasmania. It mattered little in early times in what part of the island of

Van Diemen these convicts were located. There was no difference in the punishments and cruelties inflicted upon them, and it would be a stretch of the imagination to suppose that greater cruelties were ever perpetrated in Siberia. Weighted down with heavy chains, which made walking almost impossible, the convict was made to toil in the woods near by his prison from day to day and from month to month. If he complained of illness, he was accused of malignering, and his complaint only increased the brutality of his jailer, until worn out with lashings and solitary confinement and starvation, he sunk down and died, hailing death as a welcome relief from his cruel master. Flogging was given with a cat-of- nine tails, a cruel whip with nine leather thongs attached to a stock, each thong tipped with metal, so that when applied to the naked and bent back, small pieces of flesh would be gouged out of the poor sufferer's body at every blow from these cruel lashes. Then as a sequel to the lashing, solitary confinement without food was added to the poor sufferer's misery, and if he survived these measures, in many instances he only waited an opportunity to pounce upon his jailer and strangle him to death, knowing for this he would be im- mediately executed by hanging, but preferring this ignominious death, to his life of torture. The motto of the convicts became "Anywhere, anywhere, to get out of the world." It must also be remembered that these convicts were not all criminals, but in many cases political offenders, and in others, men who were sent for life to these penal colonies because they had stolen a rabbit from the forest or game preserves of some English baron, in many cases hunger prompting them to make the theft. "It is with shame," says a well-known writer, "one has to admit that such cruelties were not only possible under the con- vict system, but that for so many years the people of Great Brit- ain were the instigators of convict colonies, which made it possible for their agents, appointed as jailers over these unfortunate peo- ple, with a few honorable exceptions— to torture and kill them according to their own depraved dispositions— so that Australia and Van Diemen's land, with their penal colonies, became the dread and scourge of the British nation."