Southern Cross and Model T

Press, 10 March 1984, Page 18

Southern Cross and Model T

Melanesians at Mission Bay. By R. M. Ross. N.Z. Historical Places Trust, 1983. 95 pp. $10.95. A Pioneering Ministry. By Harold Scott. Presbyterian Church of New Zealand, 1983. 94 pp. $9.86. (Reviewed by Jim Gardner) Contrasting light is thrown on the history of evangelism in New Zealand by these two short studies. In 1847 Bishop Selwyn planned a great Anglican mission field in Melanesia. Its heart was to be a missionary college in Auckland. Between 1849 and 1867 groups of Melanesian students were annually brought to St John’s College and then to Kohimarama, now Mission Bay. The essential link across the South Pacific was provided by the mission’s ships, notably the three which bore in turn the name “Southern

Cross.” The enterprise was taken over in 1856 by J. C. Patteson, first Bishop of Melanesia and one of the most devoted and enlightened of Pacific missionaries. By the mid-1860s he had come to see that Kohimarama was unsuitable and had closed the college well before his tragic death in 1871. Epidemics had been frequent among the students, and 17 or more had died. The human cost of establishing the Melanesian Mission was high. The late Ruth Ross wrote this meticulous account as a background to the surviving mission building at Mission

Bay, now owned by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust.

The Presbyterian principle of an educated and ordained ministry could not be applied fully in colonial New Zealand. Presbyterians in remote districts would have been deprived of the services of the church; the cardinal Presbyterian principle of evangelism would have been greatly frustrated. The gold rushes of the 1860 s compelled the Otago Presbytery to commission its first home missionary. Thereafter the realities of scattered settlement had to be faced. By 1913 there were 80 home missionaries. They formed virtually a second-class clergy, generally not well-educated and miserably paid — £l2O to £l4O per annum for married men in 1913.

Efficient instrument, and perhaps symbol of the system at its peak in the 19205, was the Model T Ford, the toughest and cheapest car for back country roads. The church could find no satisfactory way of educating or promoting the home missionaries out of existence, and the system survived on a rather makeshift basis until 1964. There is too much organisational detail in the text; it would have been condensed in appendices. A list of home missionaries serving for a significant period should have been provided, thus rescuing many faithful men from undeserved anonymity.