A MISSIONARY BISHOP.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIII, Issue 4, 5 January 1907, Page 16

A MISSIONARY BISHOP.

In our Australian summary will be found a brief accouut of a new bishopric to be established in Western Australia as soon as the necessary funds, some £10,000, are raised. A few additional particulars will be of interest. Tho founding of the new see has been sanctioned by the General Synod of Australia, and at the request of that body Dr. Riley has taken up his mission. Before leaving West Austialia £5000 was promised him. Sinco then he has ,ittended the Church Congress in Victoria, and has visited, in addition to Melbourne, Ballarat, Bendigo, Bri&bane, Grafton, and Armidale, Newcastle, and Sydney, and Hobart, returning home by way of Adelaide. "I have been very hospitably leceived everywhere," Dr. Riley lemarked to a representative of the Daily Telegraph, " and am hopeful that a thousand or two may iiccrue from my efforts. The people over here seem to think, however, that we should raibo tho money ourselves. It is a fact that West Australia has been producing for some years immense quantities of gold, but the dividends do not etay in the State. Neither does a large proportion of the wages earned. The miners, to a large extent, come to us from the eastern States, where they left their wives and families, and much of the money they received they sent away. A change is taking place now, but up to the present Melbourne and Adelaide have had much of the benefit from the mining industry of our State. The business between those cities and West Australia has been enormous." For some ten years after his appointment to the See of Perth; Dr. Riley had the whole State under his episcopal jurisdiction, and he has travelled on an average about twenty thousand miles every year in the performance of his duties. "It may not seem very much on a railway," ho said, " but it means a lot when it has to be done for the most part in buggies or on horseback. , Just before leaving on this visit I had a five-hundred-mile trip by buggy." Two years ago a portion of West Australia on the southwest was cut off and formed into the See of Bunbury. Compared with what was left it was small, but nevertheless the area was larger than that of Victoria. ( " The new bishopric will be essentially a missionary one," Dr. Riley says, " Jnd the bishop must travel about. There is no big population centre in it. Jt will be a very large see, with very few people. I think there are about ten thousand whites. There has never been a census of the blacks, but, according to Dr. Klnatsch, a German .scientist, who

has beoii making investigations among them, there aio more than people generally Mippose. There might be forty thousand ; 1 cannot say. In the north are cattle stations, and further south sheep fctations. Then there are .the goldfields at Marble Bar, and the pearl fisheries at Broome. In the fisheries, of course, there aie a great many aliens, principally Malays. We started an aboriginal mission some years ago at Forest River, fifteen hundred miles from Perth. One of the men got speared and nearly killed, und another had his head knocked in, also almost with fatal results. The station had to be abandoned. It was too far away. There was a mail only once in two months, and it took a fortnight's travelling to get theie. If lh e natives Bpear the cattle, they are punished, and then the first white man that comes along catches it. That is tho trouble. The blacks aie a fino race of people, capable of civilisation ; and much of the land is adapted for the production of tropical crops and for tropical industries. We have an aboriginal mission on an island in King George's Sound." Speaking of Church matters on the goldfields, Dr. Riley said the need was for suitable men for the work. There ttas ample opportunity there, and -there Would be. ample support for clergymen who knew how to deal with the digger. One of the troubles was that the population was of such a moving character.