God's Lights in a New Land

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

Matthew 5:16

Throughout Australia’s short history, Christians have stood up and stood out. The influence of their Christian values has been the social glue and the key to meaning — the sure foundation upon which truth and freedoms are built. Novelist Kate Grenville wrote that “Australian history is full of all those incredible stories that nobody’s told.” Some of those include the following.

Robert Harkness (1880–1961), a most excellent musician

Robert Harkness was the son of Abraham and Jane Harkness, two deeply committed Christians. Born and raised in Bendigo, he displayed remarkable musical ability on the piano and organ from a very early age, and soon began to compose hymns. The whole direction of his life changed in 1902 when the R. A. Torrey–Charles M. Alexander missionary team visited Bendigo. His brilliant piano playing immediately caught the attention of Alexander, the mission’s song leader, who arranged for him to join the group.

Several months later, Harkness dedicated his life to Christ during a mission in Dunedin, New Zealand. From that time onwards — for the next sixty years — he devoted the whole of his talents, energy and expertise to the presentation of the Gospel through music, song and the spoken word. He travelled the world with the Torrey–Alexander and Chapman–Alexander teams, taking part in all their major missions, and composed in all over 2,500 gospel hymns. One of his best-loved hymns was I Met Jesus at the Foot of the Cross, written in 1922.

Charles La Trobe (1801–1875) and the Moravian influence

Charles Joseph La Trobe was the first governor of Victoria and a man of deep Christian convictions. Both his father and grandfather were personal friends of John Newton and William Wilberforce, and both were clergymen in the Moravian church — then the most missionary-minded of all the Protestant churches. La Trobe himself had trained for the Moravian ministry, was personally involved in the abolition of slavery, and was fully aware of the havoc which colonisation was wreaking on indigenous peoples all over the world.

The pioneer settlers of Victoria wanted to get rich quick. They wanted the colonial government to build roads, bridges and wharves so they could get their produce to market, and they wanted lots of land. That meant dispossessing the Aboriginal people. Imagine their horror when La Trobe arrived as superintendent of the infant colony of Port Phillip in 1839 and declared that he had different priorities — Christian priorities.

Encouraged by Alexander Thomson, a devout Presbyterian pastoralist, La Trobe invited the Moravians to send missionaries to work among the Aborigines. He granted them 25,000 acres of land at Lake Boga near Swan Hill, and the Moravian missionaries eventually achieved the only success which any mission to Aboriginal people achieved in the nineteenth century.

La Trobe was not only a champion of the indigenous people but also of culture — something of a poet, artist and musician. At considerable personal expense, he gave every encouragement to the development of churches and charitable, cultural and educational institutions. On Christmas Eve 1853 he had the satisfaction of hearing the Melbourne Philharmonic choral society give its first performance, a rendition of Handel’s Messiah. Among its choir members was David Mitchell, the father of Australia’s — and perhaps the world’s — most celebrated soprano, Dame Nellie Melba. Because La Trobe allowed his administration to be fashioned on Christian values, Nellie Melba’s father was able to express the talent that would rise to such a great height in his daughter.

William Guthrie Spence (1846–1926) and the conditions of work

Before the 1880s, most Australian workers had to work long hours, in bad conditions, for little money. Any worker who complained could lose their job. In the early 1880s, as Australia’s economy was growing, workers began to form trade unions to bargain with mine owners and pastoralists, finding that strength in numbers could win them a better deal.

Perhaps the greatest union organiser in Australian history was William Guthrie Spence, a Methodist preacher and a Presbyterian elder. The suburb of Spence in Canberra is named after him, and in 2003 the head office of the Australian Workers’ Union in Melbourne was also named in his honour — AWU secretary Bill Shorten calling him the founding father of the AWU.

The labour movement in Australia would have been a very different thing without Spence’s Christian heritage. Born in 1846 in the Orkney Islands, he was the grandson of a noted Presbyterian minister, and his mother taught her two sons to read from the Bible before they were six. Largely self-taught, he became widely read in the Bible, the classics, political ideas and economics, and made a close study of the lives of both Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul.

In 1874 he initiated a trade union, and from 1882 to 1891 was general secretary of the Amalgamated Miners’ Association. In 1886 he became foundation president of the Amalgamated Shearers’ Union of Australasia, and he later served in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly and the Federal House of Representatives. In his unexcelled concern for the working people of Australia, he always maintained that he was doing what Jesus would have him do for the downtrodden of society. He wrote in 1892 that “New Unionism was simply the teachings of that greatest of all social reformers, Him of Nazareth, whom all must revere.”

Bob Mellows and the impact of Jesus on the coal industry

Australia’s Christian heritage pops up in the most surprising places — even in the safety of workers in a dangerous industry. At the Cornwall coal mine in the Fingal Valley of Tasmania, between 1980 and 1990 there were about 200 accidents reported each year, and the company paid between $50,000 and $250,000 per annum in compensation. Then in 1991–92 the accident rate started to dip dramatically, so that by 1993 it was practically zero, and it has remained near zero ever since. So how did it happen? Did the mine close? No.

A Christian mine manager, Bob Mellows, saw that safety was best regulated not by the law of the land, but by the words of our Lord Jesus Christ. He made a study of the practical meaning of the word love in the New Testament and shared his findings with the miners, speaking to them about how different the workplace would be if they treated one another in a way consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ — if they were humble, owned up to their mistakes, took responsibility, cared for one another, and put the interests of others ahead of their own.

In a report to the 1998 Coal Operators’ Conference he said: “It is not because of legalism that Jesus Christ told us to love God and love one another. It was because He knew it was essential to our well-being in all aspects of life.” The mine’s safety improved, Mellows concluded, when a breakthrough in relationships occurred — when barriers were removed, trust developed, and self-esteem was achieved. This breakthrough occurs whenever communities resolve to live by the values of Jesus. What a wonderful testimony.