After considerable hesitation we have agreed to the publication of our father's memoirs. It is not that we doubt the worth of his 'Australian Story' for we knew, admired and loved the man both as our father and as a man of God, as did so many others. It is this preciousness and privilege that we did not wish to expose to undeserving, anonymous analysis that views from a distance. For he was a man of God and for God, a man most relevant to the varying times in which he lived, and that is all any person can ever hope to be. From this perspective, we invite you to share in and enjoy his unique story, and to celebrate all that God has done through him.

Dawn Chivell, Edda Thomas, Joan Moore--Daughters.      

INTRODUCTION.

      It is Sunday afternoon September 8, 1981. We have just come home from a family dinner at which Neville Moore, our son-in-law, suggested that I should write something about my experiences in the ministry. I have heard this suggestion previously by other people, but I have never thought seriously about it. This is my 73rd. birthday and it occurred to me that time is running out and if I am going to do anything about it today would be a good day to make a start. I have always written in a hurry . . . as I have done most things I can hear my wife say! It is not my nature to write something, read it, re-write it several times before I produce the finished article. Rather I write in a hurry and that is it. Consequently you will find grammatical errors, and maybe if I considered more carefully I would find better ways of expressing myself. Be that as it may, here I go.

      One other thing before I plunge headlong into the past seventy three years. This is not a history of our family. I will leave that to them. Sufficient to say that we have a wonderful family. God has given to us five daughters of whom we are justly proud, and one foster son, Graham Dunkley, who is completely accepted in our family and means as much to us as any son could mean.

      As far as my wife is concerned there are three incidents which I will briefly record which will illustrate that she has been an excellent minister's wife. One afternoon while we were at Mildura the ladies were gathering for their meeting when a man came into the church yard and asked one of our oldest members if she could tell him where he could find the minister. She asked, "Which one?" "You have more than one minister have you?" "Yes", she replied, "Mr and Mrs Chivell."

      At Unley the late Sir Philip Messent added a little to it. It was our first annual business meeting of the church. The usual speeches were made about the ministry, and then Sir Philip, with his carefully chosen words said, "We have two ministers, and Mrs Chivell is the better of the two." I turned to him and said, "Hear hear."

      We spent almost two years at Brooklyn Park in an interim ministry. When we went there the situation was a little tense. At our farewell, one of the elders, who said he had known many ministers and their wives, went on to say that Mrs Chivell was the best minister's wife he had known, and that she was such a dear that he was going to give her a big kiss. He did so before the whole church and most of the men followed on. I have known some minister's wives who would merit anything other than a kiss!

      In what follows my wife will often be mentioned. As is the custom these days, I will refer to her by her Christian name. You will be aware that it has been team work, and that I have depended on her more than I could ever say. I am not hesitant in saying that when I was away from her I generally wrote to her every day, and sometimes it was twice a day. She said she knew how every letter would commence . . . "Just a note in a hurry . . ."

      And now a little of my background history. I was born in Warracknabeal, Victoria, in 1908, the fifth child in a family of six. My father and mother were on a farm. My father had little education. He went to school in South Australia for two years, and then worked on the home farm at Mallala. There were ten in their family and he was the third eldest. His father prospered, but drank himself to death in his forties. The family decided to take up land in Victoria and my father was the eldest o f the boys to come with the family. They pioneered in the Warracknabeal district. When I was quite young I heard two men talking about my father and one of them said, "Mark is a white man." I was puzzled by it. Whoever would think that he was black? In later life I understood what was meant. He died when I was thirty three. My mother had what was considered a good education in those days. I can recall ten in her family. There may have been more than that number. She had a brother in the Methodist ministry, and another in the Victorian Parliament. She died after nine months in hospital after the birth of our youngest sister. She was forty two, and I had just turned six. My eldest sister, at the age of fourteen became our 'mother'. There were two boys and four girls. I am the only one still alive. I have buried all of them with the exception of our youngest sister. In addition I buried my brother's wife, the husbands of two of my sisters, and my mother-in-law.

      When my mother died in 1914 the country was in the grip of one of the worst droughts we have known. The first world war commenced that same year. We lost most of our horses, sheep and cattle. There was no harvest at all. I can remember my father coming home with a big drum of molasses to put with the straw-chaff with which he was trying to save some of the stock. We would go to the drum and get a dish of it to put on the table at meal time. We would eat home made bread, dripping, and this black goo. It was fun for the first meal or two but the humour soon disappeared. We did not suffer from constipation. I can remember a dust storm which raged for three days and nights. We would sit at the window and watch fences, fowls, sheep etc. getting slowly buried. Our dams were filled in with the sand. I don't know where we obtained water to drink. The top soil blew away leaving limestone and stumps protruding. At last the rain came. We ran out into it and danced and played until we were soaked through. The next year we had a record harvest and with the world at war, prices soared. My father never looked

back as far as prosperity was concerned. He was a good farmer, a hard worker, and a keen business man. But he had become a very sad and quiet man with the death of my mother. She had been his adviser and support in many ways. We have some of the letters she wrote while in hospital and they breathe her Christian faith and her devotion to my father and the family. Although I was only six years old, I can remember him coming home from the funeral with his hair snow white. Previously it was dark. In later years his hair darkened again, and when he died it was iron grey. I was told I must not mention my mother to him, and I didn't for many years. In my teen years he spoke about her occasionally but he could not do it without becoming upset. When I was told of her death I remember I climbed up on to the wagon and shaking my fist at the sky, I said, "God, I hate you for taking away my mother. Give her back to me." It took a long time to get over that anger. I stopped saying my prayers at night. She had taught me some of the Bible stories such as the giving of the manna, the raising of the little girl by Elisha. I could not understand why he took her to heaven. Throughout the whole of my life I have felt that there has been something lacking in my make up because I did not know mother love after the age of five. What are broken homes doing to our kids today?

      After I decided to train for the ministry my father told me she had prayed that I would be a minister as soon as I was born. My schooling commenced when I was six. We lived two and a half miles from the school and walked it. When my youngest sister commenced school she seemed to tire after the first few chains and I would hump her along on my back. There were eight pupils in the school in the various classes. Our teacher would be there on Monday and Tuesday and then ride his horse on twelve miles to another school for the remaining three days of the week. He had twelve pupils in that school. The remaining four days of the week I would spend working on the farm, school forgotten. I was taught to stook the sheaves of hay when I had to drag them to the stook because they were too heavy for me to lift. He made me a stool to stand on so that I could reach the top of the bags of wheat to sow them. At other times I would follow the plough and heap together the stumps for burning. He put me on a horse before I commenced school and told me to ride into town, seven miles away, to get the mail. I hesitated, so he turned the horse toward the gate, gave him a smack, and off I went. This became my task each Saturday morning. In the afternoon we would cut chaff for the next week's supply for the horses. We had what was called a horse works. Two horses would be hitched to a pole and have to walk around in a circle about thirty feet across to turn a wheel which in turn turned the chaff cutter. I had to walk behind the horses and speed them up every now and then. It was a great day when we bought an engine to do the job. On Sunday we would all climb into the double-seated buggy and drive into town for Sunday School and church. We considered ourselves up in the world when we had a hood put on the buggy.

      The church met in the hall which was built of iron. Services were conducted by the Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans and locals. We attended them all. My first day at Sunday School I was given a text card with a bird on it and the text was "God is Love." The Sunday School was a great occasion. I was pushed up to recite. My sisters chose a piece and taught me to say it. I still remember it. It was about a wife trying to wake her husband in the morning. They encored me again and again until I got the feeling they were making a joke of me, so I refused to say it again, and never again did I recite. In due course I took my Qualifying Certificate which was granted in the sixth class if you passed. It was the admission to High School Studies. My father sold the farm and moved into Warracknabeal to retire, and to send me to High School.

      He had in mind that I should be a solicitor. This was a completely new experience for me, but I soon adapted and enjoyed it. Each new boy was supposed to have a fight with someone they put forward. It took place after school behind a tin fence. I said I didn't want to fight but they insisted that I should, so they formed a ring and put the two of us in it. I still protested until the opponent gave me a smack across the face. I then went for him with a whirl wind of blows, and gave him a blood nose etc. and then the fight was stopped. He became my best friend at school. The head-master announced that he would have a weekly spelling test and anyone who had more than three wrong would get a cut with the cane for each wrong spelling above that number. In the first test I had four wrong. About a dozen of us were taken over to his office. I had not learnt that it was good policy to get on the end of the line with the hope that he would begin to tire by the time he got to you. I was first one up. One of the boys said, "New boy, Sir." He looked at me and said, "New boy are you? I'll teach you not to come into my office." He gave me four terrific cuts on the hands and then two around the seat as I walked past him, as he said, "For good measure." My hands and seat were numb for hours .

      I was there for two years and it was my pleasure, near the end of this time, to see him bluffed. I was very friendly with one of the 'big boys.' He came off a farm and played football with the senior team of the town. He was sent to High School to finish his education. He was only filling in time. This day we had something wrong in a science lesson which the headmaster took. He ordered us to his office. He came in, took up his cane and said,"Step forward Chivell." Before I could move my mate threw off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and shaped up to the head-master, saying, "Come on Mr Dare." (That was his name.) Mr Dare hesitated, and my mate stepped closer to him. Suddenly he came alive and with a loud voice and a show of bravado, shouted, "Get back to your class." We laughed at him and went slowly out of his office. I was never chastened by him again. It was not that I was a 'dud' or misbehaved. Most of us got that kind of treatment. After my first term I was top of the boys in my class and remained so to the end. The staff recommended me to receive

my Merit Certificate without sitting for the examination because of the work I had done throughout the year.

      Leaving school came suddenly. I was in a gang who went around doing silly things. My cousin and I were the joint leaders of the gang. We made shanghais and became pretty good shots with them. One evening we were shooting at the parrots which came into the street trees to roost. We were near the Anglican church. The Rector came out, dressed in his gown, and complained the stones were landing on the roof of his church. He said something about police, so we ordered the gang to fire on him, which they did, and a stained glass window was shattered. The next day police came to the school and called out the names of some of our gang. They demanded our shanghais which we had hidden behind the toilet pans, and we were taken to the police station for questioning. My cousin and I admitted shooting with the shanghais, but would not admit to breaking the window. The other boys did and eventually had to pay for it. We did not tell our people at home about this. We both said we were not going back to school after the Christmas holidays. I rode my bike thirty two miles up to my brother who was on his own farm, and batching. I worked for him for my food, two cigarettes a day and six pence a week. One day my father arrived with a piece of paper. It was a summons to attend court. He took me back home. He engaged his solicitor to come to court with us and he made a speech about the Chivells being good citizens and pioneers in the district. The magistrate said he should send me to some institution, but in view of the family's history etc. he placed me on a bond to be of good behaviour for twelve months, and to report regularly to a police officer. Walking home with my father he said, "This is the first time our name has ever been in this court." That made me feel ashamed of myself. A few days later he told me he had bought another farm and he was going to put me on it to work it, as he put it, "To take some of the nonsense out of you."

      The farm was 18 miles out of Warracknabeal, with a house of eight rooms, built on the bank of a creek. At the age of fourteen and half I was put there alone. At first I was scared at night. There were possums in the trees, the rooms were empty, foxes howled along the creek and owls hooted their dismal calls from the garden. I became accustomed to it and loved it. There was a young lady living a quarter of a mile away whom I had known at High School. I found myself across there at times but I was terribly shy. I dreamed about improving the farm and while I did so I produced two good harvests and my father promised me that if I continued to do well, when I got to the mid twenties, he would give the farm to me.

      I gave away the church but I did go to Sunday School for awhile because the mother of the girl over the way conducted it in the local school. Horace Jackel was the minister of our church at Brim. He came to see me and talked to me about becoming a Christian. I had been in a high jumping contest in which he was a competitor, and I beat him.

      He thought it was a point of contact. We were standing in the kitchen while he talked to me, and he gave me some tracts, asking me to read them, saying that he would come back to discuss them with me. I opened the stove and threw them in. He never came back. Another day someone (I guess my father) brought Mr Bagley to the farm. I now know he was Home Mission organiser in Victoria. I was working about a mile from the house. He walked down to me and got on the drill and rode around with me. After telling me who he was, he never mentioned the church. He asked about my work, about the drill, the horses etc. and I liked him. I never saw him again.

      I became interested in reading novels written by Zane Grey. I would sit up late at night reading by the light of a hurricane lantern. My family was talking about a tent mission being held in Warracknabeal. One Sunday I went down there to see my cousin. I drove a T model Ford car although I was too young to get a license. We went to have a look at the mission. They were singing what I thought to be, "Right in the corner where you are", and I thought that was about the extent of their intelligence. We met a few of our old associates and stayed outside the tent. For something to do we untied some of the ropes and let one side of the tent cave in. Someone produced some over-ripe tomatoes, and we threw them into the tent, but when the police arrived we disappeared.

      The mission was being conducted by E.C. Henrichsen and Chas. Pratt. We agreed to gather the next Sunday, but only my cousin and I turned up. Two girls came off the street and were going into the tent when we did something to attract their attention. They snubbed us, and we laughed at them. One of them immediately stopped and came over to me and said, "It is you John"! I had had a school romance with her and had forgotten about her. She urged us to come into the tent with them, but we backed off. The service got under way, there was no one outside, so we thought we would sneak in. We noticed where the girls were sitting, and there was an empty seat behind them. We got under the side of the tent and sat behind them. We tried to be smart to attract their attention but that failed so we settled down to put up with the meeting. A duet was sung by Mr and Mrs Pratt, the chorus of which went, "Shall the record be found wanting or shall it be found trusting while that hand is writing on the wall." I remembered the story from the Old Testament, and the sermon which followed was on the same incident. The invitation hymn was, "I've wandered far away from God, now I'm coming home." Sixteen people went forward, the hymn finished, Henrichsen was coming off the platform to take their confessions, I said to my cousin, "I'm going out", and asked if he was coming with me. His reply was, "Don't be a damn fool." I pushed past him and made my confession, after which I went out the way I came in and met my cousin in the street. I told him that I meant it, and that I was finished with the life we had been living. I took out of my pocket my week's supply of cigarettes and threw them in

the sewerage gutter. I was baptized that week and received into the church at Brim.

      Immediately I felt that I must go into the ministry, but I had no idea where to begin. As I drove my team of eight horses I would practice preaching. I would run out of thoughts after about a minute. I read the Bible late into the night. One night I went down to the stable to give the horses their last feed for the night. An irresistible feeling came over me and I knew I had to do something about the ministry. I fed the horses and then put the lantern down on the floor of the chaff shed and knelt down and confessed that I knew what God wanted me to do, and he knew how much I loved the farm and everything about it, but if he opened up the way I would leave it all to be a preacher. Next morning I went down the creek and began felling trees, which I was going to use to build a grain silo. My father arrived and talked to me about what I was intending to do. A car came in from the road to where we were and I knew the driver was the land agent with whom we did business. Addressing my father, using his Christian name, he asked if the farm was for sale. He replied jocularly that it was at such and such a price. The figure he mentioned was a ridiculous figure. The agent had been doing quite a bit of buying and selling and making money out of his deals. The upshot was that he went off to look over the farm and I gave up the axe and armed myself with the rifle and went off along the creek to shoot rabbits. I saw this as an answer to my prayer the night before. I spent the rest of the day wandering miles along the creek thinking about things. I arrived home about 5 p.m. to be met by an agitated father. He said the gentleman concerned was ready to accept the figure he had suggested and would pay cash. He considered it was too good an opportunity for us to miss, but he would not sign until I consented. I dodged by leaving it to him. I knew what he would do. He couldn't miss a deal like that. He immediately signed the contract.

      I found myself back in Warracknabeal and took a job in a garage for 15/- a week. I became involved in the church there and my boss gave me a key to the garage and put me in charge of the mechanical work. He also spoke to the sergeant of police and he gave him the nod allowing me to drive the taxi he ran, even though I was still too young to get a licence. I worked all hours. I drove the taxi to the football on Saturday with the players, and at night if the call came. I thought it was pretty good and never worried about the pay I was getting.

      Mr Cornelius was our minister with whom I was very friendly. He came to me one day to say he was going to be away on Sunday afternoon and he needed someone to take the Bible Class. He wanted me to do so, and gave me a lesson book to help me. I had never opened my mouth in public. He would not take no for an answer. On Sunday afternoon I found myself in front of forty people, including my father, and I was supposed to teach them. From that day on it was my class. One night Mr Cornelius asked me home for supper. He took me into his study and asked me if I had ever thought of going into the ministry. I replied

that this was my intention but I didn't know how to go about it. He was quite excited and gave me a book on preaching by Jowett, The Preacher, His Life and Work. I devoured it without coming up for breath. It said the kind of things which clicked with me. I went back to him and said I wanted him to help me to get to College. He spoke to my father about it, and he came to me and said something like this . . . "You will make a good farmer but I am not sure that you will make much of a preacher."

      He took me for a drive on the Saturday afternoon and showed me a beautiful farm and said he had inside knowledge that it would be on the market on Monday and he would buy it for me. I told him I was done with farming. It was the College for me. He said no more about it. My brother said I was a damn fool, and that all he could think of me was that I wanted an easy life. In later years he came to stay with me and I took him visiting with me . . . to the hospital, homes etc. After a few days, he refused to go again. He said I was crazy the way I was living, at the beck and call of everyone about the place, people coming to the house day and night, out at the church every night, and said he would not do it if he was getting the income he was getting from his two farms. Ever after he was much more respectful of me, and when his wife was killed immediately rang me and asked me to go over to Victoria to bury her. He also requested me to bury him when his death occurred.

GLEN IRIS.

      February, 1926, I arrived at Glen Iris full of anticipation and I was not disappointed. I had never been to a city. I travelled down alone arriving at Spencer St. station at about 9 p.m. I was told by a platform official to go to a certain platform and there I would get a train to Glen Iris. I took a seat and waited. Train after train came racing in and out again, but not one had Glen Iris on it. After about two hours another official came to me and said he had observed me sitting there for a long time and what was the trouble. When I told him he said there had been a number of trains going to Glen Iris. They had Darling on them and I had to get off at Glen Iris. How would a boy from the bush know that ! I arrived at College around mid-night. My trunk had not arrived so I crawled into a bed that was not occupied. I will not dwell on the four years I spent there, amidst 'Glen Iris hills and dales'. They were wonderful years of comradeship such as I had never known before, during which my mind was stretched, my personality developed and my desire for the work of the ministry confirmed.

      I assisted the church at Burnley (a slum area) for a year and a half, receiving 3/6 (35c.) a week. It may have paid the train fares: a year in ministry at Bayswater followed by another year at Bayswater. When the Principal asked me to go to Bayswater he said he was afraid of my youth because they always liked an older man. The officers met me after the first morning service and one very stern old gentleman looked over his

glasses at me and said, "He's young". The others were silent. This gentleman then moved that I be put on three months trial. At the end of thirteen months when I resigned he got very cross with me, so I reminded him that I was still on trial.

      Ivanhoe was a city church where there were a lot of well placed people . . . two doctors, a number of factory owners, a builder etc. Some of their homes were mansions. I went in fear and trembling. After my first address a visiting minister from our British churches thanked me, and spoke encouragingly to me. The secretary of the church, who had trained for the ministry and had become a factory owner, who had a brilliant mind, and was a big noise at Conference, was on the Advisory Board and Chairman of the Home Missions, came to the door and without shaking hands, walked past me, saying, "Your sermon was all up the shoot." He continued to criticise me in the months ahead until I had a confrontation with him. He took me with him to the exclusive Melbourne Club for lunch. At my table was a man who seemed to know a lot about the Victorian Railways, and at that time they were on strike I disagreed with him on some issue and thought I was holding my ground fairly well, when I got a kick under the table from my host. When lunch was over we went outside and he flew into me . . . "Don't you know you were arguing with the secretary of the Victorian Railways, and what do you know about the strike etc. etc." The final shot was, "I know what will happen to you. You will get up in some little bush town and be nothing more than a knock-kneed bush parson." I boiled over. With a great deal of gusto I said, "I would like to have you up in the bush now. I would knock you right on your big nose etc. etc." Having started I let him know I had had enough of his criticism and I would deal with him if I heard any more. He left me alone until my last day there. The church developed. I had a big group of young people. I played football and tennis with the church teams, the older people accepted me by giving me so many invitations to go to their homes for meals that I could not accept them all. I had a car and it was easy to get to Ivanhoe from College. I spent more time than I should have done over there. I knew every person in the church was with me and were full of encouragement, except the secretary. But when I stood up to him, his little bubble burst. After the last address I gave there he passed me a note to say I had mis-pronounced three words . . . he wrote them out and underlined the vowels. When he came to the door to shake hands, he said he hoped I didn't mind him taking this last opportunity to criticise me. I said I didn't, and added, "Who was the man standing up there today making the announcements, saying Mundee, Chewsdee, Wednsdee . . . " That took the grin off his face. In spite of his harshness he did teach me a great deal. He was a marvellous salesman and took me with him when he went to interview some people such as the manager of Hoyts Theatres in Australia, the chief of the ANZ bank, the managing director of Coles. He owned a factory which made burglar locks. He used to tell me to observe him in his approach, how he quickly and quietly took control of

      the situation, how he presented what he had to sell etc. His idea was that I had to learn how to deal with people and get across what I had to sell. He taught me things I have never forgotten and which have stood me in good stead, particularly when I was Conference Secretary, sometimes dealing with top brass. I still think there was a kinder way to get his message across to me.

      I graduated from College in 1929. My only thought was for the full time ministry. All this time I wrote every second day to the young lady who had attracted me into the mission tent, and who became my wife. We were not interested in a city ministry. I was approached by the Board of an influential city church but I feared such a responsibility and wanted to do some pioneering work. When E.C. Henrichsen wrote to me from North Queensland where he was conducting a mission asking me if I would go to Charters Towers, I immediately accepted. We borrowed the money to get there from my father. He had married again a few months previously and I soon learnt that we were not wanted at home. We trained it for five days and nights to arrive at Charters Towers on the afternoon of the Sunday the mission was finishing there.

CHARTERS TOWERS.

      It had been a big mining city but with the cessation of mining it had dwindled to a population of about 10,000 people but still had fifty eight hotels. It was regarded as the educational centre of the North. There were a number of church schools providing for the higher education of the children who came in from the out-lying stations. If I remember rightly there were five such residential schools, and consequently there were a lot of uniformed young people around the city. Arriving tired and worn on the Sunday afternoon we were met by church people, the mission team, and the Mayor of the city dressed in trousers and a pyjama coat. We were taken to the home of Mr and Mrs Coward Snr., where a number of the family gathered for the evening meal, after which we all went to the tent for the final service of the mission. The paper next morning reported that there were a thousand people there. We were introduced, I read the scriptures, and then went into the baptistry to baptise seventeen people. The rubber waders leaked and both legs filled with water. The last person I baptised was so excited that he kissed me when he came up out of the water. My trousers were saturated and so was the rest of me when he finished his embrace. It was the only suit I possessed.

      Next morning we found a furnished house for $2 a week and moved in that afternoon. We plunged into the work and had a wonderful time during almost four years. The church had been without a minister for a number of years, with Mr Coward doing most of the platform work. He

was a good speaker and devoted to the church. They had two buildings, one well placed in the city, a brick building with two lovely bells in a tower about forty feet high. They have since been listed by the National Trust. The other building was of weatherboard and out in one of the suburbs. This was the building they had used prior to the mission. To ensure that we would not have a divided congregation I got busy persuading the church to dismantle the wooden building and re-erect it for a hall behind the city property. A working bee on a Saturday afternoon brought twenty six men together to pull the building down. In a matter of hours that was accomplished. The re-erection took some time longer. I spent many hours on the project.

      The church had a strong English influence in it. Many of the miners had come from Cornwall, Wales etc. Those who had established the church came from these areas and brought their traditions with them. They were not quite sure if it was scriptural to pay a minister. They did not have a plan for those taking part in the morning service, set scripture readings, or regular Sunday School lessons. The speaker was not planned. At the appropriate time the usual invitation was, "If any brother who is in good standing and fellowship has any word of exhortation for the church, let him now say on." Before it was completed I was behind the pulpit and after a little while it was accepted that I did the speaking unless otherwise arranged.

      I recall the first Board meeting. I made thirteen suggestions which were all rejected. I then learnt a lesson I have never forgotten . . . if you think you may lose your suggestion, talk about it with someone who has influence and convince that one of its worthwhileness, and allow that person to introduce it. You can then come in and expound on it and thank the person for bringing it to us. Nearly always you will succeed in having it accepted. This is what I did, and within three months or so all the rejected suggestions were in operation.

      Mr Coward was the strong man in the church and soon began to treat me like a son. He called me by my Christian name, which was unusual in those days. He had a Willys-Knight car but he did not drive. Often I was behind the wheel as he went out to buy cattle, or I was using it to take young people to meetings etc. One day he took me to meet several business men, he being a butcher of long standing in the city. His purpose was to introduce me to them. In one shop, after the introduction, he briefly told me what a good citizen 'Dick' was, how he led a community choir, assisted charitable work etc. and then he concluded, "But 'Dick' has no Christ in his life." He could speak like that because he was highly regarded as a Christian business man by the business fraternity.

      He died about a year after I went there and I missed him a great deal. His death-bed was the first I had attended. The family gathered in the home, and one by one they approached his bed and said goodbye to him, and he had an appropriate word for each of them. I came last. He put his hand on my head as I bent down and he blessed me. I do not remember what he said but it was a very solemn moment for me and I

felt a very heavy responsibility resting on me to care for the church which he loved so dearly. After farewells , he passed on within a few minutes.

      The church responded to the leadership we tried to give. We would have eighty to one hundred people there in the morning and over a hundred at night. A Roman Catholic school teacher wrote a letter to the paper criticising the Bible. I took him up, offering to debate with him anywhere he wished to name. On the Sunday night I announced some related topic and took my coat off to him, and the Roman Catholic Church in general. Three hundred people came along. I had just studied church history, so of course was a real authority! From then on , until I left there, I would have a second audience seated along the gutter in front of the church. They were the days when people went to church on Sunday nights . . . our own people and others with them.

      I do not know how many people I baptised there because I did not keep records, but decisions came quite frequently. I had a boys' club which thrilled me. We often went camping along the Burdekin River. I would hire a horse and cart (the horse only had one eye) and load the gear on to the cart while the boys rode their bikes behind me. We would go ten to fifteen miles, sleep on the ground, catch fish, chase wild pigs and sometimes be chased by them, hike, swim (some would swim all night). If a boy was sleeping soundly he would probably be rolled into the river. One of those boys has since been the President of the Queensland Conference.

      My wife had a class of girls to whom she taught dressmaking. Years later one of those girls wrote to her saying she had her own dressmaking business and the basis of her expertise she received in that class, for which she was very grateful.

      The depression had settled upon us and church finances were in a bad way. After the first year my salary was reduced from $10 to $9 and I was not paid for the last week of the financial year because the Treasurer said that was the only way he could present a statement to the church showing a debit. There were many men out of work. There was a constant stream from the south coming through on their way to Mt. Isa where they had hopes of getting work. A few weeks later they often called on their way to the coast having been unsuccessful. To draw the dole they had to travel eighty miles between hand-out centres. I think the dole was 70 cents a week. This put thousands 'on the track'. We had a constant stream of callers seeking food and clothing. We recall one morning when we fed thirteen with breakfast. We had a few hens and they came to the rescue . . . a fried egg and a slice of bread was a help along the way.

      I had one pair of shoes and they were the worse for wear. We saved until we were able to buy another pair for 75 cents. Next morning I had them on to 'break them in' when a caller came to the door. He stood on the bottom of the steps, showed me the odd shoes he was wearing, one sandshoe and the other leather, with the soles worn through both of them, and asked me if I had a pair I could give him. I kicked off my new

shoes and threw them down to him. He protested, but I assured him I could still make do with the old ones, so off went my new shoes for a walk down the street! I asked one caller why so many came to me and he said my name and address was on 'the honour list'. There was a cutting under the railway line and this is where many of them camped when they jumped off the train . . . 'the rattler'. If someone treated them well their name went up on the cement wall for the benefit of newcomers. I called at the camp and sure enough my name was there.

      There was one man who had built himself a humpy amongst some rubber vines. He had written 'HOME' in large letters over the door. I often stopped to talk with him. One evening he shook hands with me and said he was going for a holiday. He was going to jump 'the rattler' to Brisbane to see the Exhibition (the annual show), and then on to Sydney and Melbourne to visit friends and relatives. About six months later I noticed his front door was open so I called. He had just arrived back from doing as he had planned and it had 'not cost him a penny'.

      One Sunday evening a stranger was at the service. That was not unusual. Next evening he was at my door. He was reasonably well dressed and had quite an air about him, so I invited him in. I soon discovered he wanted money. He said he was an estate agent in Ingham and had expected to have money waiting for him here but it had not come through. I had heard that before. I checked and found there was a man by the name he gave me who was an estate agent in Ingham. We put him in the spare room for the night, only to be awakened with piercing screams from him. We were to learn that he was getting over what was called the DTs. Next morning he went off to meet some 'business associates'. I went to the police station. He was known to them. He was bankrupt, turned out by his wife and family because of the drinking habits, and had got as far as Charters Towers on a beer crawl. I was ready for him when he came back that night and after reciting his pedigree to him told him to get out of the city as quickly as possible or I would charge him as an imposter. He went off in a flood of tears. A few days later I was out visiting the flock when the said person came around the corner in front of me. I knew he saw me. He walked very quickly, turned down the next street, up a lane etc. and I tagged along about a chain behind him. Finally he stopped, faced me and gave me a torrent of abuse. I told him I wished he was a younger man (he was about 45). It would give me great pleasure to change the shape of his face. I again told him to get out of the city, and amidst his tears he asked where he could go, so I suggested he should go outback, get a job on a station, and dry himself out. He said he would do as I said and we parted.

      A year later I was riding my bike down the main street when he stepped off the footpath in front of me. He looked a different man. He thanked me for the advice I gave him and said he had taken it. He had worked on a station, saved his money, and given up the grog. He had thought up a contraption for boiling eggs in large quantities. He had been a sailor in earlier life and had ships and hotels etc. in mind with this

device. He could see I was suspicious so he asked me to go into the grocer's shop where we were and meet the owner. I knew him so in I went to find that this man was backing his invention which he was going to patent. I also discovered that my friend had gone around the city and paid all the debts he could remember he had left behind him, and offered to pay for the night he stayed with me.

      The upshot was he rented a little house on the edge of the city, did whatever odd job he could get, came to church each Sunday night and borrowed books from me to read. His favourite book was The Meaning of Prayer, by Fosdick. In due course he announced that he was going to Brisbane to patent this thing and sell it to big name people. He asked if he could take the afore-mentioned book with him, and I agreed. One day the grocer told me he had received a note from our friend to say that someone had stolen his invention and had it patented before he could do so, and that he was very upset and depressed. A little later a policeman came to see me and asked if I owned the book he had, in which was my name and address. He said it had been found in a hotel room in Brisbane, together with other items which I was able to identify, and that a body had been found in the river which it was believed was the body of the man who had occupied that room. He was a man of about 45 etc. We never knew whether there was foul play, an accident, or suicide. The story was reported in our paper.

      A man who lived near to the Towers Brewery kept a few pigs. The brewery had a clean-up and ran a lot of waste into the creek near by. The pigs were shut up at night and turned loose in the morning. This night they did not come home so he went looking for them to find they were blind drunk. It was stated that ever after he could not get them to go near that creek, and the comment was . . . "Pigs have more sense than some men".

      In our ecumenical climate which we have today it is hard to appreciate the isolation in which churches and ministers lived fifty years ago. I am not sure if there was a Ministers' Fraternal in Charters Towers before my advent or not. We had little to do with each other. The first Fraternal meeting I attended was to meet Dr. F.W. Boreham who was holding meetings in North Queensland. It was held in the Anglican Rectory. We all seemed to be rather frigid toward each other, but Dr. Boreham warmed our hearts as, in a casual way, he spoke about our common faith and church life as he was seeing it in North Queensland. Regular Fraternal meetings followed, being held once a month in the homes of the various ministers. A splendid brotherly spirit developed. We co-operated in taking weekly devotional meetings in "Eventide Homes" each Friday afternoon. Rev. Fox of the Presbyterian Church and I went together. He could sing a bit and play the organ and I could not. Each week he recited the same little speech . . . "Next week, I'll choose the hymns, play and read the scriptures, and you preach." Once or twice I beat him to it. He was older than I and I appreciated his friendship. We played bobs at his place on Monday nights when we were both free. He

had a notice over the table . . . "No swearing aloud." His wife made pies and pasties to augment their salary and his young son, Kev, went out with his basket to sell them. We were a customer. When the city of Elizabeth was commenced the Presbyterian minister appointed there was Rev. Kev. Fox. I approached him to find he was the pie and pasty seller, and that his father was living in retirement in Sydney.

      The Anglican rector was a bachelor of about fifty years. He looked the part. Riding his bike with very high handles, he sat straight up on the seat, with hat turned up, and vest and collar. At the fraternal we each took a turn in giving a paper. My first paper was on the covenant relationship, for which I borrowed heavily from my College notes. The Rector was jubilant and confided in me after our discussion that some of the other men did not understand this relationship. We became very good friends. He said he would pray with anyone who acknowledged the lordship of Christ, but he was afraid that some people were too familiar with God.

      The Baptist minister was an elderly man who had been a miner. He was a sincere man but was not very familiar with theology, and rather tactless and blunt in his approach. One hot afternoon we were meeting in the Baptist manse. The Rector had recently been referred to in the paper as 'Father'. It was so hot that we cast ceremony aside and removed our coats. The Rector removed coat, vest and collar. As soon as the opening prayer ended, the Baptist minister stood up, leaned across the table, pointed the one finger he had left on his right hand at the Rector and shouted, "Call no man Father." We all knew he was referring to what had happened in the paper. The Rector remained cool during the first round, but then warmed up. When he had had enough he stood up and said, "Gentlemen, I am leaving. I did not come here to be insulted." He picked up his coat and looked around for his vest and collar.

      They were not to be seen. The lady of the manse made an excursion to the back of the yard and returned with them after retrieving them from the mouth of a half-grown cattle dog pup. They were no longer wearable. I still laugh when I think of the Rector sitting up very straight on his bike with a blue shirt peeping out from under his coat and collar, and vest dangling from the handle bars. The meeting adjourned and we thought it might be the end of the Fraternal, but not so. Next morning the two met in the school yard where we had gone for R.I. and apologised to each other. On one occasion the Rector came to me because he wanted to talk to someone about what had happened.

      He had gone into a cafe and while at the counter a man came in, and seeing the 'parson' there, he began to use the vilest of language.

      The Rector ignored him, and while being served, said to the man behind the counter, "It is keeping very dry." The blasphemer came in on the conversation with, "Why don't you b . . . . . . . . . pray about it?" The Rector turned to him in his quiet way and asked him to come out the back door, he wanted to show him something. The man followed him out and then the Rector swung around and said, "Take that", and gave him a beautiful

straight right to the jaw. He went down in a heap and the Rector walking out of the shop said to the man behind the counter, "Your customer is waiting outside for you."

      He told me that when he lived in England, before he became a Christian, he was a professional boxer. He never told anyone there about his past and he thought this incident might get around. I assured him the receiver would not be so silly as to spread it around. Each year we had a picnic, taking our wives and families with us. We went down to the Burdekin and had great times together.

      One of the guests we had at our Fraternal was Rev. E.R. Gribble of the Anglican Church who had spent his life amongst the Australian Aborigines, and was then working at Wyndham. He had just published a book entitled , The Problem of the Australian Aborigine. I still have a copy of it. He stirred my interest in these people. At particular times, such as Show Day or when races were on, they would come into the city by the hundreds. At times we had some of them sleeping in our backyard. The employers of aborigines had to pay so much a week to the sergeant of police and they would hand it out to the aborigines when they came to town and requested it. Most of them had no idea of monetary values. The scheme depended entirely on the honesty of the police. I have heard an aborigine in the police station ask for money to buy sandwiches. When asked, "How much", he said, "Pound boss, him be all right." Probably he could have bought all he wanted for a tenth of that amount. In the Northern Territory at that time the employer paid 75 cents for a licence to employ black labour and he could employ as many as he wished. A dog licence cost more. I have seen police bring in black 'criminals' chained together by chains around their necks. At night they took the two ends of the chain around a tree and padlocked it.

      The Fraternal became concerned about gambling which was operating a big school in the back yard of a cafe. We wanted information, so one night I dressed in old clothes and sauntered into the back yard. No one seemed to notice me. I leaned against a post and tried to look sillier than I generally do. I saw the money flying, but to my astonishment there was the sergeant of police at one of the tables. We knew it was useless to continue to report the matter to him, so I wrote to headquarters and asked them to clean it up. A few weeks later a raid was made by plain clothes detectives and more than twenty arrests were made, but the sergeant was not among them. Either it was not his night or he had been tipped off. I was beginning to learn a little about public life.

      When we left Charters Towers Elva weighed five stone five ounces, and I was seven and half stone. The church presented me with a gold wristlet watch, the first wristlet watch I ever had, and I still have it. On the back of it they inscribed, "Church of Christ, Charters Towers, 3/12/1933", and my initials. I had seen an advertisement in the 'Australian Christian from the church at Auburn, NSW, inviting applications from ministers to

become their minister. I answered it and they called me. It was a large church with 242 members. They had a manse but it was occupied, but they hoped it would be available in due course. The commencing date was agreed upon and I resigned. Two weeks prior to leaving Charters Towers I sent a telegram inquiring if the manse would be available. A reply came back, "See next week's Christian." When it arrived, under the heading of Auburn, was the news item of another minister commencing there on the date I was supposed to commence.

      Then came a letter from Thomas Hagger, the Home Mission Organiser, telling me that he knew what had happened, and he regretted it, and the Home Mission Committee would like me to go to Gilgandra. I could do nothing but accept. When I attended my first Conference in NSW I was asked to give an address to Conference. At the close of the meeting in the Enmore Tabernacle I went to the toilet and found myself alongside the church secretary who had sent me the telegram. I asked him what had taken place and he said I had asked for $50 travel expenses and the other man would travel at his own expense. He added that since he had heard my address to Conference he thought they had made a mistake. I said I was glad they had made it because I did not wish to be associated with such dishonourable people. I think he was glad to leave the toilet when I took him to pieces. He was a man with a prominent name in the NSW Conference . . . a little fish in a big pond.

GILGANDRA . . . The First Time.

      The town was the centre for a wheat growing and grazing district, with a population of about two thousand. Our work had been commenced some years previously by a family moving there from Horsham in Victoria. They had a Sunday School, an after noon communion service and an evening service. There were about twenty members, most of them on farms from two to eighteen miles out of town. I was told it would be pioneering work. Elva and Joan went on from Sydney to Melbourne by boat to visit Elva's mother for six weeks. I arrived by train at 9 p.m. after sitting up in the train all night. No one met me so I left my luggage at the station and walked down the road toward the town, which was about half a mile distant.

      I came to two little girls playing hop scotch and asked them where the church was to be found. They told me they went to Sunday School there so I went into their house and made myself known. The lady told me that the people next door were members and knew I was coming, but that the lady was down the street shopping. I went in and waited. In due course she arrived home, embarrassed to find me there. Her husband worked out in the bush cutting sleepers. I had not had any breakfast. She got herself lunch while we chatted, and sat down and ate it. In later

years we got to know this lady very well and regarded her as one of our best friends. She was very kind and helpful to us and our kids called her 'Aunty'. But that first meeting embarrassed her and she forgot to ask me to eat. After she had lunch, she suggested that she would take me to visit some of the members in the town, so off we walked and did that. I began to wonder where I was going to stay that night. I hoped to get board somewhere. I was invited to tea and when her husband arrived home and he found I came from Warracknabeal and he had come from Horsham, we fell ayarning about people and places, and he suggested that I should board with them, which I did.

      I had found a house to rent when Elva arrived and I ordered new furniture on time payment. I had bought a double bedroom suite and thought a bed was included in a suite. When it arrived we were minus a bed, so we used the floor. We discovered rats coming up through a hole in the floor in the dining room. I got a trap and set it and re-set it until we caught nine big fat ones. We went to sleep then. We did not stay long in that house. We found a better one nearby.

      I was restless because there seemed so little to do. I rode my bike out to visit the farmers and that was a bit exacting. They were all dirt roads, and in those days I had to wear a suit complete with collar and tie. Out and back eighteen miles in the one day was good exercise. One day I was passing a farm house when I saw the farmer killing a pig. I went in to say 'Hullo' to him and in the course of conversation he said he would give me half of the pig if I could guess the correct weight. He would be cutting it down in the morning. It was not a large animal so I put it at ninety eight pounds. Next morning he was at our back door with half a pig on his shoulder and insisted we should have it because my guess had been 'spot on'. It was a nice change from rabbits!

      We were being paid eight dollars a week, less tax. There were no perks, such as travel, telephone (which we didn't have) etc. Just the bare amount. Our rent was $1.60 a week. One Monday morning I cashed a cheque and paid the bills, coming home with a half pence. I put it on the kitchen table and told Elva to be careful how she handled it. We had 1/- (10 cents) in the bank to keep the account open. I heard two of the elders talking together one day. One said, "What do you think of him?", meaning me. The other replied, "We won't keep him long, he is too busy for us."

      I discovered they had a debt on their building and had not paid anything off it since it had been incurred. I brought it up at a Board meeting. These were held when they thought about it, and always on a Sunday afternoon after Sunday School and Communion. Many stayed for tea and the evening service and we stayed with them, At this Board meeting I proposed that we should have a fete to wipe out our debt. I knew many of them opposed fetes. I argued in favour of them and answered all their objections until they were speechless. We then took a vote and it was passed by a majority of one vote. I then laughed at them and said I never wanted a fete but I did want to get rid of the debt so that we could get on with a new project. I proposed a special debt reduction

offering in a few weeks time. They all readily agreed to it and we had it and the debt was wiped out.

      I wanted the inside of the church painted and they said they would do it after harvest, but they didn't say which one. It was then 'after cropping' with the same result. One Monday morning I went down the street, bought the paint and brushes and booked them to the church and got to work. By the next week end I had put four coats of paint over the whole of the inside of the building. It had never been painted previously. I was amused at the expression on the different faces when they arrived on Sunday. I then decided on a mission. I ran it myself with little success, so I was convinced we must have a tent for it, as was the fashion in those days.

      Three of us went to the Annual Conference in Sydney and waited on the Home Mission organiser, Mr H.G. Harwood, and stated our case. We were treated coldly. He suggested I should do more visitation and I asked him how far he rode a bike to pay a visit. He asked who would be the missioner, and the men with me said, "Our minister." We came home empty handed.

      I received a call from the church at Ipswich in Queensland, so I accepted it. Churches would not pay the cost of removing furniture, so we had an auction sale. Hardly any people attended and when it was over we received a cheque for fifty pounds. Elva had taken in sewing and saved the money until we had seventeen pounds and off I went to Sydney to buy a second hand car. I bought a Chevrolet for fifty pounds, fifteen pounds down and the rest from a money lending-Jew at 15% flat rate. I had two pounds for expenses to get home and just made it, without being able to eat at all on the night and day trip. We set off for Ipswich in our car. Our sewing machine was new and we had been offered two pounds for it at the sale, so we took it with us. I built a carrier on the back of the car and put it on it.

      Somewhere in the ranges, near the Queensland border, we broke the main leaf of the back spring. We were in a very small town with one garage. I went to the man who owned it and he said he did not have a new leaf and it would be days before he could get one. I looked up at the roof of the garage and there was a leaf hanging up there. I drew his attention to it and he said he did not know what it was . . . it was there when he took over the garage. I said it looked like what I wanted. and he said I could get it down and try it. It was what I wanted. He loaned me his tools to put it in.

      I was under the car doing just that when the local policeman came along and asked me what I was doing with the back number plate of the car covered up with the machine on the carrier. I said I was too busy working on the spring to do anything about it. He stood there for more than an hour and then suddenly disappeared. The garage man came out and said the mail had just come in and the policeman had gone off to collect his, and he would be back pretty soon. I had just finished the job, so he said to me to leave the tools, get in the car and go for our lives to

the Queensland border which was only about ten miles away and once we got over the border we would be out of his jurisdiction. This we did and as we sped towards the border all eyes were on the rear vision mirror to see if we were being pursued. We soon bumped over the border and to safety.

IPSWICH.

      It is a fine city, twenty miles from Brisbane. The roll membership of the church was almost three hundred but with only about eighty attending. I was the tenth minister in thirteen years, the Conference President, the late Fred Collins, inducted me to the ministry. He assured me that with my diplomacy I would be able to right the ills of the church. It was divided into two groups, and had been for a number of years. But no one seemed to know what it was about.

      It was really a problem of personalities. At the conclusion of the first morning service, the man who was supposed to be the trouble-maker came to me and said he was opposed to me coming there because it was not fair to me. He had argued that they should resolve their differences before they called any minister. He assured me that now I was there he would give me his support. We became good friends. He was a strong man, hard in some ways, a very successful business man, but he had a generous heart. We were able to rent a furnished house for $2.40 a week. I was receiving $9 a week. I printed a leaflet and walked around five hundred houses distributing it and inviting people to come to the services. As a result one man came to one service. I learnt that door-knocking is a waste of time.

      I decided on a brief mission. Bert Baker, who was at Boonah, came as song leader and I did the preaching. We had excellent attendances and some decisions. Attendances at all meetings increased and I was getting along with 'both sides', but the situation was a worry to me. One Sunday morning I did not go into the pulpit, but stood on the floor of the church and took as my text, "Love the brotherhood'. I flayed them with their lack of love, and their unwillingness to forgive each other. When I was shaking hands at the door, one man, who was a prosperous business man, "That is what the old cow wants", meaning the man to whom I referred earlier. I asked him, "Are you speaking about your brother in Christ?" "No brother of mine", he snapped and went on his way. Next evening 'that old cow' came to see me and shed tears over the state of the church, and asked what he could do to help. I suggested that he go to see the man who had made that statement and talk the whole matter out with him. He agreed to do so but was back in a few minutes saying the door had been slammed in his face.

      We had a Board meeting that week and reference was made to my address on the previous Sunday. One man who said he was neutral in

the affair, thought I had been ill-advised and too hard in what I said. I stood my ground and he became very agitated and said he would move that I should be dismissed. I asked him to do so and I would second it. I knew he was bluffing, but I wasn't. I took an old envelope out of my pocket and wrote my resignation on it and threw it on the table. He told me I could not do that, but I said that I had done it, and that was it. He asked when it would be effective and I said from this moment and went home. Later they persuaded me to stay for two more Sundays.

      Gilgandra heard of my resignation, and their minister having had a breakdown, they sent me a telegram inviting me to return. We were just ten months at Ipswich. The minister who followed me told me I did the church a lot of good. The shock made them look at themselves and do some sorting out of their problems. The next ministry was more or less normal. While I was at Ipswich I discovered that there was a small church meeting at Bundamba. They did not have a minister so I suggested they should let me speak near the beginning of their morning service and then I could leave for Ipswich to be back there to speak and they could continue with the rest of their service. They were delighted to do so but Ipswich took a dim view of it.

      Bundamba was a coal mining area and the church had thirty plus members. They were old-fashioned in some ways but very sincere and friendly. We had a mission there and packed the place out, and there were some decisions. They used one communion cup. Each one would drink of it, wipe it and pass it on to the next one. The first communion service we attended we sat in the front seat and they began serving at the back. We got the last taste of it. Elva suggested that the next time we attended we should sit in the back and so get it first. We did, but that day they began serving at the front so we were last again.

      One day when we were there it was announced that a young man had been disciplined for using bad language. I was later told he had used the word 'damn'. He was to be out for a month. When the server came to him with the bread he leaned over past him, he was sitting on the end of the seat, and gave it to the second person. When the bread was coming back to the server the young chap made a grab, got a piece of bread and said, "Ah, beat you that time."

GILGANDRA . . . The Second Time.

      It was good to be back with the happy family at Gilgandra. We began immediately to prepare for the tent mission which we had been refused by the Home Mission Committee. We got the loan of the Home Mission tent for a month, with this proviso, that they should supply the song leader, who was a member of the Committee. He was a man old enough to be my father and loved to tell little stories between hymns.

      He gave his testimony one night . . . so many years an atheist, so many years a Christian, so many a back-slider etc. I counted up the years and he was one hundred and one! I think others there could count too, if he couldn't, and it became evident they did not think much of him. We got along reasonably well because I let him know who was in charge.

      The meetings were well attended and many new contacts were made. I preached every night of the week , including Saturday, answered questions, and on Saturday and Sunday nights had an open air meeting in the main street before we went into the tent. There were eight adult decisions for the month but the chief value was the way the church was brought before the community. To illustrate the way I had to get around my song leader I will recount this incident.

      A business man and his wife who never went to church anywhere were coming to the meetings. He wanted to pounce on them the first time they came but I would not have it. I knew them and set out to cultivate more of their friendship before pressing them at all. One day when I was in their shop the lady asked me to call to see her because she had some things she wanted discuss with me. We arranged a time and he came with me. I took over the conversation as much as I could do, but he still managed to get in on it. At one stage she told him that she was addressing herself to me, not to him. When the time came for us to leave I felt that we had made a good impression. He suddenly fell on his knees and began praying. These people had a boy in high school and I heard him whistling in the back yard. Apparently one of his jobs after school was to take wood into the lounge room for the evening open fire. He came in through the door, whistling loudly, with an armful of wood. The room was fairly dark, and coming in from the light into the darker room, he did not see the legs of the praying mantis in his pathway. Suddenly he was spread out on the floor with his wood scattered over the carpet. The mantis prayed on, and those people never came back to the mission. A few days later I was in their shop and the lady said to me that I was welcome to call on them at anytime, but not to bring that other man.

      The Home Mission Committee must have received a good report concerning the mission for they asked me if I would consider being the State Evangelist, together with their songster, and spend my time conducting such missions. I was not interested.

      After two and half years back at Gilgandra the Home Missions Committee asked me if I would transfer to Albury. The work there was fairly new and they had had trouble with a minister who did not suit the situation. He unexpectedly died. The NSW Committee appealed to the Victorian Committee for their help. They agreed that NSW should find a suitable minister and Victoria would come in with a subsidy, and because Albury was closer to Melbourne than to Sydney, the Victorian Committee would give the oversight. I refused their request to transfer. The joint Committees then wrote to the church and asked them to release me, saying how important it was to have me there in this large and developing city etc. etc. I left it to the church to make the decision and they came to

the conclusion that I should go, but only on loan. When I felt I had completed my work there I was to come back to them if they needed a minister at that time. We had another auction sale of furniture, and with some trepidation, we boarded the train for Albury.

ALBURY.

      Edda was six weeks old. We arrived there on a cold, wet morning in June after a cold night sitting up in the train. We had been told that the church rented a house for a manse, but we were to find that they 'had let the house go', as they said, because they did not want to pay the rent until I got there . . . about three weeks. We stood on the station platform with our three girls, our dog, and a few cases. No one was there to meet us. After some time a man came up to me and asked me if I was the new minister. He ran a fish shop and had come to collect his fish. He loaded us on to his utility on top of his crates of fish and took us to the past minister's widow. We knew we were not welcome there, so I left the family with her and set off to find accommodation of some kind. At about four in the afternoon we were able to move into a flat. There were two rooms with a double bed and a box for a table. It was a cold, dingy place.

      In the evening one of the elders, hearing we had arrived, called to see us. We chatted a while. He was a grocer and was on his way home from his shop. As he left he said, "God bless you", to Elva. God didn't exactly bless him at that moment, but Elva did. Before a fiery blast of the English language he hurried out and hastily drove off in his big English car.

      Next morning we went our separate ways looking for an empty house. I came home without any prospect, but Elva had done better. She had heard that the house next to where we were was to be empty in a week and she had secured it. In due course we moved in.

      I was unpacking when the Anglican rector called. I invited him in but he refused. The cat walked up and down the verandah as he told me there was no room for me in the Ministers' Fraternal. I asked him if that was his opinion or the decision of the Fraternal. He implied that it was the latter. I immediately presented myself at the primary school to give R.I. I went to one of the ministers, who proved to be a Baptist, and asked him if the Fraternal had declared me to be an outcast. He said he had not heard of such a thing, and he also told me that immediately after the lesson at the school the Fraternal was meeting in the Anglican rectory. I gave them time to get there and to start their meeting, and then rang the door bell. The maid answered and I said I was one of the ministers and had come to the meeting. She showed me in. Proceedings stopped. The Baptist man introduced me. When it came to the rector, I reminded him that we had already met. In a very little while I was secretary of the Fraternal and had the key to the room where we kept clothing etc. which we gave out to those in need.

      I soon discovered there were problems in the church. As is so often the case it was basically personality problems. A tent mission had been

held and had brought in about a hundred new people, and many of them never had a clue what it was all about. There were two men on the Board who worried me. Both were business men of some means and some standing in the city. One man had a big mouth when it came to church matters, but he seldom attended the services, and soon after my arrival was before the Court for conducting S.P. bookmaking. The other man drank heavily and his wife confided in me that he thrashed her. I went to his place of business on one occasion, and I frequently did because there was something about him which I liked. This day he did not know I was there. He was reprimanding one of his employees. I thought I had heard all the Australian profanities, but that day I heard a few new combinations. When he had finished I walked over to him and spoke to him as usual. I would not rebuke him in front of his men, so I acted as if I had not heard.

      A few weeks later we had the annual business meeting of the church. It was the practice of the church to write the names of those who had been nominated for positions on a blackboard, and with it in front of them they would vote for those of their choice. When the blackboard with all the names on it was put up in front of the members I walked down to it and rubbed out the names of these two men and said to the members that if anyone wanted an explanation as to why I had done it I was ready to give it to them. No one questioned me, and certainly not the two men concerned, who were both present. The S.P. man became my enemy . . . but a silent one. The other man became a good friend and most generous toward me when I wanted to do things later. He acknowledged that he ought not to be a deacon. Both of these men were buddies of the deceased minister's widow. She also had the ear of the Victorian Home Mission organiser who was the man who dealt with me. She was a real nuisance, not only to me, but to the whole church.

      We were there for a year and the work was developing. New people were coming to the church and a number of people had been brought into the fellowship.

      Elva had gone to Melbourne to stay with friends for a few weeks and I was on my own. This widow lady invited me home for lunch on Sunday. We had to walk about three quarters of a mile to her house. As soon as we began our walk she started to take me to pieces over something which was taking place in the church. It was my opportunity to tell her what a nuisance she was making of herself. At first she fought back, then wilted and the tears began to flow. She asked me what she should do and I told her to learn to keep her tongue still, mind her own business, quit the positions in the church to which she clung but did little about them, learn to get with people etc. We ended up coming to an understanding, so I thought, and she was most cordial toward me at the service that night.

      The next morning the Home Mission organiser arrived when I was cutting the lawn in front of the church. He was greatly upset. My widow friend had rung him on the Sunday afternoon. I boiled over and told him

to get back to Melbourne and let me do what they had brought me there to do. I pointed out to him that the church was never better than it was then, and she was not going to spoil things. He went on his way to see her, leaving me a little downcast. During the week I was riding my bike down a street when I saw the aforesaid lady talking to another lady. I rode close by, raised my hat and said, "Good afternoon." She turned her back on me. I did a circle and came past again and greeted her again, and she repeated her about turn, so I did it the third time. This time she snapped, "Good afternoon", and I laughed and went on my way.

      Things settled down and the whole of the work was progressing. We decided to have a church tea with an inspirational meeting to follow with a speaker from the city. The Home Mission organiser said he would come and bring the speaker with him, which he did. The church was crowded for the tea, and it went with a swing. The Board had decided on a 15c. charge just to cover costs. As I was about to announce the cost and pass the plate around, the same lady had to push in and tell me to announce it was 30c. so we would make some money out of it. I announced the 15c. and she rushed out the back in a sea of tears. She was followed by the organiser. I went on with the tea. When it was over and the building was being made ready for the meeting to follow, the organiser took me for a walk down the street. He began talking about the church in Geelong. I asked him what he was on about, and he told me that the Home Mission Committee had decided I would finish at Albury and he had gone to Geelong and put my name to them and they were very happy to have me. I very quickly told him he could go back to Geelong and tell them that I was not going there, and that we would go back to the church immediately, and I would get the Board together and he could tell them that I was to finish there. He objected and said he wanted me to tell them after he had gone back. I demanded he come back and I took him into the vestry where I had gathered the Board and said to them, "Mr So and So has something to tell you", and walked out and closed the door.

      Next morning he was up at our place very early and the first thing he said was, "Jack, you must stay here. I have never been spoken to as those men spoke to me last night." I told him I would not stay. I had been dismissed and that was it. The Board begged me to stay on but I wouldn't. Two days went by and I had no idea what we would do. A letter came from a member in Gilgandra telling us the sad news that their minister had died suddenly. He had an operation and seemed to be recovering well when a clot of blood went to his heart. I sent a telegram to the secretary of the church saying I was free if they wanted me back there. In two weeks time two men arrived with a truck and took us and our belongings back to Gilgandra. I believe what took place at Albury did the church a lot of good. The Board took a stronger lead, the Victorian Home Missions withdrew. Dual control was not good.

      There are a few happenings at Albury which still linger in our minds. Somehow Elva arrived home with a young man called Harry, who was installed into our family. He seemed to be without a family to care for him. I was not over-impressed with him and just put up with him around the place. Elva found him a job in a grocer's shop, but he soon got the sack for being lazy. She persevered with him for months. One day, something happened and I got to the end of my patience. I sent him on his way with his few belongings. Elva was far from happy about it. The years went by and he was almost forgotten.

      I was passing through Albury by train and had a little time to spare there so went for a walk down the main street. I met two soldiers coming toward me and as I passed I looked at them. I felt I knew one of them, and after getting past, stopped and looked back. He had done the same. We soon recognised each other. It was Harry. He didn't have much time but quickly told me what had happened. Leaving us he got a job on a dairy farm out of town. Eventually he married the farmer's daughter and had taken over the farm. He had been called up to do military service. He wasn't much interested in me, except to say that I did the best thing I could have done for him when I sent him on his way. Most of his concern was for Elva. She stood out as an angel in his memory. He assured me he remembered the things we tried to teach him and he and his wife were regular in the Methodist church when he was at home.

      We had a woman coming to our home who had some sad story which we never got from her. She would come into my study and talk suicide, and at first I was very gentle with her, but I got tired of hearing it. One morning I pointed her to the rifle standing in the corner and told her to take it and go and do what she was talking about. I think it shocked her a bit. She got up and went out and as she did so I told her to get out on the street so I wouldn't have to clean up the mess. I never saw her again, but a few days later a policeman called and asked if I knew a certain woman. I said I didn't, and then he said they had found our name and address in her belongings. I realised she had given us a different name. They informed me that she had been found dead in a room with her head in the gas stove. So she had done it! You can't win them all.

      I was invited to go to Mildura to conduct a mission running over three Sundays. I arrived there on September 2, 1939, the day before war was declared. I was not well on the Sunday, and on the Monday morning they brought in the Doctor. I had measles. I knew I had never had them when I was young. I was delirious, wanting to get out of bed to get after the Germans. This mission was postponed and I was confined to bed. After two weeks I started again. Attendances were good and there were some decisions, but I was pretty sluggish. I never dreamed that in ten years time I would be there as their minister.

GILGANDRA . . . The Third Time.

      We arrived back with our family of three, and furniture, but no house to move into. On the day after our arrival I heard of the death of a young married man and I went to see his mother. I had not met any of these people, but I had known about them. I found the mother wanted to sell her house. I told the church secretary and he suggested that we should buy it in our joint names. I told him I could put in two shillings. He agreed to pay the deposit, and I could go on paying off the balance by way of rent. We signed the contract, the purchase price being two hundred and seventy five pounds, with eighty pounds deposit, and the balance free of interest to be paid off at twelve shillings a week. She could not receive more than those amounts without affecting her pension. It was quite a good house, but it needed painting, and it did not have a water supply. In Gilgandra there was no community water supply. Each property holder had their own well or bore.

      We soon saw to the painting of the house and then I began making cement cylinders for a well. I made forty of them, three feet in diameter, and one foot six inches in height, and two inches thick. I borrowed a windlass and rope and went to work. Every spare minute was spent in the well. Elva turned the windlass with a half full bucket of soil until it got too much for her. We struck water at fifty five feet. My joint owner came in from his farm to help me lower the cylinders one by one. One would sit on it and guide it down and place it in position. We bought a windmill on time payment and I erected it. I was given a leaking one thousand gallon tank, and I went into the bush and cut four hefty twenty foot long logs and erected them for the tank stand, and then cemented the old tank up on the stand. Pipes were laid to the house and garden and the great day came when we put the mill into gear, the wind blew, and the water flowed.

      We soon had a good garden of lawns, flowers and vegetables. When we were leaving there the church asked me to sell them the house for a manse at the same price as we had paid for it. My joint owner said he would give his share . . . the eighty pounds deposit . . . to the church. I reluctantly agreed to do so. I thought I was helping the church to get a manse. A land agent came to me and offered double the price the church was willing to pay, but I stayed with the church. A few months after we left there they sold the house at a considerable profit, but they did use the money to buy another house for a manse.

      As far as transport was concerned, I was back to riding a push bike in my work. A farmer who had no connection with the church met me on the street and told me about a car he had in his shearing shed. He thought I might be interested in it because he knew I did a bit of repairing

of vehicles for church members. He said a young man had had a breakdown with this car and had asked permission to leave it there until he could do something about it. It had been in his shed for some months. I went out to have a look at it and very quickly I saw how it could be repaired. It was an eight horse power Morris, five years old, and had done a low mileage. The owner had forgotten to put oil in it and a piston had broken and gone through the side of the engine. I wrote to the young man and offered him all we had in the bank and the kids' money boxes . . . fifteen pounds. He wrote back and asked for thirty pounds. Before I could answer in the negative another letter came from him accepting my offer. It cost me two pounds ten shillings to repair it. I bought a secondhand piston and used a plate off an old T model Ford car to patch the hole in the engine. I asked the church to pay for a year's registration, which was four pounds ten shillings, but they refused, saying it was my responsibility. Of course they expected me to use it on my work. How times have changed! We had to save until we had enough to register it. We did sixty five thousand miles in it and sold it for one hundred and fifty pounds. It was in the war years that we sold it, and cars were hard to get.

      We approached E.C. Henrichsen seeking his services for a six weeks' tent mission. He arrived with a tent and song leader. We had done a lot of preparation work and the opening attendances were very good. They did not maintain, and ECH called a meeting of our elders and blamed the church for his lack of success. He said we set too high a standard in the community and that frightened people away. They were not impressed and let him know of their disappointment. That night he announced the mission would close immediately. After the benediction he got in his car and left for Sydney. He had been there for three weeks and had been a complete failure. In spite of this set-back the church continued to grow and became self-supporting.

      There was a fear that the Japanese would invade Australia. The eighth army was brought home from the Middle East. They moved by road to Queensland, passing through Gilgandra with their trucks, soldiers, machine guns etc. For six weeks they thundered through, day and night. We knew there was a war on. I went to the shire clerk who was the recruiting officer for our area and filled in my enlistment papers. He would not accept them. He said I was in priority one, and the only way I could get in was to resign from the church, and after six months I would be taken; or I could go as a chaplain and it was for the church to appoint me to that position and not the forces. Further, he said I was needed in the town, so he would not take my papers. I was then called in to assist in recruitment. Every little while there would be a fresh call up of men and I had to assist in interviewing them. A little later I had a call from Sydney to report for duty as a chaplain in the airforce down there. My name had been passed on by our Conference. I rang the base to ask what would be

my duties. I was told that British law required a chaplain to a certain number of men. When I asked for specific duties, I was told that I could bring my family to Sydney, report for duty each morning, sign on and off and then disappear out of the way. That meant being a parasite. I thought about it for days and then sent a telegram stating I would not be there. I waited in fear but have not yet heard from them.

      With the threat of invasion troubling us all, I decided to call the town to prayer. I went to the owner of the theatre and told him what I had in mind. He said I could have the use of the theatre, without charge, on the Sunday morning for a meeting. He advertised it on the screen. The church agreed to forego our usual meeting, and the theatre was packed to the doors. Most of those attending never went near a church. We had prayer relating to the war situation, and I preached with all the vigour I could muster, for the times were very serious. The Japanese had just been dealt with in the Sydney Harbour and the town was full of people who had fled the city. I received a lot of notoriety, and again the church was brought prominently before the community.

      I was approached by the Country Party asking if I would accept nomination as their candidate for the coming election. I laughed at them. The man they nominated was returned because he was the only one who stood.

      Here is an encouraging incident. One of our men was out of work. He bought a second hand truck and began a carrying business. Much of his work was carrying work in the town, but occasionally he would have a job which took him out to the farms and stations. He met with an accident and was in hospital. I visited him and found him very worried about his business. I assured him that I would take care of that for him. I would get up early in the morning and make deliveries with his truck, and work late at night to do what I had not been able to do in the morning. A consignment of superphosphate arrived for a station owner. There were about fifty bags to go out to this place, each bag weighing one hundred and eighty pounds. I loaded up before tea that evening and set off after the evening meal. The truck owner had rung the station from the hospital to tell them the 'parson' would be delivering it late that night. I was met by three men carrying a lantern who directed me to the barn. They put the lantern down in the barn where the super had to be stacked, and put a plank from the truck into the barn and then sat down and began to yarn between themselves. I began lumping the bags in. No help was given and I went on my way thinking they were an unusual and mean lot.

      About fifteen years later I was attending Federal Conference in Sydney. After leading in devotions one morning, I walked from the platform down the aisle of the church, when a man leaned out of his seat and stopped me and asked if I had been a minister at Gilgandra. We went outside together because he said he wanted to talk to me. He said he had owned the station to which I had taken the super, and knowing the 'parson' was bringing it out, he with the other two men, had thought I would crumple under the first bag and the sat down to enjoy the sight.

      They were surprised when it didn't happen, I had grown up humping bags of super. Not long after that incident he had sold the station and gone to Sydney to retire.

      One evening he and his wife were out walking when they came to a Church of Christ. He stopped and said to his wife that that was the church to which the 'parson' belonged who had brought out his super, and he sneaked up to the door to see if it was the same chap. The door-keeper laid hold of him and got he and his wife into the back seat of the church. At the close of the service the people got around them and invited them to come again. During the week the minister called on them, and the result was that he was then a deacon in the church and his wife was downstairs helping with the meals as a member of the Conference catering committee. I went down to meet her. "Cast your bread upon the waters" . . . it doesn't always return after many days as far as one can see, but on this occasion it did.

      It was something of a surprise to me to get a letter from the Victorian Home Mission committee asking me if I would consider taking up the work at Hamilton. My father had just died at Portland, and the church at Portland had been commenced partly through his efforts, and it came under the care of the Hamilton minister. The work at Hamilton was fairly new. They had a nice new chapel and hall and the large and prosperous city presented good opportunities. So once more we auctioned our furniture and packed our four girls into the little Morris and off we went.

HAMILTON.

      There was a rented house waiting for us and we were very warmly received. The church was not large, about sixty or seventy at both the Sunday services. They were a happy and responsive group of people. We soon discovered that it was a cold and wet climate. In the first week we were there, Elva developed asthma. It was something we had never thought about. We had both been very healthy except for migraine, which I had had for years. Our Doctor was the essence of kindness, but asthma persisted, and finally it meant we had to leave after only two years there. The church offered me a further five year engagement toward the end of our second year, and I wanted to accept it, but our Doctor spoke to one of the elders and advised that we should get out of the place. They sent us away for a holiday by the sea but with no effect. It was with reluctance that we decided that we could not stay on.

      While we were there Elva's mother came to us with the ulcer on her leg which she had for many years, so bad that the Doctor put her to bed for five months while he grafted it. It did heal completely, but broke out again after she went home.

      The spirit of the church is revealed in this incident. We had an air force school there with hundreds of young men and women billeted in homes. It was a six week's course, so that we had thousands of young people pass through there. We invited than to come to the services of the church and often we would have quite a group present. I arranged sing-songs after the evening services particularly for them, and sometimes brought in people to entertain them. Our ladies would provide supper.

      Mr Cecil Marriott, a well-known actor, was in town doing work for the local radio station. I asked him if he would come one evening and put on a programme for the young people. He readily agreed, so I suggested he might like to come to the worship service prior to the meeting in the hall. It was Harvest Thanksgiving and they arrived a little late. They (he and his wife) were escorted to the front seat because the building was packed. I welcomed them and after the service our people got around them and likewise welcomed them. When they came into the church hall Cecil said that he had never been to a church service like it before . . . it was warm, friendly, helpful and he had so many handshakes that he thought he would lose his hand. Ten years later he was in Mildura doing work on the radio there. Walking down the street past our church property he noticed my name on the board and came in to see if I was the person he had associated with in Hamilton. He was there for some weeks and there was no need to persuade him to come to the services. He came regularly and when he needed some little girl to help him in one of his plays he used Dawn. It was probably her first taste of public work. So often it is the spirit of the church, more than any other factor, which impresses people.

MARYBOROUGH.

      Eric Hollard had injected new life into the church there, as he usually does. He was going into the services as a chaplain and I was invited to have a ministry there. I inherited from him a daily devotional service on the radio. We did it under the name of 'The Wayfarer'. I enjoyed doing it but it was a tie, and it demanded a good deal of thought to keep it fresh. After a few months the manager of the station asked me if I would follow on each morning doing the hospital session for a half hour. He stipulated that it was not to be 'a religious show, not too many hymns'. I went around the hospital beds each Monday afternoon and received from the patients their requests for favourite songs which I would play during the week.

      My difficulty was to fit in all the requests they made of me. The manager told me his wife was going into hospital and asked me to be sure and call on her. He professed to be an atheist, and he could swear better than most people. When I called on her she asked me to play 'Abide With Me'. I did so the next morning without announcing that it was

especially for her. I had barely started the recording when the manager burst into the studio turning the air blue, shouting about telling me not to make it a religious show. When he had said his piece, I told him a very important person had requested me to play it. That set him off again . . . he didn't care who had requested it etc. And then I told him it had been for his wife at her request. He thought the world of her and was completely deflated. After the session he apologised and said if he hadn't respected me so much he would have sworn at me. I thought that was what he had been doing, but apparently he had kept something in store.

      The management of the station changed and the Brethren from Bendigo offered $600 a year for my session as the Wayfarer. The new management asked me to match it if I wanted to keep the session. I could do that but I called for a special meeting of the Council and told my story there in the presence of the new management. The Mayor supported me very strongly emphasising that it was wrong to lose the session to Bendigo. After the meeting I had a phone call from the new owners to say they had taken down every word I had said and that I would be hearing from their solicitors. I told them that I would be delighted to do so, and hung up on them. I never heard from them again. I patented the name 'The Wayfarer' so that they could not use it. The church was in good heart with good attendances.

      One of the bright spots was a young ladies choir with twenty six voices. They did not have a conductor. With my complete lack of musical knowledge and ability, I offered to do it. We had an excellent pianist, there were a number in the choir who did know music and I could understand words, so we managed. I waved my arms and shook my head and bent my knees and the girls sang beautifully. We sang over the air on many occasions. While I was with them there was only one Sunday night that they did not sing. The old asthma problem was still with us. Things had improved on Hamilton days but it was still worrying. Ted Waters had been the minister at Mildura when I had held the mission there. He had returned to the area and was part time at Dareton and working a fruit block. He died suddenly and his wife asked me to go up to bury him, which I did. Later I took holidays and went up to help with the harvest. An invitation from the Dareton church came to me to do as Ted had done, to be their part time minister and they would finance me to secure a fruit block. We thought it would be better for the asthma problem and give us a little more security than we had, we decided to accept the invitation.

SUNRAYSIA.

      There was supposed to be a property waiting for us to inspect, but it did not eventuate. There was no house available. We lived with Mrs Waters, which was unsatisfactory for all concerned. I worked for

her brother-in-law on his and her blocks, and did the work of the church in my spare time. After about a year one of the packing sheds offered to put us on a property which was run down. I worked it for some months waiting for the transfer, only to have it refused because the owner had two properties and the authorities would not split the title. The situation seemed hopeless. The Home Mission Committee wrote to me asking me to act on their behalf and have a look at Red Cliffs. My reaction was negative. The Red Cliffs Board then approached me and asked me to meet with them. Elva and I went over to Red Cliffs one afternoon and looked the place over. The manse had three rooms and a couple of small verandahs. I leaned against the church next door and said, "I am not going to live in that", to which she replied, "Yes we are", and that was it.

      I met the Board that night and discovered that they had an income of $5.35 over the past few years. They had not had a minister for seven years. There were about fifteen to twenty members meeting and a Sunday School of about the same size. They said they had saved enough money to engage me for a year, I told them that would not satisfy me. If I was to be their minister they would have to become self-supporting immediately. I had a scheme by which this could be accomplished and they accepted it. They wanted me to say that I would come for a definite period, but I refused, saying that if they were not there this Sunday I would not be there the next. The Home Mission Committee had asked me to assess the situation and see if I would go there for a month, three months, or whatever suited me. If it did not work out they promised to place me somewhere at the end of the trial period. We moved in and went to work. My scheme for self-support was to ask the fruitgrowers to sign pledges to contribute a certain percentage of their fruit to the church, and deliver it to the packing sheds in the name of the church.

      We received enough pledges to become self-supporting immediately. I think something of the scheme still operates. I drew their attention to the inadequacy of the manse. They agreed to pay for the materials for extensions if I did the work. I added verandahs across the front and on one side and built them in. We were then able to house our family. We had very few contacts since they had been so long without a minister. I adopted all manner of means of meeting up with people. A favourite way was to drive along a road toward one of our members, see a man working out on his block, stop and walk in to him, and ask if I was on the way to so and so. I would then talk vines to him, tell him who I was, give him a church paper and invite him along. I soon knew a lot of people. I started a boys' club which quickly grew to fifty boys attending. This gave me many contacts. I borrowed a big ex-army truck from Alex. Long and a trailer from Jack Cook, and together with boys from our other three churches in the district, set off for Hall's Gap for a camp in the September holidays. This became an annual event. I had to limit the number of boys to sixty. Our Sunday School grew from sixty to eighty or so there regularly. I was told by the Board that I could not have a meeting on Sunday nights. The first Sunday I was there I announced a meeting at

night and we had thirty five there. It grew until we had sixty to eighty there.

      I invited our Home Mission organiser to come up to speak at the first church anniversary we had there. We had three meetings that day and at each one the church was packed out. He said to me next morning that he never believed it was possible. Of course I trod on a few toes, not deliberately, and I think I trod gently.

      I was unpacking our boxes when one of the deacons came in to welcome me there. He told me to call him by his christian name and I reciprocated, but he protested, saying he respected the minister too much to do that. He shook hands, was warm with his words of welcome, and then added,"I have seen every minister we have had come and go, and I have made them all cry, and I suppose I will do the same with you." I quickly replied, "You won't. If there is any crying to be done you will do it, not me."

      One day, just a little later, in a Board meeting, he attacked me loudly and quite unnecessarily. I waited until the other Board members left and then said to this man that I would like to see him for a few moments. He followed me out the back door of the church where I turned to him and told him to repeat what he had said in the meeting and be prepared to take the consequences. I took my coat off and faced him. He was dumbfounded. He put his hands on my shoulders and with tears running down his face he said, "Jack, I am sorry. I didn't mean it like that." I said, "Who is crying now?" I gave him a good lecture about controlling his temper and told him to get off home. I never had any more trouble with him. In fact he became one of my best friends. Not long before he died he told me how he had mellowed and I knew he had. He was a fine Christian man and completely loyal to the church.

      I had been told about a man who was described to me as being more regular at the services than the minister, and who suddenly stopped coming to meeting some years previously. One day I was driving past his property when I saw him pruning his vines. I walked over to him and introduced myself. He did not have much to say. To get him to talk I said that I knew that he had been a good friend of various leaders in our Brotherhood, and then I asked him to tell me what it was like to have Christ in your life and then push him out. Did he sleep well at night? Could he get along without prayer and worship? What about the future, did he think about it? I said I knew what it was like to be without Christ and then to receive him, but I did not know what it was like to push him out after receiving him, and would he be good enough to tell me. He stopped pruning, his mouth fell open, and he whispered, "Go away, please go away." I took the secateurs off him and said I would prune for him while he answered my questions. I pruned one vine and he kept repeating, "Please go away." I offered him one of our church papers which he refused to take. As I went out of the vineyard I saw his coat hanging on a post so I put the paper in his pocket. Some years later when I was visiting Red Cliffs from Adelaide I saw this man sitting in the church

and was told he had suddenly returned to worship. Later he went into one of our Rest Homes and I saw his death notice in the Australian Christian.

      Les Snow was the minister in Mildura. We had studied together in College and found it easy to work with each other. Without any announcement about it we looked after the four churches we had in the area. Hardly a day passed without us being in contact with each other. We commenced a camping programme which brought new life to our work, in particular, our youth work. We had a youth council which co-ordinated youth activity in our four churches. We began printing a monthly church paper covering all of our work in Sunraysia. A Sunraysia Council of Churches was commenced with Les as secretary and myself as treasurer. Later I became secretary and then president, and remained in this latter position until I left the area. We commenced a district conference for our churches, and a conference for our women of which my wife was the first President. Mrs Snow was not well and became progressively more ill until Les felt he must leave the ministry.

      He became a secondary teacher at the St. Arnaud High School. Thus ended our association in ministry. He was a big man. in stature and in mind and in spirit. As I look back I regard him as one of the good friends with whom I have worked. He added a great deal to my life and thinking. Those three years together, complementing each other, were spent without us ever having a difference with each other. When he left the Mildura church asked me to take his place.

MILDURA.

      Some of the people at Red Cliffs were very disappointed when I left them but they had a good man to follow in the person of Clarrie Lang. Again we became the best of friends. Perc. Whitmore had come from College to the church at Merbein and the three of us continued to share our ministry around the whole area. We developed the camping programme by having one for girls in the May holidays. Later, when I commenced the Sunday School of the Air I commenced a camp for these scholars. The last year I was in Sunraysia we had four camps for young people with an aggregate of about two hundred and fifty young people.

      I got the idea of having a Sunday School over the local radio station to reach the children in the outback. The manager of the station was not impressed. He would not give me time and did not want to sell it to me. At last I persuaded him to let me try it for three months. He was afraid I would spoil the image of his station. He did not think anyone would be interested in it. His charge was $5 a week. I spoke to our district conference about it and no one so much as commented. One Sunday morning one man promised me half that amount for a year to give it a go.

      I soon had the rest of the needed money and we made a start. At the end of one year we had enrolled fifteen hundred scholars. They lived as far away as Queensland. Many came from outback NSW. I set homework for them to do, sent them a card for their birthday, sold them Bibles at cost price etc. This meant a great deal of work. I had Mrs Hall (Aunty Vera) and others to help me. We sent off hundreds of letters each week and received the biggest fan mail of the radio station. Every letter we received was acknowledged, and all the homework was marked and prizes were given for the best work etc.

      In addition, I did a weekly broadcast on a Friday morning just before the mid-day news. I used hymns instead of songs. On Sunday mornings there was a broadcast from one of the churches. Often churches did not want to take it because it interfered with something they were doing, and the station knew I would always oblige. I would sometimes have it week after week. The church was good to me, giving me almost a free hand. The community received me as I had never been received in any other community. I was 'Uncle Jack' to hundreds of people. Tradesmen were particularly generous when it came to camp provisions.

      I was probation officer in the childrens' court and had many children referred to me for supervision. Police officers showed me every consideration. Elva was free from asthma. We often said we would never leave Mildura. I had many weddings and lots of calls for assistance to those 'in need'.

      One day a man and his prospective wife came to me to be married. They were both beyond middle age. Notice of marriage was required by law, but they wanted to be married that day. I sent them to the Clerk of Petty Sessions who could waive the not ice if he wished. He rang me granting permission and the couple returned with another man to act as witness. I called my wife in as the second witness. The bride demanded a 'proper' wedding, which she said must be 'before the altar'. She also insisted that the groom must kiss her during the ceremony. We put on the light over the baptistry on which there was a cross marked in the tiles. That satisfied the altar demand. I brought them up on the platform, which was about eighteen inches high. The ceremony got under way with Elva comprising the audience and she was seated in the back seat. At the appropriate time I whispered 'kiss' to the groom. He seemed to be far away in thought. He looked blankly at me and said, "Ay?" I repeated it. He swung his left hand around to take hold of his bride, contacted her hat, and sent it spinning down into the church aisle. He looked at the hat, and then at me, and took off to retrieve it, which he did, and with both hands he pulled it down on his bride's head. I again requested the kiss which she then got. I looked down at Elva to see her almost in hysterics. She got up and tip-toed out the front door leaving me to it. When the signing was over I led them to the front door and ushered them on their way. I was closing the door of the church when he came back from the street to ask me, "Is this the Church of England?' When I told him it was

not, he called out to his bride, "Damn it all, Mary, we got married in the wrong church." I closed the door.

      One night I was working late in the study which opened on to the church yard. The phone rang. It was the editor of the Sunraysia Daily who told me that the King had just died and he wanted to run an article in the paper next morning from me as the President of the Council of Churches on the life of the late King. He gave me two hours to get it to him. I had just settled to write something when there was a tap on my window. I opened it to find a big rough looking man, in shorts and a dark singlet, standing in the church yard. He asked me if I was the minister and had I heard the news about the King. He said he had seen the light in the window and that he wanted a minister to pray with him to thank God for the King. It seemed a strange request at about 1 a.m. I offered to pray with him leaning out the window, but he wanted it in the church before the altar. So I went out and opened the side door of the church and put the light on over the baptistry. He followed me in. I told him to kneel down and he did, so I knelt beside him. I was still wondering if he was genuine, so I said, "You pray first and I will follow." After a long silence he said, "Our Father" . . . another long pause, "Which art in heaven." A still longer pause and then he blurted out, "I don't know any more. You finish it." I did, and added a little more to it. He stood up, shook my hand and said, "You don't know how much that means to me, padre. He was a good King and I fought for him." With that he was gone into the night and I heard the roaring of the engine of his transport as he got on his way. To my amazement Elva and some of the girls were hanging out my study window, asking if I was OK. They had been awakened by our conversation and were there to witness my assassination.

      I could tell endless stories similar to these. One year during the Christmas-Harvest period I counted the callers at the manse looking for help etc. The number was one hundred and fifty eight. I was addressed by various titles . . . padre, reverend, pastor, comrade, father etc. So many were phoney. More than once I was invited to 'take my coat off' when I refused their request., or suggested they get their money where they got their grog.

      We had a branch of the Melbourne University in our city for a few years. There were over seven hundred students there. I was asked to act as liaison officer of the University in Melbourne and our local branch, particularly in matters of examinations, transport for visiting professors, accommodation etc. I received three dollars a week for my services, which was very handy when my salary was twelve dollars a week.

      Pastor and Mrs Neimoller were invited to be there by our Council of Churches, and one of the meetings we arranged was to address the student body. I recall him saying he had seen a heap of ashes higher than the room we were in, and covering a larger area, it being the ashes of the Jews from the incinerators of the concentration camp. At a public

meeting in the Town Hall during lunch hour, the hall was packed with business people, he described how he was arrested in his church at Dahlem. After the morning service, without any warning, he was whisked away by the SS men to be Hitler's personal prisoner. Over the door of the prison were these words, "No Bibles allowed in here." They took his Bible from him, but later, after many requests, it was returned to him.

      He found himself in a cell with a Roman Catholic priest and a minister of another Protestant church. They agreed that they would take it in turns to celebrate communion on Sunday. They saved a little of their bread and water and in turn they took communion according to their particular practice. Outside a little window which was high on the wall was the exercise yard. Prisoners were marched around the yard an hour at a time. He would stand on the table with his face close to the window and read verses from the Bible to them as they passed below. He quoted the text, "The Word of God is not bound."

      Periodically Hitler would send for him and try to get him to renounce the stand he had taken against him for killing the Jews. His constant reply to him was, "Thou shalt not kill." Hitler would fume and curse and threaten to have him killed, and he expected that he would, but he didn't. The Sunday morning following his disappearance, the church at Dahlem was packed with worshippers. There was no one to lead that service, and, as he said, the Lutherans do not encourage lay participation. Eleven o'clock came, and no one in the pulpit. Five past eleven and still all was silent. At ten past eleven a young man arose from the audience, went to the pulpit and opened the Bible and began to read. To the best of his ability he conducted the service. At the close of it, the SS men came forward and led him away., and when Neimoller said, "We have not heard of that young man since", his wife, next to me on the platform leaned over and whispered, "He was our son."

      I met up with this great man in San Juan where he was one of our guest speakers at our World Convention assembly. When I shook hands with him, I asked him if he remembered me. He did instantly and laughed as he recalled that we had been caught in a dust storm as we were taking he and his wife to the airport for departure. After fourteen years he associated me with a dust storm! In 1970 he wrote to me from Germany asking if we would have 'a mere Lutheran' at our assembly in Adelaide that year. I hastened to urge him to come. He said he would be delighted to do so, but later he wrote to say his Doctor had advised against it.

      It was while I was supervising examinations in the Town Hall that I received a letter inviting me to become the minister at Unley. I had been in Mildura for seven years and I suppose some people thought it was time I moved on. I had received a number of calls. One church was so persistent that at last I scribbled on the bottom of their letter to me, "I suggest you keep the money you are spending on postage and add to your salary and perhaps in time you may attract someone." I never heard

from them again at that time, but I did do an interim ministry for them at a later stage.

      When the call came from Unley, something clicked. I did not know anything about the church there. I had been to Cottonville (now Hawthorn) to speak at their church anniversary, and I have since learned that the family we stayed with on that occasion dropped my name on Unley. I told Elva I thought I would accept their invitation. Her reply was,"You can go on your own." It was that afternoon that the secretary of the Mildura church was talking to me and he said some of them had been talking together and the consensus of opinion was that they recommend to the church that I be invited to stay another ten years. I was shocked and said the church must have settled down in a rut being happy to go along as we were and I thought that they probably needed a change to stir them up. I never mentioned the call I had received that morning. After a few days to think and pray about the matter, I decided I should go to Unley. A letter came to me saying that if I was happy at Mildura I should stay there because Unley had some problems, and I would need 'a double portion of the Spirit of God' if I went there. That did not worry me. And then the secretary of the S.A. Advisory Board called on me. I told him I was going to Unley. He chatted a while and went on his way. I wondered why he came. Later I learnt that he had come to present to me a call from his home church.

      It was not an easy decision for me to make to leave Sunraysia. We were happy there, and the work had developed beyond my expectations. I did feel that I was being stretched to my very limit. I gave weekly instruction in six schools. In the High School I took an assembly of 500 students for half an hour each week. We had crowds of young people around the church: I was on seven committees in the city: my broadcasting was demanding: I did a weekly round of visiting at the base hospital: I supplied a text and a comment each day for the local paper etc.etc. I loved what I was doing but it was heavy work. I was having the occasional 'blackout', notably one on a Sunday morning when I was broadcasting the service.

      Our eldest daughter, Joan, was married there. We faced difficulty deciding who we would invite to the wedding. We had a fairly long list of relatives and we had served with the four churches there and we felt that to invite some and not others would not be fair. While we talked about this dilemma, one of the Mildura ladies came to Elva and said the ladies of the area wanted to take over the reception and suggested that all of the churches be invited to attend without us sending out invitations. This they did and we can never forget them for their generosity. The reception was held in the Town Hall and hundreds attended. It was a magnificent sit-down meal at no cost to us whatever, and then they presented a cheque to Neville and Joan as a wedding present from them all. A movie film was taken of the proceedings and given to them as a memento of the day. Don't talk to me about ministers being badly treated by churches! Maybe some are. All I can say is that churches with which we have

ministered have been wonderfully kind. So often churches treat ministers as they have been treated. I will always be indebted to my brethren for their treatment of me and my family.

UNLEY.

      Keith Jones and I sat together in College, went for holidays together, and had corresponded throughout the years . . . opposites in a number of ways . . . and yet good friends. He wrote to me saying that the man who had always described himself as a 'bush parson' was going to the blue blood church of the Australian brotherhood. Unley did have a swag of professional people. There were six Doctors, five of whom were active in the work, and a lot of other academics and high ranking people. I have often wondered why they called me and how I had the audacity to accept their call. I am still here after thirty years and acknowledge that this church has contributed much to my life. There has always been an emphasis upon dignity in worship and a high standard of life expected of members. The name of Messent has been associated with this church throughout its history. Four years ago Sir Philip died suddenly followed a little later by his wife, Lady Messent. Sir Philip had been an elder for many years. His passing left a gap in the life of the church which has not been filled. In his profession as a surgeon he was known far beyond this church and this state. He was commonly referred to as the praying Doctor because it was his practice to ask his staff to join him in prayer before he commenced his operating. He was in charge of surgical studies at Adelaide University for twenty years, and at the same time gave voluntary service at the Adelaide Hospital. It was my privilege to wait on him in his consulting rooms on North Terrace to ask him to accept nomination to be President of our World Convention. He said that he and I would be working closely together, and would I mind if he called me by my Christian name and would I please call him Phil.

      When he died I felt his loss more than I can say. I said at his funeral service something which is very true . . . "He was my friend, faithful and just to me." I was with his wife when she passed away and it was my privilege to conduct her funeral services.

      The seven years I ministered here the church was very good to us. The work expanded, the Sunday School doubled in attendance, we had eighty teenagers together each Friday night. We had a long list of contacts. Being an old church and having had a big membership and Sunday School enrolment, there were many funerals and weddings. Sometimes I would have three on the one day. We developed camping for teenagers and the Sunday School scholars.

      For three successive years I ran a mission to women and each year we brought together the women of the area with whom we had contact in a series of house meetings, culminating in them conducting a Sunday

evening service. We had one hundred and eighty women attending these meetings. I was invited to come for three years. It was unanimously renewed at the end of the time and at the end of six years this was repeated. I asked that it should be for one year only to be reviewed during the year. This was not acceptable to the church, so I gave a year's notice of concluding my ministry. I left feeling the work was in excellent spirit and pulsating with life. I have never known a church to be so well organised with an organisation that really worked. My successor paid me the compliment that he had never gone to a church which was working so efficiently and with so many contacts.

MAYLANDS.

      We were received enthusiastically by the church and immediately felt at home. Soon after our commencement we had a Billy Graham Crusade in Adelaide and this gave many churches a lift. We had about fifty people referred to us. I set up a training class for them and had an attendance of over forty over a number of weeks. Our congregation increased in numbers and decisions were made. It was the usual thing to have the church packed on Sunday mornings with people sitting on the side of the platform or in the aisles. The evening services were almost as well attended. Again we were able to build up an excellent group of teenage people. We would have about fifty of them together each week and they would attend the Sunday services regularly.

      When I was leaving there I truthfully said that I had never heard a cross word spoken to me or about me, nor had I heard a criticism passed by anyone about a fellow member. It was easy to minister to them, they were so receptive and responsive. The two years I was there I carried the office of Conference Secretary in a spare time voluntary capacity. The load increased and I indicated to the Conference Executive that I could not continue as Secretary. I had carried it for five and a half years. The church was asked by the Conference to release me and I left the decision with them. With reluctance they decided to do so. It was a sad parting, Maylands had been so good to us and the future seemed so bright and challenging.

SOUTH AUSTRALIAN CONFERENCE SECRETARY.

      At the 1955 Conference, the late H.R. Taylor indicated that he would not accept nomination as Conference Secretary. He had held the office for fifteen years. I was member of the Executive and was asked to nominate as Conference President. I declined to do so and in so doing said that if I had my preference I would be Secretary rather than President.

      A few days later I was asked if I would do the work of the Secretary for three or four months until they secured a permanent replacement. I said I would if the Unley church agreed. Several meetings of the Unley board were held before they could decide to let me do it. All the while I was doing it and using the President to sign the letters I wrote. There was no one wanting to take the position and I don't think the Executive was looking for anyone. This arrangement continued for five and half years, as I said previously, until I would no longer nominate. I was then appointed full time. When I was appointed Secretary the affiliation fee was 5c. per member (it is now $4). We had exactly $22 in kitty. During the years of the voluntary service I paid all phone calls, postage, travel, stationery etc., and at the end of the year they gave me an honorarium. It ranged from $160 to $300. I don't think I made money out of it.

      Regarding my Conference work, I will discuss it under several headings.

1. THE CENTRE.

      We were renting two small rooms in McHenry St. We had a small bookshop with one girl employed to help the Secretary and care for the shop. The Home Mission Director and Youth Director and Social Service Director did their work from their homes. My first concern was to get better office facilities. I heard of a property belonging to an estate which was to be sold, and I had first offer before it went on the open market. I could buy it for $30,000. I interested an insurance company in it and they were prepared to consider underwriting it if we demolished the building on it and built with about eight or ten stories. I asked the Executive members to bring their lunch to the lawns in North Terrace opposite this site. They did, but only one person supported my idea. Today when I look at the building erected there, I almost shed tears. It could have been ours, and what a money-spinner! I then turned to property in Gawler Place owned in part by some of our members. It was being used as a private hotel. It was the haunt of criminals. The Executive hesitated for some time. We had practically no money to buy it but I had ideas as to where we might be able to finance it. We purchased two thirds of this property and paid rent on the other one third until we were able to purchase it. We used some of the interest earning from the Burford Trust, and the late Albert McGlasson was sold on the idea and he took people out to lunch and asked them to contribute. Thus we got almost enough to make the purchase.

      In the process of moving in I got the shingles. At the same time I was arranging Federal Conference here. We paid $21,000 for the site, occupied it for twelve years, and sold it to the Government for $27,500. The opportunity came to buy the property at 104 Grote Street. It was owned by a Doctor and we had previously approached him but he wasn't ready to sell. When he was, he approached us and wanted an immediate answer. He asked for $56,000. I suggested $52,000 and he agreed. It

was necessary to get the consent of the churches. Our treasurer was out of town so I sat up most of the night doing a feasibility study on the property and sent it to the churches for consideration. I think we had signed the contract before the churches got our submission. I was sure it would be acceptable to them. It was. No one objected, but many commended us for our action. To help meet our payments on the bank loan we had obtained we let the vacant land for car parking. I do not know what the debt on the property is today. It should be almost liquidated. It would be impossible for me to guess at its value. The city is moving back to that area, making the site extremely valuable.

2. AMONGST THE CHURCHES.

      The first priority in the mandate given to me by the Conference was that I should move out among the churches. This appealed to me more than anything else associated with the office. I planned to be in a different church each Sunday and to alternate between country and city. I never had to seek appointments with the churches. There were so many requests that at times I had to refuse. I was called on to speak at anniversaries, harvest thanksgiving services, ecumenical meetings, dinner meetings, the setting aside of the officers in churches etc. I conducted several short missions, stewardship campaigns, spoke on social issues, evangelism etc. I was 'all things to all churches'. Always I saw myself as a representative of the total brotherhood, and kept myself informed on what was happening in both State and Federal work. Often the whole of my address on a Sunday morning would be on our Brotherhood work, but I endeavoured to lift it to a high spiritual level, with the hope that I would get people to see that they shared with a work more extensive than that which claimed their attention at the local level.

      Many times I sat with church boards and applied myself to the matters which were bothering them. There were times when I had to take a firm stand, and on one occasion the whole board was dismissed and I named a new one to take their place. The church accepted this and history has shown that the action was in the best interest of that church. On two other occasions I asked those who were making a nuisance of themselves in the church, to leave, and those who wanted to get on with the work to stay. People left and in both instances the church went on to happy and worthwhile growth. There were times when I was asked by the Advisory Committee, of which I was a member, to talk to certain ministers, sometimes to encourage them, sometimes to ask for better service from them, and sometimes to suggest they should leave the ministry. Often ministers came to me to discuss their situation and ask my advice quite independent from the Advisory Committee.

      As the secretary of the Building Extension Department and the Mutual Fund, I was always interested in the property of the churches, and, at times, I would suggest that they should take better care of it. On the other hand, I never failed to commend them when I saw something

worthy of commendation. Always always when returning from Sunday appointments I had the feeling that I had been able to encourage the brethren. I found most satisfaction in moving amongst our country churches. They were eager to have fellowship with me and were so hospitable. If I heard of someone from a country church being in a hospital in the city, when I returned to the city I made it a point to visit that person. Often when they were in hospital in their local area I would call on them.

      There was one experience I had when returning from Bordertown which was typical of the kind of thing which would happen. On Sunday morning I drove down to Keith to take the AM service and went on to Wampoony for the afternoon service, and back to Bordertown for the evening service, after which I retired to the hall and I was 'on the spot' to answer any questions anyone wished to ask, mostly about the brotherhood. Supper followed and I probably got away about nine thirty. I always came home on Sunday night unless I was required in any way on the Monday. Coming through the scrub area somewhere this side of Coonalpyn, as I rounded a slight bend in the road, I thought I saw a woman and child at the side of the road waving me down. I went on a little way wondering if I was dreaming and then stopped and reversed the car. There she was with a little girl of about three or four years of age. She lifted up the little girl and ran around to me and asked if I was going to Adelaide. When I told her I was, she said she was coming with me, and pushed the girl past me on to the front seat. She then ran around to get into the front seat with me. I stopped the engine of the car and asked a few questions. She said she had had a row with her husband and was finished with him. I asked where he was and she indicated that he was over my side of the road in the bushes. I peered into the darkness and could see a small light which later proved to be the light on the dashboard of his car. Suddenly she jumped out of the car saying that she had left her purse behind her and she was going back to get it. She crossed the road and stopped and appealed to me to 'come and help her' assuring me that I was bigger than he was and could handle him. The little girl was on top note yelling for her Mummy. I got out and followed her into battle. He had his car parked in the bushes about twenty yards from the road. When she got near to his car, he started the engine and she flung herself across him and retrieved her purse. The car shot off with wheels screaming, throwing dust up in a cloud, and hurling her to the ground. I picked her up, and he shouted back, "I hope I b . . . . . . . . . well killed you", and he was gone heading in the direction of Victoria. I helped her back toward my car. When we came to the edge of the road I could see the lights of a car approaching us and stopped to let it pass, but my lady friend made haste across the road right in front of the oncoming car. I dashed after her, put my arm around her and flung her forward. She landed face down on the bonnet of my car, and the oncoming car was so close to us that it actually brushed the leg of my trousers. When we were again seated in the car I began asking some more questions.

      I discovered she had a sister living in Adelaide 'off Brighton Road', and that I could take here there. There was nothing else I could do so off we went. I suggested to her that she was taking a risk in getting into a car with a complete stranger, but she said that she knew I was a good man. I said I happened to be a minister but she didn't know that. She asked me which church and when I told her she said her grand-father had been a minister in that church. She told me his name and I asked where he had been and she said she remembered him being at Strathalbyn. I knew that a minister of that name had been there. I took her into a roadhouse at Tailem Bend because I wanted to have a good look at her. She complained of a sore chest and I suggested it could be her roll in the dust or my tossing of her on to my car. She said she would see a Doctor in the morning, and I asked her if she knew such a person in Adelaide and she said she knew Dr. Leditschkie. I asked where he practised and she said at 104 Grote Street. I told her that if she came there she would be seeing me because we had bought that property. I was beginning to think she was speaking the truth about herself. Getting to Adelaide I drove up and down Brighton Road looking for something she could recognise indicating the street where he sister lived. She could not remember the name of the street. At last she found something familiar and I delivered her to her sister's house. She left me with the assurance that she would see me in the morning. Well the morning has yet to dawn.

      About 3 a.m. I crawled into bed alongside my wife who woke up with the usual, "Is that you Dad?", and I made the same reply as I usually did, "Who were you expecting?" I began to tell my story but I had not proceeded very far when she said, "Go to sleep. You are so tired that you are imagining a lot of rubbish". So I promised to complete it in the morning.

      There were many lights and shades to my visiting the churches. I could recount many similar stories as the above. I often took people with me to places or brought people home with me when they wanted to come to the city. I enjoyed having their company. I will always be grateful to the churches for the way they received me and trusted me. They added much to me.

3. THE STAFF AT THE CENTRE.

      The men I worked with at the Centre were Geoff. Whiting, Eric Hollard, Albie Jones, Keith Horne, Chas. Dow, Gerald Rose and Ted Heard. There were a number of young ladies who worked for these men, and myself, who were a part of the team. Eric, Keith and I were together for about fourteen years. We made many visits to churches, conferences, board meetings, inter-church committee meetings together. Our thinking and activities were shared with each other. We almost always agreed with each other but you could hardly expect three men working closely with each other for all those years to be completely in agreement.

      We talked freely and frankly about all the matters which came to our notice as individuals and so built up a mutual trust of each other and a very real concern for the total work of the brotherhood.

      Often when we went to the country we travelled in the same vehicle, which saved expenses and gave us opportunity to talk together about the matters we had in hand. It was a valued relationship which we had with each other and I am sure it was for the good of the churches. Albie was doing work of a different nature and so was not so much involved with us. When Charles Dow moved into Christian Education and Keith Horne moved to Home Missions to take over from Eric Hollard, who had taken a ministry with Glenelg church, the same co-operation continued.

      On the female side of the staff there were four who were with me for long periods and to whom I owe a great deal for their patience and co-operation. Miss Verna Lander commenced the same day as I did and continued for seven years. Jenny Wormald came to us from school and stayed for six years until she married. She had an amazing memory. I think she could recall every book we had had in the Bookroom while she was there. She also had a heavy hand and a big capacity for 'playing the fool'. Many were the bruises she inflicted on me.

      Leigh Deguet came to us as a quiet little girl who had worked for an accountant for two years. She soon asserted herself. When I went overseas, she seated herself in my chair at my table and became the Conference Secretary. She wrote to me continually telling me all that was happening about the place. She knew where I kept my personal cheque book and used it to pay her bills. She always paid me back on pay day. When she became pregnant she left me. It was just as we were coming up to the World Convention in Adelaide. She rang me one afternoon and made this announcement . . . "Chiv. the water has broken." I was dumbfounded and told her to ring a plumber. She assured me it was OK for she had rung Neil (her husband) and he was on his way home to take her to hospital. Leigh had been with me for seven years.

      Ros. Marsh was my next and last girl. I had baptized her at Maylands. She was so meek and shy that she would blush when I spoke to her. She soon thawed out. A business man said to me one day, after she had been there for a few months, that he had never seen anyone develop as she had done. She was quick in all that she did and was completely competent. This was so evident when she came to helping me arrange the Convention here. Quantas computerised all our work and Ros had worked on computers and so was able to teach me the little I learnt about them. Our World Secretary from New York had many dealings with her, and one day he said to me, "Where did you find her, Jack?" She was with me for four years and continued with my successor. There were other female members of the staff who worked with the other men. We had a lot of association with each other but they were not directly under my control. As I think back to those years I thank God for those girls who were so efficient, who were so loyal to me, and who

served with such a sense of mission. They made my work so much easier. The Brotherhood never knew how much they owed to them. I married Jenny and Leigh, and wrote a hymn for each of them which they used in the service.

4. ADMINISTRATION.

      I had not been trained for business management. I learned by trial and error. There were several accountants to whom I often turned for help and advice and they were most generous to me. I suggested to Conference that they should set up a Finance Committee with authority to examine all of the finances of the churches and Departments and make their recommendations to Conference. Conference was enthusiastic about the suggestion and I had nominations ready to make. An excellent committee of men with high qualifications in the area of finance was appointed. This committee became a tremendous help to me. I was their secretary and more than once I asked them to talk English so I could get down what they were saying.

      We had been trying, at Executive level, to do something about the salaries and conditions of ministers. I suggested something along this line soon after being appointed to the Executive. I was smartly told that what they had introduced into Victoria would not be acceptable here. I lobbied some business men and they brought it up at Conference. The delegates were shocked to hear of some of the poor conditions under which our ministers worked, and something had to be done about it. The Finance Committee immediately took it up and became the ones who recommended to Conference, through the Executive, what should obtain in this area. They spoke with some authority and their recommendations were never rejected in my time with them. They also suggested to the churches the percentage of giving to each Department, and revised their suggestions each year. I was concerned about the way our Brotherhood money was received and receipted. Each Department had its own bank and receipt book. That which was sent in to me I receipted in my book and banked it in the appropriate bank for them. It was haphazard and difficulties arose. I persuaded the Finance Committee that I should receive all brotherhood money and that I should use a composite receipt book covering all departments and open an account for each of the departments in the Mutual Fund and bank it there for them. The Committee saw the wisdom of it and accepted the draft of the receipt book which I presented to them.

      It took a little while to persuade all of the Departments to agree, but finally they did . . . but not the Women's Conference. I went to their Conference meeting and explained it to them, but not many women can think logically. I didn't convince them. Finally a woman objected to a 'man' coming into their business session and speaking to them, and moved I no longer be heard. It was carried and I laughed at them and left

them . . . and left them to muddle along in their own way. In fact I did a lot of work for the treasurers of the eight Departments, and was a signatory, appointed by them, on each Department, so that I could draw cheques and pay accounts for them. It was all subject to audit and so quite in order.

      I mentioned the Mutual Fund. It was established in 1955, the year I became Secretary of Conference. After a little while I was made the Administrator of it and when I retired we had over half a million dollars in it for loaning to the churches. Various responsibilities were added as the years went by, such as Secretary of the Building Extension, of the Brotherhood Centre in charge of the car parking arrangements, Director of the Book Depot until it closed, Secretary of the Australian Committee of the World Convention, Director of the Australian Christian etc. I was a member of all Conference committees.

      In inter-church activities I was the continuing member of the Heads of Churches, our representative on the British and Foreign Bible Society, a member of the committee directing prison chaplaincy, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, a representative on the S.A. Council of Churches and on its executive, its Programme Committee and Christmas Bowl and a a signatory on their accounts. I was our original representative on the committee directing the co-operative work in West Lakes, and a representative on the Joint Advisory Council. I was on twenty four committees when I retired. The last one from which I retired was our Federal overseas Committee and then they honoured me by appointing me a life member.

      The Methodist Church, before the Uniting Church came into existence appointed me a member of their State Conference. I regarded it as a recognition of our Brotherhood rather than of me personally. I had been sent to Tasmania in 1950 to help in the organising of Federal Conference there and to fill the Hobart pulpit for a couple of months because they were without a minister. I organised the Federal Conference in Adelaide in 1956 and became Federal Vice President in 1962-64. I initiated the annual consultation of State Conference Secretaries but it lapsed after my retirement. I did most of my administrative work in a hurry, taking short cuts wherever I could to the dismay of some accountants. I was more concerned with people than figures. I spent a great deal of time interviewing people . . . ministers, church officials, elders, others in responsible positions who sought advice, people with marital problems, pregnant girls etc. etc. Consequently I carry many confidences which I would never betray, and have the pleasure of seeing some people overcome evil with good.

5. WORLD CONVENTION.

      In 1960 I was asked by the Executive to accept the position of Secretary to the World Convention. Previously, the office and Committee had been in Melbourne. I accepted it thinking there was very little time needed to attend to it. After I had organised the Federal Conference in Adelaide in 1968, the late Dr. Jesse Bader said to me that we should invite the World Convention to come to Adelaide. I kept that suggestion in my mind but thought it was most unlikely to eventuate. On taking the position I found myself organising our end of proceedings for the Convention in Edinburgh. I did little more than prepare registration forms and collect registration money for the office in New York. We did send an invitation to Edinburgh inviting the next Assembly to come to Adelaide, and nominated the late Sir Philip Messent as the Australian Vice President.

      It was resolved that the 1964 Assembly should be held in Puerto Rico. During the four years leading up to this Assembly we had two visits from our World Secretary, Dr. L Kirkpatrick, who stressed to our committee that I should go to the Puerto Rican Assembly and present an invitation to it to come to Adelaide in 1970., and work with him through that Assembly to get an insight into its organisation in case our invitation was accepted. I was not keen about attending but the Committee thought that I should do so. Sir Philip waited on the Executive and they were persuaded that this should eventuate but no one knew where the money was coming from to make it possible. I agreed to go if it was not at any expense to me, that it was not part of my holidays (I seldom had such. In the first seven years I never had a holiday at all); and that the other Directors at the Centre should agree and endeavour to cover my work while I was absent. It was all agreed to and I went overseas for two months.

      Dr. Kirkpatrick promised to give me an itinerary he had planned for me, with the names of cities I was to go to, people who would meet me, where I would stay, what meetings I would address etc. I got a list of the places I was to go to, but no more. I cabled him before I left and his reply was that it would be waiting for me in Los Angeles. It was not there so I rang him. He said it was in the post and I would have it in the morning. It did not arrive and I have not yet seen it. I made my way from place to place as best I could. People were very kind to me, even those who had never heard of me. I had arranged a tour for our Australian people in USA to and from the Convention. I met up with them in Los Angeles and journeyed with them as far as Albuquerque. I had the company of Kath and Edgar Lawton so far here and from then on I was alone. I arrived on a Saturday evening in Fort Worth and stayed with Mr and Mrs Parr-Armstrong who had visited us in Adelaide. I had no idea what was expected of me there. I was taken to a large church on Sunday morning to address a mens' Bible Class, and immediately afterward taken to another large church set in the midst of ten acres of land, to address the communion meeting. At the door when I was shaking hands with the people after the service many expressed their thanks as Americans do,

when a boy of about seven years of age came out, looked at me over his glasses, shook hands, and said, "Fine preaching, Doctor." My bubble really burst then. Parr-Armstrong had introduced me with a great flourish as , "One of the great preachers of the many great preachers in Australia."

      When I rose to speak I said that was a big honk for a little donk. He told me afterwards that I did not build myself up enough. I thought he over-did it. On the Sunday night a group of churches, which were tired of doing nothing on Sunday nights, were getting together to hold gospel rallies, and when they heard I was in town they rang me about tea time and asked me to speak. The building held about three hundred people and it was packed, with the aisles full and seats on the platform. I did not have a seat to sit on but stood waiting my turn. After the service was a young peoples' do in the basement hall.

      Next morning Parr-Armstrong raced me off to the Texas Christian University and presented me to the Dean. (He was the man who spoke to the ministers at their breakfast at the Adelaide Convention and referred to me as 'opal'.) It was coffee break for the staff and he rushed me off to speak to them in their coffee room. I was introduced to Dr. John Suggs, whose book on theology I had just read, and then came Grainger Westberg whose books we sold in the Book Shop, and a few other notables. I was told that I would have fifteen minutes to speak to them and then five minutes for questions. I filled in most of the time so that they would not be able to question me too much. I only got the one I usually got . . . "What did I think about Vietnam?"

      Late that afternoon Parr-Armstrong took me to the airport to fly to Houston where I was to meet Arthur Crouch. I had a little time to spare so went in for a haircut. Just as I got on the chair I was paged and told that the plane I was to fly on had engine trouble and I would be taken by bus to Dallas in time to catch a plane from there. It was a distance of about twenty miles. The day was very hot and when we were in sight of the airport the engine in the bus stopped with the petrol vaporising. There was a stream of traffic behind us and car horns were hooting. I got out and went to the driver of the utility immediately behind us. He was a big fat man and was using words which I think were purely American. He started to wriggle his vehicle to get out into the next lane. I asked him for a lift to the airport and he abused me as if I was to blame for it all. As he pulled out past me, I threw my bag into the back of his vehicle and then crawled in after it and stretched out on the floor so he would not see me. He stopped at the airport and I jumped out with my bag and disappeared in the crowd. He never knew I was there.

      I went to a window and was told my plane was about to leave. I ran down a long passageway and got to the tarmac to see a plane driving on to the runway and was told that was my plane. I was also told there was not another plane to Houston that night. Houston was two hundred and fifty miles away and I had to be there. There was a big jet standing on the tarmac and an official told me it was going to Houston but it was an overseas charter plane taking scientists to the space

launching site and no one was allowed to join it. It had encountered a head wind and ran short of fuel, thus its landing there. The passengers were off the plane standing in the shade of the covered way with a rope around them. A man came along driving a little tractor dragging a trolley loaded with luggage. He stopped, got off, took down the rope and drove his tractor and trolley in through the rope. I followed when he wasn't looking and mixed with the scientists. He put up the rope and drove through them and I saw him no more.

      Soon came the call to board the jet. I went with the scientists. I saw an empty seat on the plane and sat down. It took off and I knew all was well. I didn't think they would throw me overboard. The Stewardess brought a menu to me and I ordered roast turkey and all that goes with it. By the time I had eaten a very posh dinner I was at Houston. I was so busy with the culinary duties that I did not have time to talk to the others. They were very busy talking 'shop'. When we landed we were all roped in again with men in uniform guarding us. I waited my opportunity and when it came I stepped under the rope and disappeared in the crowd. I went to the appropriate desk and handed in the coupon from my wad of tickets which applied to that section of the my flight. The receptionist looked at it and said it was not anything to do with him. I said I had just come in on that flight and he tried to tell me I couldn't have. While he was busy studying it I again disappeared in the crowd. I peeped back to see the poor fellow gazing out into the crowd looking for me, so I moved quickly.

      I had arrived before Arthur and Flo. so sat down and waited for them. I told this story to Dr. Hugh Riley in Louisville four years later when I preached for him on the Sunday morning, he told it to his congregation before I preached. When I was at the door shaking hands after the service a man came out who referred to it and said that he worked in the airlines and that he could not believe it because the security surrounding Houston and the space business was so tight that it couldn't happen. He went off saying, "I can't believe it."

      I spent three days and four nights with Arthur and Flo. while we drove from Houston to St. Louis. There I was entertained by the Bethany Press and had my name put on the list to receive free publications from them. They were revising their hymn book and talked to me about Australia using their book. They made me an offer of five hundred hymn books at one dollar each to introduce it to the Australian Brotherhood. I had a session with the Hymn Book Committee when I returned, placing all the details of a very generous offer before them, even to the including of Australian written hymns, but they would not have it. I think the only reason they could reject the offer was that some of the committee would not have their names on the fly leaf. I still think it was a tragic mistake. The book is used by both Disciples and Independents and the Baptists, and is revised every twenty years. They went so far as to offer to do the printing for cost and let us then do the binding here in Australia.

      I stayed in the Boys' Home run by our people in St. Louis. It was a fine building set in about ten acres of trees, lawns etc. It was on the edge of the Negro section. I was told not to wander out on to the streets on my own. One night I thought I would go for a walk in the grounds. Suddenly I was challenged by a man with a revolver in his hand. He had stepped out from behind a tree. I thought he was joking and laughed at him, but I soon learnt that he was in dead earnest as he marched me up to the office and had me cleared. He was one of the guards employed at night to guard the place.

      On the Sunday morning I was taken across the river to Granite City to preach there, and in the afternoon was shown over their new University. At night I preached for the First Christian Church in St. Louis. I was surprised to see in the congregation the Conference Secretary for the State of Texas who I met in Houston and who was filling the pulpit of a new million dollar church there until they could find a minister for it. He had spent a lot of time showing me over the place. Arthur told me he was a very close friend of his. I wondered why he was so far from home that night. I afterward heard that he had followed me up to hear me preach. I remembered that he had asked me a lot of questions and told me a lot about the prestige of the church there etc. Apparently I did not fill the bill, or perhaps I made it plain that I was not interested in living in God's own country.

      I was taken on a tour of about twelve of our churches in St. Louis. In 1969 I was back there again for five days and spoke as many times at meetings. When I arrived at Miami there was not anyone to meet me. I rang the First Christian Church and they said they had never heard of me. They suggested that I take a taxi and come in to them, which I did. I booked in at the Liberty Hotel opposite the church. When I did so the Cuban proprietor got excited and kept saying, "Brunie." At last I decided he was saying, "Brune" so I asked to see the guest list and sure enough Lance and Molly Brune and Eric and Fern Hollard were booked in there. Miami is a big place. It was strange that I went to the very place they were staying. I had not seen them since they had left Adelaide some weeks before me. I went up and knocked on the door of the Hollard's room and what a thrill it was to see them. We spent the night being driven along Miami Beach.

      Next day I flew on to Puerto Rico, arriving at about nine o'clock at night. Dr. Kirkpatrick was to meet me but he was not there. I found my way to the hotel where he had booked me in for the time I was to be there. I noticed a Miss Shirley Muir from Canada booked in as a delegate to the Convention so went to her room to make myself known. I got a shock when I met her. She was about seventy or more, and, as I discovered, walked very slowly. She suggested we travel together to save taxi fares. I did that once, and when she got out of the taxi she took my arm and ambled alongside of me. We met Dr. Dale and Betty Fiers. (Dale was Secretary of the Disciples in USA.) He said, "Good morning", shook

my hand and turning to my girl friend, said, "Introduce me to your wife, Jack." I was always too busy to look her up after that experience.

      I arrived nearly two weeks before Convention commenced and was immediately plunged into the work of organising it. There were about twelve people working in the main office, and only Mr. Mike Saanz could speak English. Mike and I 'clicked' as soon as we met. He was the local Secretary of the Convention. When he was away from the office I did a lot of head nodding and hand twisting while everyone else jabbered away in Spanish. When the Convention began the centre of activity was in the huge modern hotel which was where the main meeting place was for the morning meetings. It had a big ballroom but it was not large enough to seat all our people, so we had the ballroom of another large hotel about half a mile away. When an address was given in the first hotel it was my job to hustle the speaker into a taxi and get him/her to the other one to give the same address again. I was planned to give an address on 'Christ in my world . . . Australia' . . . or something to that effect. I was so busy that I was able to take only one short tour one afternoon. On the Sunday morning we were to provide preachers for all of the Protestant churches on the island. I would think we had to match several hundred churches up with ministers. It was a hot, humid morning.

      At last they were all matched up and gone. Mike and I sat down together. I asked him where he was going to go to church and he said he didn't think he would he was so exhausted. Just then a little Puerto Rican man came running in waving his arms and giving us a burst of Spanish. (Mike is a Mexican and holds three doctorates, and had been there as a missionary for eleven years.) He told me the little man was saying they did not have a preacher and they were just about ready for him. Mike turned to me and said, "I'll toss you for it." He tossed and said, "You lost", but wouldn't let me see the coin, so I went, and I'm glad I did. It was a Presbyterian congregation which had bought a house in a government housing area and taken out some of the interior walls and made it into their worship centre. There were about three hundred people there. A young lady led the meeting. There were testimonies, readings, prayers etc. which went to make up a very happy and informal gathering. It was all in Spanish, but I could guess what was going on and being said. When I was called on to speak the man who had picked me up interpreted for me. I thought I would try and identify with them by saying 'Good morning' in Spanish. They burst out laughing. I still do not know what I said to them. I decided to stay with English. They were such warm, hospitable people. I was struck by the fact that whenever scripture was read every one stood reverently listening.

      The evening meetings of the Convention were held in a stadium about six miles from the centre of the city of San Juan. I went out early each evening to see that everything was in order for the meeting. The first night was the presentation of flags. I wondered why there was a delay in

commencing. The platform was out on the oval with the people seated in a grandstand. Those who carried the flags were to go in from a gate at the side of grandstand and walk out to the platform accompanied by a young lady from Puerto Rico. Someone came rushing up to me telling me I was wanted at the gate. I ran there to find that Dr. Kirkpatrick and everyone else had forgotten to get someone to carry the Australian flag, and since they were to be taken in alphabetical order, we were to be the first to present our flag. I was pressed into duty, and when I asked what I had to do I was told the young lady who was to walk with me would tell me on the way to the platform, so off we went. I asked her the procedure and she waved her hands and shook her head . . . No speak de English. We climbed the platform, walked to the front of it, put the flag in a holder which was there, and knelt down. Everyone else who came with a flag did the same. I don't yet know what we were supposed to do.

      That was typical of the lack of organisation throughout the Convention. One evening, after seeing all was in order, I sat down in the stadium alongside a very old Puerto Rican gentleman. My guess would be that he was well over eighty. The Roman Catholics had persecuted the Protestants until nineteen years previously, and that night the Roman Catholic Archbishop was to be a speaker on the programme. I asked the old gentleman how he felt about it. He could speak a little English so he understood what I meant.

      Our conversation was something like this:

      "How do you feel about the Roman Catholic Archbishop speaking to us tonight?"

      "I am very happy."

      "But did not the Roman Catholic church persecute you?"

      "That bin finish long time."

      He pulled up the sleeve of his coat, and then his trousers leg and showed me big scars.

      "Him do that, me lose job, lose house, children nothing to eat, very bad, but that all finish now and I very happy Jesus Christ taught me to forgive."

      I shook hands with him and went off to another place in the stadium and did some hard thinking. I had often preached about forgiveness, and this little old man had given me a living demonstration of what it means.

      In those night meetings we were told to sing the hymns in our own language. Can you imagine it? Hundreds and hundreds of people singing in Spanish, in English, in Japanese, in languages from India, Africa, the Philippines etc. etc. I guess the Lord sorted it out. During the mornings of Convention a distinguished looking man sat outside our office puffing a cigar. I never said more than 'Good morning' to him. I noticed others often stopped to talk to him. When I went back to USA I saw Kentucky Chicken places and it suddenly dawned on me that the picture

of the Colonel about each of these places was of the gentleman who sat near our office door. I mentioned this to Dr. Kirkpatrick and he said that he was in membership with us, that he was his very good friend, and he often went to his ranch to have a holiday with him. I knew that the Convention had made a loss of seven thousand dollars on the Assembly in San Juan. I was on the Finance Committee. When this loss was made good I asked Dr. Kirkpatrick who had made it good, and learnt that it came from fried chicken. Later I went to the little corner shop in Lexington where the Colonel commenced his business and was treated to an evening meal of fried chicken.

      When I went to Puerto Rico I was charged with the responsibility of taking the invitation from the Australian churches to hold the next Assembly in Adelaide, 1970. I had asked the Premier of South Australia to provide me with a written invitation from our people in this state. He did so and when I asked the Lord Mayor of Adelaide to do the same, he did. One morning during the Convention I met with the Time and Place Committee to discuss the next Assembly. I was told there were two other invitations to be presented. We met before the morning study groups, and since I was a joint leader of one of the groups, I asked permission to speak first. It was granted and I took about twenty minutes to present the claim of Australia for the Assembly, reading the invitations from our Premier of South Australia, our Lord Mayor and from our Federal Conference Executive. The other two invitations were withdrawn. At the morning session which followed the study groups it was announced that the next Assembly would be in Adelaide, and I was asked to say something about it. I had anticipated this happening and I had asked the S.A. Tourist Bureau to print three thousand invitation leaflets which I had written and fly them to San Juan for distribution when the invitation was accepted. While I spoke people from Australia moved in and distributed the leaflets. I was asked how I had managed to get them printed so quickly. I had also waited on Rigbys and asked for books on Australia to be given to me for display as soon as we knew the Convention was coming here.

      They had arrived . . . a very fine range of beautiful colour books, and these I had set up while the meeting was in progress. I told the people about the display, and emphasised that it was only a display, that the books were not for sale or to be taken away. Within half an hour the only book left on the stall was the History of the South Australian Churches of Christ written by H.R. Taylor. I gave that to someone. Evidently 'Thou shalt not steal' does not apply to church conventions!

      The morning after the Convention closed I spent at the airport. The airlines ran a shuttle service to the mainland to move all of the people. By 2 p.m. they had thinned out to a mere trickle, so I boarded a plane for Baltimore, and thence to Washington. I had been so busy I had not had lunch, and had had a very early breakfast. I thought I might get

something on the plane, but I didn't. There was no one to meet me at Washington. I saw a man walk by me wearing a brightly coloured sports coat. He seemed to be looking for someone from Australia who had just been appointed President of his church Convention, but he had forgotten his name. I asked him if it was Sir Philip Messent, and that rang a bell. He asked who I was and when I told him he said he had not heard of me, but he was kind enough to invite me to get into his car and go with him. Sir Philip and Lady Messent were coming in on a later flight and I was able to tell him where they were staying. He proved to be the assistant minister of the First Christian Church in Washington. He spent the next few hours, until eleven o'clock that night showing me over the city, and at that late hour he thought I might like a bite to eat. He took me to a cafe down near the Pentagon and ordered a steak for each of us. They were so big they filled a very big plate. I was terribly hungry but I was afraid I would not be able to wrap myself around that one. However I did, and had a very restless night that night.

      When I asked him to take me to the YMCA where I could stay for the night he would not hear of it. He took me home with him and he and his wife were extremely kind to me. He cleared his diary next day and gave it entirely to the Messents and myself, taking us to places of interest. He took us to both the House of Representatives and the Congress, both being in session. He had access to President Johnson because he and Ladybird worshipped at the church where he ministered. He gave a messenger a message for the President and one came back from him saying that he would meet us at 11 a.m. We were seated in Congress waiting to be received by him when Eisenhower arrived and sought a private meeting with the President. A message came back to us that Eisenhower had some important information re the Vietnam war and the President would not be able to see us until 2 p.m. We had other arrangements so called it off.

      From Washington I flew to New York and took a taxi to a YMCA. Again there was no one to meet me. I was standing in a queue waiting to book in when the sign 'House full' went up. Next to me was a big Negro to whom I had been talking. I said I was going in to see the manager and he followed me. The manager suggested that I should go to another YMCA and indicated that I could get a taxi in front of the building. The Negro came along with me. I did not know where the taxi was going to take me. He took us to Harlem, probably because the Negro was tagging along. It was a run-down place. I dumped my bags and took a train to the World's Fair and spent the rest of the day there. I came back to the underground station at knock-off time. I went up to a chap reading a paper and asked him if he would tell me from which level I caught the train to such and such a street. He went on reading. I tried again with the same effect. Seeing a big stout Negress on her own I went to her with my request. She smiled and said, "Honey, I know what it is to be a stranger here. Come with me." She took my arm and off we went. I confess I had some misgivings. She took me to a lower platform and told

me to wait there for the next train, get on it and count the stops, and get off at the eighth stop and I would be right there. And so I arrived back safely in Harlem.

      At a later date I was on one of the underground trains when a man boarded with a board hanging around his neck on which he had written, "I am deaf and dumb. Please help me." I was standing alongside of him and noticed he dropped something. I nudged him and told him he had dropped it. He said, "Thank you", and stooped down and picked it up. After a while I woke up. He must have been as silly as I was.

      Next morning I called a taxi to take me to the airport. The driver had been to Australia and when he knew I was a minister he drove me past Doctor Vincent Peale's church, the Hospital, and a few other places. I had plenty of time and I guess the further he drove me the better it was for him. I flew to Buffalo and then went by bus to Niagara where I stayed in a hotel on the Canadian side. I spent the rest of the day and night at the falls. They fascinated me. I sat up until 11 p.m. watching the changing of the lights as they lit up the falls. It is a sight which defies description. I was back there in the winter of 1969 when they were frozen. I stood there and watched the sun rise. That was a magnificent sight but you need to see them in summer time and at night.

      Next morning I caught a little Mohawk plane to fly to Toronto. A young lady came on board and sat next to me. She asked me where I was staying and I told her I was flying on to London that night. She tried to persuade me to stay the night . . . she knew where she could book me in. When we arrived I hurried to customs and looked around to see this girl behind me. I put my luggage in a locker and she was there. I got into a bus to go into town and she did the same. I hurried down a street, turned a few corners, went into a shop and looked up to see her alongside me. I went down to the lakeside where a boat took tourists around the lake for about an hour. She was following. The boat was pulling out. I ran down the jetty and leaped on to the boat when it was about four feet from the jetty. The captain gave me a good lecture, but I landed safely. That was the last I saw of the young lady. I had told her to go hopping but she just followed on.

      I caught the plane that evening for Montreal and then on to Edinburgh and London. A Mr. Scott met me there. He was a friend to people I knew at the Elizabeth church. He took me to his home for breakfast and then back to London to spend the Saturday walking around the centre of London. He had spent the whole of his working life there and knew every corner and alley. We got home at about 8 p.m. and I was almost asleep on my feet. I had been on the plane all of the previous night. I don't think I have ever felt so tired as I did that night. I was told I was preaching next morning, but I was too tired to bump one thought into another. I fell asleep thinking I was too tired to ever wake up and I didn't care if I didn't. Next morning I went to church with the family and gave the address at the Hornsey church. Next morning I went to Heathrow to fly to Geneva and Rome. We were unloaded twice at Heathrow because of

'mechanical' trouble. That put me off a bit so I went to the Pilot and asked him the nature of the trouble. He said a windscreen wiper would not work to his satisfaction. At the Geneva airport I went into the toilet from which I saw men coming, only to find myself next to a woman. I fled, but nature forced me to return. That was a good demonstration of the equality of the sexes.

      Arriving in Bombay I was met by Thornley and rode the train to Dhond. I spent a week on our mission field and came away impressed by what had been accomplished, but with the feeling that we at home should make better provision for those who go out there in our name. It is another story to tell of the week I spent there so I will not dwell on it. I arrived home three days before our State Conference commenced but my efficient secretary had everything in hand with all necessary arrangements made.

      We immediately began preparations for the Convention Assembly here in 1970. I suggested that we set up 26 committees and drew up a booklet setting out the duties and responsibilities of each committee. I had taken notes in San Juan and was determined we would avoid mistakes made there. When it was over I estimated that we had involved a thousand people in the various activities of the Assembly . . . .committee members, choir (three hundred), ushers, parking officials, those who arranged accommodation, those who opened their homes to visitors, tour directors, caterers, stall holders, those who prepared the satchels for delegates, office helpers etc. They all worked magnificently. They made a big team who were easy to direct and who worked without stint. When the Assembly days arrived the whole organisation swung into action and there was not a major hitch anywhere.

      Qantas were our overseas carrier and Ansett our domestic line. I learnt how to use these people to our advantage. I am certain that they saved us more than twenty thousand dollars. Qantas computerized all of our work on the computer they had just installed in their Sydney office. This was done without charge to us. We had to supply all the information. We received the 5,000 registration forms and processed them in our office and then sent them to Sydney. Each week a new set of computer forms came back to us. On these we recorded all the information supplied by each delegate . . . .home, address, when leaving, when arriving, where staying, what tours they were taking, what functions attending etc. Letters had to be answered, receipts sent, currency exchange corrected (in this matter we had almost a thousand corrections to make, some had sent too much and some too little and each had to be corrected.) I would post as many as five hundred letters at the one time. I had asked Qantas for five thousand plastic satchels in which to put the material for the delegates. They cost 85c. in Japan and they supplied them and flew them

to my office. I approached the State and Federal governments for maps, brochures, magazines etc. on Australia.

      I had an excellent response from Canberra but little from our own state. Canberra stated that this was the largest international convention of any kind to come to Australia up to that time. The formation of the programme for the Convention was left to the Australian committee. I think I prepared it six times, submitting it to the State Executives before we got it to the final draft. Likewise it was left to us to prepare the Convention programme book, choose the hymns and print them, prepare choir items, soloists and other items. We printed and sold ten thousand bus tickets for touring during Convention days etc. There was splendid co-operation from the community. I needed 58 places for our morning study groups to meet. No one I approached refused to make their property available. The M.T.T. quoted me a price for providing buses to take people to and from the meeting places. When it was over they reduced the price by $500 because of our ready co-operation with them and what we had done for the city. Likewise the Agriculture Society reduced their quoted rent price for the Wayville property because we had been so helpful and left the place in such tidy condition. The official caterers were supplying thousands of meals each day and after Convention sent us a donation. We received commissions from hotels and motels where we had housed our delegates.

      The largest of such donations was from one hotel which sent us a cheque for $750. We had bookings in 58 hotels and motels, plus many flats, caravans and private homes. I waited on the ABC and asked that our first meeting, the pageant of the flags, should be televised and shown live. At first they turned a deaf ear. I went back to them with a more detailed programme of the meeting. They became interested and agreed to do it. Finally they gave us seven programmes on TV and radio, and afterwards sent us a donation. The ecumenical night was arranged by representatives from the various churches who met in our Board room to draw up the programme for the evening. Many of the church leaders participated in it. The final night was a communion service with 10,000 people attending. The service was so arranged that each person waiting on the Table served 30 people. This meant we had 300 people waiting on the table. Special communion trays were made and donated by the late Cec. Patrick. All of the sessions were taped and thousands of tapes were sold. We made a choir record and had to have a second impress to meet the demands. There were hundreds of copies of the official Convention slides sold. For months after Convention was over we were posting slides, records, tapes etc. When it was all over and our books were audited, we were very happy to send to our head office in New York a cheque for $10,500 which was the profit we made after we paid all of the expenses here in Adelaide.

      In 1969, the year leading up to the Convention, to stimulate interest in the Assembly, and to attend the meeting of the Executive, I was taken to

USA by Qantas. I was to tour the churches there and publicize the tours Qantas had arranged for the delegates. There were five tours of the Pacific and on around the world., which Qantas had prepared specifically for our people. These I had to sell, and I did with great success. I signed up 500 people, and got a mailing list of another 1,500.

      I attended the Executive meeting at St. Louis for five days when we had together representatives of the various countries where we have churches, plus a lecturer from the Roman Catholic seminary in New York, we being one of the world church bodies. Likewise we had a representative from the Vatican at our Assembly in Adelaide in 1970. The rest of the two months I was in America I spent amongst the churches conducting meetings and promoting the Convention. Altogether I spoke at eighty meetings . . . in worship meetings, to ladies meetings, to ministers, to students, to school assemblies, at State Conference sessions, at 'church nights', youth meetings etc. There were sixty tour leaders appointed and if they could get fifteen people to come to Adelaide they received a free ticket. I was their guest and they took me to as many meetings as they could arrange and to the bigger churches in an effort to get their quota. Many of them succeeded in doing so. At one church we signed up eighty people. At the end of my tour five hundred new registrations had been received and I had fifteen hundred more names on our mailing lists, and many of those registered later.

      I stayed in over fifty homes and their hospitality was almost embarrassing. When I arrived home there was a bundle of letters waiting for me, most of them thanking me for coming and hoping I would 'come again'. That is an expression of American hospitality. I could never repay those people for their kindness to me. I can still, in memory, drop in on many of these fine people. I have mentioned Mike Saanz and his wife, Nancy, whom I first met in Puerto Rico. They offered to come to Adelaide and work with me leading up to the Convention here. I was able to get them a free of charge cottage by the seaside which one of our members made available, and a Holden car from a secondhand dealer for their use. They worked with me in the mornings and went touring in the afternoons. They brought their two children with them. For five weeks they helped us in this way, and then on through the Convention days. Fancy them sitting in my office taking orders from me. Mike is a Doctor in business management, economics and something else. He was the Personnel Director in Mission House, the headquarters of the Disciples in Indianapolis. He had a staff of two hundred and seventy five. The last I heard of Mike he was the Dean of Laredo University. He is a very good friend and I was honoured to work with him through two Conventions. I gave them a piece of uncut opal when they were leaving and with their gift to me was a little card on which Mike had written, "To the best Secretary I know." I hope he wasn't being facetious!!

      While I found a great deal of administration work to do during my years as Conference secretary, it was more than administration. One Sunday night, while I was shaking hands at the door of the church where I had conducted the service, a lady said to me, "What a pity you are out of the ministry." I replied, "Out of the ministry? That address tonight was the seventh I have given this week." It may have been a more than usual week but that was true. I did a lot of preaching in the churches. The last year I endeavoured to go to all of the churches but I could not fit them all in. I never had a Sunday morning or evening free that year. Another year I was going down Park St. (my home church) with my wife for the Christmas service on Christmas morning. She reminded me that that was the first service I had attended at Park St. that year. As I said earlier, I did a lot of counselling at the Centre. Some days I would not touch the work I had planned to do because so many people had come in to see me that all of my time had been taken up. At one time we thought of moving our office out of the city and the Executive asked me to keep a record of the number of people who were coming in to see us. Over a three month period the number dealt with, chiefly by myself, a few by my secretary, was a hundred and ten a week. Suffice it to say that it was more than a book keeping job.

6. INTERIM MINISTRIES.

      While the Executive always said I was to be available to meet the needs of all the churches, and they frowned on me doing interim ministries, yet it did become necessary at times. They were always extra-ordinary circumstances which led me to do such ministries. My work had to continue and these ministries were something added and put heavy strain upon me. I did not receive payment from these churches. They were required to pay something to the Executive for my services but I received no more than my usual salary. Always at the end of my term with them the churches would make a presentation to me, which was appreciated. It was always understood by these churches that I must be free to go to other churches as the need arose. I am glad I did do these extra tasks. It helped me to keep in touch with the pastoral ministry. The order in which I conducted these ministries is as follows:

      Prospect for four months.
      Elizabeth for four months.
      A year later, Elizabeth again for a year.
      Maylands for a year after the death of Jim Lewis.
      Henley Beach for a year after the death of Jack Maxted.
      Glenelg for a year when Eric Hollard went to USA.
      During the same year I was at Glenelg I gave oversight to the church at Albert Park

and took services quite often for them and arranged for the pulpit when I could

not be there.

      After retirement I helped at Blackwood, Maylands, Henley Beach, Brooklyn Park (twenty months) and Unley. In early December 1973 the South Australian Brotherhood was generous to me in filling the Grote St. church one Sunday afternoon for a farewell gathering in recognition of the eighteen and a half years I had been Conference secretary. I am grateful to them for this recognition and the presentation they made to my wife and I.

      It is a long time since I packed my case and boarded the train at Warracknabeal to go to Glen Iris to study for a life in the ministry of the gospel. If I could turn back the clock I would make the same decision., but, I hope, I would be wiser than I have been, and that I would accomplish more than I have in the service of Christ. In the midst of my ministry I often wondered what there would be for me in my old age, not that I worried about myself, but I did about my wife and family. I know now that my concern was unnecessary. We have always had enough of material things, and hosts of friends have gathered around us. Our minds are stored with rich memories of kind people with whom we have shared. We could never talk of sacrifice, but rather of privilege.

      Tagore wrote, and he expresses my feelings for me:

I. J. CHIVELL.