something for a people nearer home. A writer in the Sydney Gazette ventures to ask, in the paper of January 1817, why that latter gentleman should be so eager for the conversion of Maories, and so indifferent to the salvation of the New Hollanders and Van Diemen Landers. A discussion ensued, and lasted for two or three issues of the Gazette. But as that was the glorious era of colonial slavery, and when a strict and more than Napoleonic surveillance of the press was maintained, with very heavy impending penalties, a notice appeared that the subject was not agreeable, and must be discontinued!
The first Wesleyan minister in Australia, the Rev. Samuel Leigh, appealed earnestly on behalf of missions at Port Jackson, and on the Derwent; but his voice was unheeded. A series of letters appeared in the Sydney Gazette of 1819, enforcing the claims of the Aborigines. "Are they not," asks the writer, "entitled to the first regards of Old England? And to a reflecting mind must it not appear strange that no body of Christians has yet commiserated their case? Ought we not to show piety at home, in the first case? And then, if after a fair and reasonable trial they should reject every entreaty, and despise all the grace of the Gospel, turn to the islanders at a distance? Who will undertake to send out a plain, zealous Christian missionary for the Aborigines of New Holland?"
British Christians were too busy with savages removed from the Whites, or with the more tractable and convertible negro slaves, to heed the cry from Sydney and Hobart Town.
The last effort made to excite an interest in the spiritual state of the Tasmanians, while they were free in the forests, was by the earnest Archdeacon Broughton, subsequently the first Protestant Bishop of Australia. The settlers of the south were placed under the episcopal charge of the Bishop of Calcutta, and once had a visit from the Archdeacon of Bombay, in 1835, under pressure of ill health. To the Duke of Wellington is Australia under obligations for affording the followers of the Church of England a local head. Archdeacon Broughton came as a learned and faithful minister of their Church. It was on the 1st of April, 1830, that he delivered his primary charge to the clergy of Van Diemen's Land, in St. David's Church, Hobart Town. One object of the excellent man's concern was the condition of the poor Native. This was his earnest language upon the subject:—
