Page:The Dictionary of Australasian Biography.djvu/111

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DICTIONARY OF AUSTRALASIAN BIOGRAPHY.
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and accomplished his mission with great tact and success. He accompanied Sir George Grey through the Heki war as interpreter, and saw a large amount of active service. In 1846 Mr. Clarke proceeded to England, and entered Highbury College (afterwards New College), London, to study for the ministry of the Congregational Church. In 1851 he returned once more to Hobart, and accepted the pastorate of a Congregational Church, of which he has now been the minister for forty years. For some years he edited a monthly paper entitled The Tasmanian Independent, and took a prominent part in the movement for the separation of Church and State in the colony, which ended in the abolition of State aid to religion in the year 1868. Mr. Clarke was a member of the Tasmanian Council of Education for nearly thirty years, and was several times elected its President. On the establishment of the University of Tasmania in 1890, he was elected a member of the Council and first Vice-Chancellor of the University. Besides a large amount of literary work, he is the author of "Sunday Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews" (Hobart, 1884). He married Martha, daughter of Henry Hopkins, J.P.

Clarke, James Langton, M.A., second son of the late Andrew Clarke, of Belmont, Donegal, Ireland, and uncle of Lieut.-General Sir Andrew Clarke, G.C.M.G. (q.v.), was born in 1801, and educated at the Military College at Sandhurst, obtaining a commission in the army, out of which he sold, and after graduating at Queens' College, Cambridge, was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in Jan. 1835. In 1855 he went to Victoria, and was appointed a County Court Judge, and Judge of the Court of Mines in 1871. He married on Sept. 2nd, 1852, Miss A. Maria Harrison, of London; retired on a pension in 1871, and died at Mentone on Feb. 16th, 1886.

Clarke, Joseph, J. P., third and youngest son of the late Hon. William John Turner Clarke, M.L.C. (q.v.), was born at Newtown, near Hobart, Tas., on Jan. 1st, 1835. He managed his father's Tasmanian estates for some years prior to the latter's decease in 1874, when he succeeded to large estates in that colony, and in South Australia and New Zealand. Since that time Mr. Clarke has resided at Toorak, near Melbourne. He married, in 1860, Caroline, daughter of his uncle, Lewis Clarke, who settled in Australia. Mr. Clarke has given many liberal donations to public institutions and charities—notably £5000 to Trinity College, Melbourne, and £5000 to the Anglican Cathedral of that city.

Clarke, Marcus (Andrew Hislop), the distinguished Australian author, was the only son of the late William Hislop Clarke, a London barrister, and nephew of Col. Andrew Clarke, K.H., sometime Governor of Western Australia. The family were of Anglo-Irish origin. Marcus Clarke was born at Kensington, London, on April 24th, 1846, his mother dying a few months after his birth. He was educated at Chomley School, Highgate, under the late Rev. Dr. Dyne. His father dying when he was only seventeen years of age, and leaving him nothing beyond a few hundred pounds by way of patrimony, it was decided by his friends that he should try his fortunes in Australia. He accordingly went out in Green's old "liner" the Wellesley in 1864. On arriving in Melbourne he was taken in hand by his uncle, the late James Langton Clarke, then a County Court Judge in Victoria, who obtained for him a junior position in the Bank of Australia in Melbourne. Figures were not, however, to his taste, and after a brief and eccentric clerkly career, of which many amusing stories are told, he relinquished banking and took to the "bush," being sent in Jan. 1865 to acquire "colonial experience" on Swinton station, near Glenorchy, in Victoria. The owner of the station was Mr. John Holt, but his uncle had a pecuniary interest in it; and young Clarke was thus permitted to lead a desultory, half lazy, half literary life for a period of about two years, during which he acquired "experiences" which, if not exactly those designed, were of high value to him in his future career as a writer, into which latter groove he now drifted. Amongst the visitors to the station was a "materialistic philosopher" named Dr. Lewins, who, struck with the youth's mental calibre and literary capacities, mentioned his discovery of the bush genius to the late Mr. Lachlan Mackinnon, of the Melbourne Argus, who at once offered him an engagement on that paper,

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