What drove a hodgepodge band of clerics, lacking even a common language, to strike out for the wilds of Australia in 1845?
History teaches us the official reasons – to minister to the two million ‘savages’ in Western Australia – but this book – through personal letters and other first-hand accounts – tells a more human story.
Thomas O’Malley has written an adventure story, plain and simple: the four months’ voyage out, the daily struggle to survive in the bush, and the frustration of good intentions by misguided ambition.
Students of colonial history will find a rich depiction of life in the very early days of Western Australia, a mere twenty-five years after the foundation of the western colonies.
Readers who want a deeper understanding of missionary zeal will discover a moving but unsentimental portrayal, based on the experience of the participants as revealed in their own words.
Fr O’Malley shares the fruits of more than ten years’ research in Australia, Ireland and the Archives of the Holy Ghost Order in Paris. Without pretense or condescension, he weaves original and secondary sources in a narrative that allows the central players to speak for themselves. Not least important, Fr O’Malley’s own missionary experience (on the island of Mauritius) allows him to speak with a credible voice.
These missionary contemporaries of Charles Darwin gives new meaning to ‘the survival of the fittest’!
Thomas O’Malley CSSp was born in Connemara, Co Galway and attended St Jarlath’s College, Tuam. He was ordained in 1948 and served ten years as a missionary on the island of Mauritius, Indian Ocean. He was instructor and Bursar at Willow Park, Blackrock College, Dublin from 1960-1975 and Assistant Dean and Bursar at Blackrock College from 1976-1981. He is at present, Bursar of St Michael’s College, Dublin, a position he has held since 1984.
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