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  • Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania
  • Kirsteen Murray
Helen Betha Gardner . 2006. Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania. Dunedin: Otago University Press, pp. 204, Pb, £18.98.

Gathering for God examines the career of Rev George Brown who servedas Methodist Missionary in Oceania and later general secretary of the Australian Methodist Overseas Mission for forty-eight years. It examines Brown's early life and conversion; his role as a missionary in Samoa, Duke of York Island and New Britain; his interests as a collector of ethnographic information and artefacts; and his contribution to public life in Australia. Of particular interest is the chapter devoted to an examination of the controversial incident in the Bismarck Archipelago in 1878 in which Brown led an armed raid of retaliation against villages which he believed to be responsible for the killing and dismemberment of indigenous evangelists. Brown's party exacted revenge by attacking and burning villages killing between ten and hundred men. This was, as Gardner notes, an incident unprecedented in missionary experience in the Pacific. Her meticulous dissection of Brown's own accounts and of Methodist and wider public responses to his actions, provide a fascinating snap shot of colonial and racial attitudes of the period.

Further light is shed on Brown's attitudes through an examination of his newspaper articles in the 1880s on the subject of the desirability of the annexation of New Guinea. Brown's ethnographic and collecting interests [End Page 200] are also considered including correspondence with his contemporaries in the field of anthropology. The book is illustrated with numerous photographs taken by Brown himself and Gardner provides a conclusion which traces the fate and curatorial interpretation of Brown's artefacts in the years since his death in 1917.

This is a very readable book with a clear narrative line that will be accessible even to those who are not familiar with mission history in Oceania. The life of George Brown provides an intriguing introduction to many issues of the period and will prove very useful for students. Brown himself is placed inside a cabinet of curiosities and at the head of each chapter a line drawing of a pith helmet stands as an unelaborated comment, perhaps on his own character or perhaps on the times in which he lived.

Kirsteen Murray
University of Edinburgh
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