William Edward BROMILOW

BROMILOW, WILLIAM EDWARD (b. Geelong, Victoria, 15 Jan 1857; d. Sydney, NSW, 24 June 1929). Pioneer Methodist missionary in Papua.

The son of an English itinerant gold prospector with 'probity of character' and a mother of strong Christian faith (Bromilow, 1929: 17). Bromilow was encouraged as a child to get a good education. He matriculated for the University of Melbourne at the age of fourteen. Despite his youth, and whilst studying for his Arts degree, he also taught at the Queenscliffe State School. As a consequence his health broke down.

It was this breakdown that deepened his religious experience, making it more personal. It also led him to offer for the ministry of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. He commenced his probationary ministry in the Wimmera district of Victoria in 1878. A year later he responded to a call for missionaries for Fiji, was ordained, and on 9 April 1879 married Harriet Lilly Thomson, the daughter of an American migrant railway worker. The Bromilows served in Fiji for ten years. They returned to Australia in 1889 primarily because of Mrs Bromilow's poor health.

Bromilow's major work was as the pioneer missionary to the offshore islands of British New Guinea (now Papua) which included the D'Entrecasteaux, Trobriand and Louisiade island groups. On 19 June 1891 he commenced a mission on the small strategic island of Dobu. Within a short time outstations were opened at distant islands of Panaeati, Tubetube, Goodenough, Murua and Kiriwina. Bromilow's name, and that of the mission, soon became well known. He served in Papua 1891-1908 and 1920-22. In between his two terms in Papua Bromilow was minister in three important circuits in Sydney: Strathfield, Stanmore and Parramatta.

Bromilow was an indefatigable traveller, a linguist, and an evangelist. Apart from his pioneering work his great contribution was in the translation of the whole Bible into the Dobu language. He believed that any missionary's desire should be to provide the scriptures in a peoples' own tongue. Theologically he was an evangelical with (for a Methodist) relatively high-church leanings. He did not accept that Christianity was a religion of a book, because the church existed before the scriptures; the scriptures were the 'necessary guardian and guarantee' of the church (Bromilow 1929, 292). Whilst Methodists had an 'open table' for Holy Communion under Bromilow only Papuans who were church members were able to participate.

Bromilow's motivation for evangelism was the perceived immorality of Melanesian traditional life, both in Fiji and Papua. He believed that the translation of the Bible in Fiji had lifted that language from its 'debasement' and so he sought likewise to 'purify and enrich' (Bromilow 1929, 294) the Dobu language through scripture translation. In 1910 he was awarded an hon DD by Aberdeen University for his translation of the New Testament into Dobuan, and was elected President of the NSW Methodist Conference. Bromilow's return to Papua in 1920 enabled him to do the majority of the outstanding Bible translation. The earlier translation was revised, and the OT translated in its entirety by 1925 and published in 1927.

Bromilow and his wife were the first Australian Methodists to secure the services of single women missionaries, urged on the Mission Board because of the response of Papuan women to the gospel and the need to staff the orphanages commenced by Lilly Bromilow.

W E Bromilow, Twenty Years Among Primitive Papuans (London, 1929); Michael Young, 'Doctor Bromilow and the Bwaidoka Wars', Journal of Pacific History, vol 12 (1977), 130-153; Michael Young, 'A Tropology of the Dobu Mission', Canberra Anthropology, vol 3, no 1 (1980), 86-108

ROSS MACKAY