Robert Kirkwood EWING

EWING, ROBERT KIRKWOOD (b. Glasgow, Scotland, 1822?; d. Lismore, NSW, 10 April 1899). Clergyman, denominational voyager.

Robert Ewing's father, John, a failed merchant, died when Robert was 12 yrs; thereupon the son, on his own account, 'earned his own bread, and helped support a widowed mother'. Ewing arrived in NSW in 1837, at first employed in clerical work. He was largely self-educated, to an impressive extent. By the mid 1840s he aspired to enter the Christian ministry, commended this ambition to the VDL Congregationalists, and in 1847 became Congregational minister at Green Ponds. In 1848 he resigned, claiming ill-health, but shortly after accepted a call to St Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Launceston. Henry Hopkins (q.v.) and other VDL Congregationalists were not impressed. Ewing proved a pastoral success at St Andrew's, ministering there until 1868, when he again retired - this time through loss of voice. By then the congregation had grown from around fifty to about 900 and the Sunday school to about 400. He cut a significant figure in Tasmanian literary life, publishing pamphlets on religious, phrenological, temperance and patriotic subjects. On the last theme Ewing declared, in l 854, that 'under the infallible Providence of God, the boom of the cannons [in the Crimea] may be the strange voice of one crying in the wilderness - "Prepare ye the way of the Lord"'. Strange voice indeed, but a sentiment well in accord with the temper of time and place. Ewing produced two books: Moses and Colenso (1864), an evangelical defence of the veracity of the Pentateuch, displaying fair scholarship; and Filings of Time (186?), an unslim volume of verse, religious and secular.

By 1869 Ewing was in Melbourne, principal of a boys' school, the Yarra Lodge Academy (later South Yarra College). By 1873, for reasons unclear, Ewing was in the country, senior partner in a mining venture near Beechworth. There, his voice having returned, he re-established two fallen-away Presbyterian congregations, and not long after, the Beechworth Presbytery concurring, was formally inducted as minister of St Andrew's, Beechworth. However in 1874, provoking one of the larger rows in the Presbyterian Church of Victoria during that period, the General Assembly refused to recognise the induction. Explanations were not offered, but impropriety hinted at.

Ewing, supported by a diminishing congregation, hung onto church and manse for a time, but by 1878 had retreated to a far better reception in NSW. In that year he was ordained in the Church of England by the bp of Grafton and Armidale. Here Ewing settled at last, though still keeping his literary hand in (eg Sunday Evening Lectures on Larrikins [1888]). In 1896 he became Canon Ewing. Ewing married twice, in 1848 to Letitia Lester (d. 2 Jan 1873) and to Frances Sanden (d. ca 1909). As often with colonial clerics of the eloquent, unsinkable kind the inner springs of action remain well-shielded to posterity.

J Heyer, Presbyterian Pioneers of Van Diemen's Land (Hobart, 1949); V Edwards, An Account of ... The Old Kirk and St Andrews (Launceston, 1969); J Martin, Beechworth Presbyterian Church: One Hundred years On (Beechworth, 1957); H Hopkins, The Congregational Union and Rev R K Ewing (Hobart, 1848); Argus, 17,19, 28 Nov 1874,11 Apr 1899

RICHARD ELY