Robert Mackenzie FRASER

FRASER, ROBERT MACKENZIE (b. Granton, Scotland, 24 March 1851; d. Vila, Vanuatu, 22 March 1921). Scots layman and elder, first missionary of Presbyterian Churches of Tasmania to the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu).

Robert Fraser was a son of Donald Fraser, Free Church of Scotland, minister and office clerk in Edinburgh, elder and social worker. In 1876, Rev John MacNeil of SA wrote to Scotland for a volunteer for the New Hebrides. Fraser responded an<l was appointed lay missionary for seven years. He m. Jessie Barclay Mellis 1881 and sailed from Glasgow 7 Sept 1881. He was ordained in Hobart, on the urging of John G Paton on 26 Sept 1881 and sailed from Sydney on Day Spring 1 April 1882, settling at Burumba, west Epi 12 Aug 1882.

He became the apostle to west Epi, a tireless evangelist among bush tribes. He was threatened, ambushed and shot at, but lived to see 250 candidates for baptism in 1899 in some forty villages. The church was indigenised, new converts going out to the heathen and leading the work as teachers in Christian villages. Fraser produced Scriptures, primers, catechism and hymnals in two local languages. An agreed civil and criminal code was adopted for the Christian villages at his urging. Tribal rivalries and fighting subsided, their dread of the occult waned, while good housing and hygiene improved social life, and a thirst for education gripped the people. After 1896 Fraser laboured for a peaceful solution to the French landgrabbing and aggression through the Joint Naval Commission. Labour recruiting for the Queensland sugar industry and diseases, some promoted by the social transformations the native communities were enduring, greatly reduced the population. On 17 April 1886 Mrs Fraser died, along with two of their children. In 1887 Fraser married Elizabeth Harriet Westbrook of Hobart. She and her five children survived him. In 1905 the Frasers returned to Hobart where he was convenor of foreign missions for his church, continuing his translations, preaching and returning to Epi during vacancies on the mission station in 1912 and 1920. He died in Vila of blackwater fever at Paton Memorial Hospital where his daughter Ruth was a nurse. 'The simplicity of his faith, and the saintliness of his life ... the guilelessness of his character, the gentleness of his bearing, his indomitable missionary spirit and his blameless life' were noted in the Memorial Minute of the Presbytery of Hobart.

J Heyer, Fraser of Epi (Launceston, 1921); J G Miller, Live vol V (Lawson, NSW, 1987); Presbyterian Mission Synod, Memorial on French Aggression in the New Hebrides (Melbourne, 1901)

J GRAHAM MILLER