Mathew Blagden HALE

HALE, MATHEW BLAGDEN (b. Alderley Manor, England, 18 June 1811; d. Bristol, England, 3 April 1895). Anglican missionary and bishop.

Son of the wealthy and charitable Robert Blagden Hale and Lady Theodosia Bourke, he was educated at Gloucester school and Trinity College Cambridge. Influenced by the evangelical Cambridge tradition of the 1830s, Hale was ordained in 1837, serving in several Gloucestershire parishes. With a keen interest in the overseas church, he actively supported both SPG and CMS but his family dissuaded him from missionary service.

Hale married Sophia Clode in 1840. His grief at the deaths of his wife and mother in 1845 led him to live in semi-retirement with his father. In June 1847, when four new bishops were consecrated for overseas dioceses, approaches made to his father for financial assistance brought Hale into contact with Augustus Short, the new bp of Adelaide. Learning of his interest in missions, Short invited Hale to be archdeacon of Adelaide with responsibility for Aborigines. Short, Hale, and Hale's two daughters arrived in Adelaide in December 1847.

Hale took his parochial and diocesan duties most seriously and the shy young English clergyman rapidly became the confident and outspoken leader of colonial society. With his ambition to evangelise the Aborigines closest to his heart, he took an immediate interest in the local people, already suffering humiliation and dispossession after only a decade of white settlement. 'We profess to admitting them to the privileges of British Subjects', Hale told the South Australian Church Society, 'but in reality the only one they enjoy is that of being hanged' (SA Ch Soc Reports, 1849-50).

Visiting Western Australia with Short in 1848 Hale met and married young Sabina Molloy. At John Smithies' (q.v.) Wesleyan Mission at Wanneroo near Perth, Hale was impressed with the self-sufficient village concept. Returning to Adelaide, he planned a native institution along similar lines. Commencing with young Aboriginal adults from Adelaide, his Institution opened in 1850 at Poonindie, near Port Lincoln, partly financed by the Hale family. The Institution also absorbed the Port Lincoln school of the Lutheran missionary, Clamor Schurmann (q.v.). Despite many deaths from European diseases, the Aboriginal people of Poonindie developed into a confident Christian community with a reputation for farming skills. Poonindie was widely admired as an example of a 'successful' Christian mission.

In 1857, Hale was consecrated bp of Perth. Despite struggling to administer an isolated and understaffed diocese, he established synodical government. He strove to influence public opinion in areas of community welfare, particularly education, and in policies towards Aborigines. But he found public apathy a frustration, and considered resigning his bishopric to run another Aboriginal institution. Hale spent his own money attempting to establish secondary schooling for both girls and boys. Of public disinterest in education, he wrote, 'There is no such thing as convincing the people that education pays. Making their sons messengers on a sheep station pays, and that settles the question'.

Despite age, and ill-health brought on by constant travelling, Hale reluctantly accepted a call to the diocese of Brisbane in 1875. He wrote: 'I have always professed to go by duty and not by choice'. He worked hard to assist the struggling remote parishes, and to improve the welfare of his clergy. His attempts to improve the lot of Aborigines and Chinese achieved little support. Although Hale never sought to be a controversial figure, he frequently found himself in dispute with clergy of Anglo-Catholic persuasion over ritual and cooperation with 'dissenters'.

Hale was always conscious of his role as pastor to his clergy. He introduced a Clergy Widow and Orphan's Fund in 1877. He lost popularity in established city parishes by attempting to create a central fund to equalise income between wealthier urban and isolated country parishes. So meagre was the response that he resigned his bishopric in protest, withdrawing it only on the intervention of Bishop Barker (q.v.). When Barker resigned in 1881, Hale became the senior Australian bp, presiding over General Synod until Alfred Barry's appointment as metropolitan in 1 884. Hale and his family returned to England in 1885.

Hale's generosity and ease with all classes of people earned him the title of 'the good bishop'. In his retirement he continued in his writings to support the development of the Church of England in Australia, and missionary enterprise among Aboriginal people. Always more a missionary than an administrator, it is his work for Aboriginal people for which he is best remembered. At Poonindie, against all popular opinion he gathered dispossessed Aboriginal people' into one little community'. 'That success is possible,' he wrote, 'no-one who believes the Scriptures can doubt; being men it cannot he impossible that these natives should come to the knowledge of the truth and gain eternal life' (Hale's Prospectus, South Australian Register, 28 Aug 1850).

When Hale died in 1895, there were many Aboriginal people who regretted that the old bishop had lived just long enough to hear of the sale of Poonindie. One of them, Tom Adams, wrote to him just prior to his death: 'We ... feel as if we are strangers in a strange land (but) I am sure it would please you to see some of the young people ... who are a credit not only to themselves but to the place where they have been brought up, and who are now living monuments of the good work Poonindie has done and of Christ Jesus ... The times (are) indeed hard with us, but we know that we have no continuous city, but we seek one to come'.

Writing his reminiscences in 1889, the aged Hale recalled the Aboriginal people's 'calm, uninterrupted happiness at the approach of death'. In their presence, he said, God had given him his richest blessing. His earnest prayer was that in death, he could be like them: 'Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like theirs'. Hale was survived by Sabina, five sons and three daughters.

ADB 4; M B Hale, The Aborigines of Australia (London, 1892); J Harris, One Blood (Sutherland, 1990); A deQ Robin, Mathew Blagden Hale (Melbourne, 1976)

JOHN HARRIS