Copland KING

KING, COPLAND (b. Parramatta, NSW, 24 June 1863; d. Sydney, NSW, 5 Oct 1918). Anglican missionary, British New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea).

Son of Robert Lethbridge King (q.v.), Copland King was educated at home until 15, when he went to Sydney Grammar School. He graduated from the University of Sydney (BA, 1885; MA, 1887) and after ordination in September 1887, served curacies at Castle Hill, Rose Hill and Dural.

A half-formed intention to volunteer for missionary service was strengthened in January 1891 when King met the Rev Albert Maclaren, appointed to lead the first Anglican mission party to British New Guinea. Hesitant at first because of Maclaren's high church orientation, King eventually accepted his challenge to join the pioneer party. He spent three months learning rudimentary medical skills at Sydney Hospital.

Maclaren and King arrived at Wedau on the north-eastern coast of New Guinea in August, and in the following months struggled to establish a station at nearby Dogura. In November King was invalided back to Australia while Maclaren remained with three recently arrived missionaries. After Maclaren's death on 20 Dec 1891 King insisted on returning to the mission, of which he was licensed head in March 1892. On his return King started schools at Dogura and nearby villages, visited other villages along the coast and gradually started stations. In 1896 he baptised the first Anglican converts.

The appointment of high churchman Montagu Shane-Wigg as first bp of New Guinea, and the arrival of another missionary at Dogura set King free in l900 to take charge of a station on the Mamba River. There he remained, first at Ave and later at Ambasi, for his remaining seventeen years of missionary service. Besides the routine tasks of preaching, teaching and translating, King also ministered to the large and sometimes unruly community of gold-miners prospecting in the area, made careful anthropological observations of the Binandere people and their culture, and furthered his lifelong interest in botany by collecting specimens which he subsequently donated to the Botanical Gardens, Sydney. But his main contribution was his linguistic work; by the time of his death he had prepared a Binandere grammar and dictionary and had translated and published portions of the OT and NT and of the Book of Common Prayer. He had also written a history of the mission. In 1914 he was awarded the diploma of scholar of theology by the Australian College of Theology.

In August 1917 King was forced out of New Guinea by ill-health. He died just a week before Bishop Stone-Wigg whom, despite their fundamentally different theological orientations, King had always defended against evangelical criticism.

A K Chignell, Twenty-one Years in Papua (London, 1913); G White, A Pioneer of Papua (London, 1929); D Langmore, Missionary Lives. Papua 1874-1914 (Honolulu, 1989)

DIANE LANGMORE