William George LAWES

LAWES, WILLIAM GEORGE (b. Aldermaston, Berks, England, 1 July 1839; d. Sydney, NSW, 6 Aug 1907). LMS missionary, Nine and British New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea).

The childhood of George Lawes centred on the Mortimer West Congregational Church, the village school and the modest, godly home of his parents, Richard Lawes, tailor, and his wife Mary, née Peckover. While apprenticed as a draper he applied for service with the LMS after hearing missionary William Gill and Rarotongan Isaiah Papehia speak in 1858. He trained at Bedford College, was ordained on 8 Nov 1860, two weeks after his marriage to Fanny Wickham, and on 23 Nov they sailed for Savage Island (Niue).

In 1874 Lawes, his wife and children became the first permanent European residents on the mainland of eastern New Guinea. His diary (Mitchell Library) is a poignant record of the privations and sorrows of their first years there. With his Polynesian staff he established a headstation at Port Moresby and ten further stations in nearby villages. After James Chalmers (q.v.) arrived, Lawes took furlough in 1878 and on his return left much of the exploration and contact work to his adventurous colleague while he concentrated on teaching and acquiring the local language. His Motu grammar and vocabulary was published in 1885 and a Motu New Testament, described by the Administrator, Sir William MacGregor, as a 'monumental' work, in 1890. In 1894 the University of Glasgow awarded him an honorary DD.

Like Chalmers, Lawes became involved in political affairs, campaigning against the labour trade, land exploitation and colonial settlement serving as interpreter at the proclamation of the British protectorate in 1884 and acting as unofficial adviser to MacGregor. His furloughs in 1878, 1886 and 1891 and his lecture tour of Australia in 1892 furthered British and Australian knowledge of the country and its peoples.

In 1894 Lawes moved from Port Moresby to Vatorata where he established a training college as a central institution for the preparation of a Papuan pastorate. Its success was impeded by the opposition of fellow missionaries to his teaching in the Motu language (used along only a small stretch of the Papuan coastline) and by their eagerness to train their pastors in their own districts. He was also at odds with some of his colleagues in his opposition to the prominence given industrial work over evangelism. Despite such tensions Lawes was effectively patriarch of the LMS in New Guinea—'an unmitred bishop'. He retired to Sydney in 1906. Throughout his missionary career he had been sustained by his simple evangelical faith and by a belief in divine providence which was tried but not found wanting by the deaths of two sons and several colleagues.

J King, W G Lawes of Savage Island and New Guinea (London, 1909); D Langmore, Missionary Lives. Papua, 1874-1914 (Honolulu, 1989)

DIANE LANGMORE