Francis TUCKFIELD

TUCKFIELD, FRANCIS (b. Germoe, Cornwall, England, 10 May 1808; d. Portland, Vic, 21 Oct 1865). Wesleyan missionary to Aborigines.

One of six children, at 17 Francis Tuckfield had a conversion experience in a deserted mine into which he had gone to pray. After six years as a lay preacher he was accepted as a candidate for the Wesley ministry, and for the next two years was one of the earliest students at the Hoxton Branch of the Wesleyan Theological Institution. At the 1837 Conference he and the Rev Benjamin Hurst were selected as missionaries to the Aborigines of the Port Phillip district (or Australia Felix, as it was then commonly known). Late that year Francis and his new bride Sarah (née Gilbart) set out from Gravesend in the Seppings with the Hursts and two other missionary couples. They arrived in Hobart on 17 March 1838, and the Tuckfields crossed to Port Phillip a few months later.

Tuckfield preached in Geelong in late July (when a Miss Newcombe is said to have 'found salvation in Christ'), but the ministry for which he was to be most noted was soon to commence. Joseph Orton (4.v.) and Hurst Tuckfield's senior colleagues, confirmed his choice of a mission station site near Birregurra. And so 'Buntingdale' (or 'Bunting Dale', as Tuckfield called it) was born in August 1839, named after a noted English Wesleyan leader. Hurst proved a less robust and determined missionary than Tuckfield, and it was the latter who persevered with the work there, becoming virtually synonymous with Buntingdale. The site itself paradoxically contributed to both Tuckfield's early success in relating to the Aborigines, and what his historian great-grandson Greenwood called 'his magnificent failure'. The fact that it lay at the confluence of several tribal hunting grounds made it strategic but led to repeated conflicts between the tribes. The fact that it was fertile and well-watered meant that local pastoralists resented this land being set aside by Governor Gipps as a mission station. Although discouraged by the limited long-term impact of his years at Buntingdale, Tuckfield persisted in his mission to the local Aborigines for more than a decade. The progress he made with the Colijan tribe was more educational than religious, leading him to question his strategies. But his willingness to learn their language and customs and to travel with them, and his warm evangelical spirit and genuine concern, mark him as a pioneering missionary of calibre and vision within his era. His contemporary John Dunmore Lang (q.v.), despite grave doubts about the likely success of Tuckfield's 'isolation scheme', spoke of him as 'an able, zealous, and indefatigable missionary'.

Government cancellation of his grazing licence finally forced Tuckfield to close Buntingdale in 1850. He subsequently ministered to Wesleyan churches in Vic, NSW and Tas, the last being at Portland in western Vic. Contracting pneumonia after attending a funeral on a bitterly cold day, he died there in late 1865. Eight or nine people, including his young son, 'decided for Christ' at Francis Tuckfield's funeral service. Of the eleven children from his two marriages, three sons became ministers and the four daughters married ministers.

ADB 2; W L Blamires and J B Smith, The Early Story of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Victoria (Melbourne, 1886); G W Greenwood, 'Reverend Francis Tuckfield's Magnificent Failure at Bunting Dale', Heritage (Methodist Hist Soc Vic), 1,2 (1956); J B Lang, Phillipsland (Edinburgh, 1847); F Tuckfield, Journal 1837-42 (La Trobe Library, Melbourne Ms 11341)

CHRISTOPHER G VENNING