Archdeacon Brown - Missionary

Abstract

It is necessary to say, in beginning, that Archdeacon Brown could not be classed as one of the outstanding churchmen who came to spread the Word of God to the heathen of New Zealand. Brown was no organizing genius like Henry Williams, he was not a man with William Williams' compelling charm, and neither did he have the magnetic personality that makes a George Augustus Selwyn. However, he can be regarded as an excellent example of a typical missionary reflecting the age in which he lived. His period of labour covered almost the whole span of concerted missionary endeavour in New Zealand, taking in the difficult periods of Maori tribal warfare, colonization and the 1860 Wars, with their subsequent reaction on the Maori race. Brown worked among the Maoris for almost the entire period of his missionary life, leaving behind the comforts and culture of European civilization in England and the little that had been transplanted to the European settlements of New Zealand. Though Brown's main sphere of labour, Tauranga, had by the 1850's a steadily growing body of Europeans in the district - first, traders such as Philip Tapsell and Peter Dillon, and then settlers - it would appear from entries in Brown's Journals and correspondence and from the lack of other recorded information that the real influx of Europeans did not come until the late 1860's and the 1870's when the Maori Wars were at an end. Then, through confiscation of large tracts of land, there was organized occupation by Europeans, such as under the Government sponsored Military Settlers' plan and later the more successful Vesey Stewart Katikati Settlement plan.