Samuel Leigh in Australasia (original) (raw)

10 August 2015 marks the bicentenary of the arrival to Australasia, at the age of twenty-nine, of the first Wesleyan Methodist missionary, the Rev. Samuel Leigh (1785-1852). Australian and New Zealand Methodism are linked by Leigh as he was the first Wesleyan missionary to arrive in both places. He visited Samuel Marsden’s mission at the Bay of Islands in 1819 and then, in 1822 established the first Wesleyan mission, Wesleydale in Whangaroa, among the Maori accused of the Boyd massacre in December 1809. Leigh belonged to a period when Methodism had close ties to the Church of England, and the fact that he was ‘not radically a Dissenter’ was one cause of conflict with his fellow missionaries. The wave of the future for nineteenth-century Methodism would be as a strong, independent, body of Dissenters. This lecture will examine Leigh’s relationships with his co-workers and argue that, as a man who belonged more naturally to an earlier period of Methodist development, he may be remembered as a pioneer, but not as a builder, of Methodism in Australia and New Zealand.