“Unbelievable donation to Adelaide Hills’ op shop stuns Red Cross” was the headline for a story on the Adelaide gossip site Glamadelaide. Not a bad little scoop, that the Bible of one of South Australia’s colonial founding fathers had been found in a bundle donated to the Mount Barker Red Cross op shop.
“The Red Cross is a secular organisation, so religious texts like a Bible can’t be sold,” Mikyla Gilbert reported. “As a result, the staff placed it aside in the storeroom, unaware of the treasure it contained.
“It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when the store manager was sorting through the items, that the significance of the Bible became clear. The handwritten annotations, dating back to 1868, was a strong indication of its historic value.”
George Fife Angas (1789–1879) was significant as a Christian involved in the white settlement of South Australia. He ran a shipping business in London which nearly failed, but discovered a special talent for banking – he founded three banks one of which, the Union Bank of Australia lives on in the ANZ bank.
“A Christian first, despite his varied business ventures Angas had a lifelong passion for forming societies and joining charitable committees,” his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography reads. ” “At 18 he helped to found a benevolent society to promote thrift and temperance among Newcastle coachmakers. At 20 he was received into the Baptist Church where his family were members. In 1816 he founded the first Sunday School Union at Newcastle and served for years as its energetic secretary. In London he joined influential reformers in fighting for the emancipation of slaves and the restoration of Nonconformist missionaries in British Honduras. Always eager to employ Christian officers in his ships, he helped his brother William to form the Bethel Mission for Seamen, and in 1833 became a director of the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society. He was deacon of Ilford Church, treasurer of a dozen philanthropic societies and one of the founders of Exeter Hall.”
Exeter Hall was the base for evangelical activity in London, including the British and Foreign bible society and the Anti-Slavery Society.
One meeting in Exeter Hall saw the foundation of the South Australian Society which lobbied for the foundation of the non-convict colony. Angas was a supporter. ADB notes “He recruited pious Dissenters, helped to provide the colony with Nonconformist ministers and chapels, sent out missionaries to the Aboriginals, founded the South Australian School Society and hoped to plant an advanced college and even a university like Oxford. The largest group of devout families that he persuaded to emigrate to the new colony were the German Lutherans under Pastor August Kavel. When the Colonization Commission and the company refused to help, he personally advanced some £8000 to the Germans for their migration. On arrival many of them became tenants on his land at Klemzig and later at Angaston.”
So a vote of thanks from the Lutheran Church of Australia.
When finally he came to South Australia himself and became a member of parliament in 1851, his nonconformist religion came to the fore. “The first major issue was state aid to religion and he had no hesitation in wholly supporting its rejection, thereby making South Australia the first part of the empire to separate church and state. Although disturbed by the colony’s lack of ‘spiritual atmosphere’, he never ceased to believe that ‘religion is a matter with which no government has a right to interfere’. On the select committee for education in 1851 he pressed successfully for Bible reading in schools, and later he strongly opposed Sunday trains and concessions for horse racing and gambling.”
A 1983 biography of George Fife Angas records that he was involved in the “City and Bush Missions, the Aborinines’ Friends Society, the Female Refuge and Female Reformatory, the Total Abstinence Society, Local Bible and Tract Societies, Scripture Readers, Sailor’s’ Home and Bushmen’s Home, the Domestic Mission” (the last described as Bible Women).
“For the erection of places of worship, liquidation of debts upon them, maintenance of ministers, and such like, his time and purse were always available.”
The biography reproduces extracts from his letters: “I have formed a libray at the goal in Adelaide and in the prison at Dry Creek, nine miles off, which I hope, under God’s blessing, will do good even in such a barren soil.”
“With the aid of one or two friends I am trying to pay for the foundation of a Baptist Theological College in this colony. I often feel that I fail in nervous energy to carry into operation the plans of my own mind and heart.”
Angas’ son John Howard Angas suceeded in setting up an intertdenominational missionary college on the site of what later became the Jeffcott Street site of the Luthgeran Seminary in North Adelaide.
Glamadelaide reports George Fife Angas’ Bible (pictured) has found a new home in the SA Parliamentary Library.