Samuel Marsden was an English-born priest of the Church of England in Australia and a prominent member of the Church Missionary Society. He played a leading role in bringing Christianity to New Zealand. Marsden was a prominent figure in early New South Wales and Australian history, partly through his ecclesiastical offices as the colony's senior Church of England cleric and as a pioneer of the Australian wool industry, but also for his employment of convicts for farming and his actions as a magistrate at Parramatta, both of which attracted contemporary criticism.
Marsden, 1833
St Matthew's Church, Windsor, New South Wales, consecrated by Marsden on 8 December 1822
Rev. Samuel Marsden, c.1809
Russell Clark's depiction of the sermon by Marsden, 1814
The history of Australia is the history of the land and peoples of the continental land mass and offshore territories which now comprise the Commonwealth of Australia. The Commonwealth of Australia came into existence on 1 January 1901 as a federation of former British colonies, however the human history of Australia commences with the arrival of the first ancestors of Aboriginal Australians by sea from Maritime Southeast Asia between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, and continues to the present day multicultural democracy.
Rock painting at Ubirr in Kakadu National Park. Evidence of Aboriginal art in Australia can be traced back some 30,000 years.
Kolaia man wearing a headdress worn in a fire ceremony, Forrest River, Western Australia. Aboriginal Australian religious practices associated with the Dreamtime have been practised for tens of thousands of years.
A Luritja man demonstrating his method of attack with a large curved boomerang under cover of a thin shield (1920)
Abel Tasman, the first European to discover Van Diemen's Land, now known as Tasmania