In November 1824, the Reverend Daniel Tyerman wrote from Sydney to fellow religious men in Britain extolling the opportunities that Australia and the Pacific region offered. The region, he enthused, will ‘form an interesting branch of the Missionary Tree which is growing — and flourishing — and stretching its branches over the whole Earth — and the leaves of it, are for the healing of the Nations’. As late eighteenth-century additions to Britain's imperial fold, the Pacific Islands and Australian colonies seemed to Tyerman to sit at the nexus of imperial and evangelical interests. Despite the fluid and de facto colonial relations between the Islands and Britain, and the unpromising penal origins of the Southern continent, the region offered missionaries and their supporters a whole new field of evangelical activity, particularly when conceived as a geographical totality. This Southern part of the world offered a tabula rasa where Protestant Evangelicals could spread the gospel alongside British enterprise, a zone where Protestantism seemed assured of unimpeded access to virgin territory, territory that was not also being claimed by Catholicism. The Southern Cross constellation, which emblazoned the Southern skies, seemed a prophetic metaphor for the spread of religion and empire under British Protestant guidance.

This chapter examines the contribution that religious travel writing about nineteenth-century Australasia made to British understandings of the region.