The Priest and the Policeman
by Peter Conole (WA Police Historian, Retired 2013)
with permission from the Police Historical Soc –
http://www.policewahistory.org.au/HTML_Pages/Museum.html
The above photograph is a fairly well known West Australian image, one which deserves a greater degree of fame. This fine relic of the Gold Rush days has been in the possession of the WA Police for untold years. The description for the photo reads as follows: Mt Morgan Police Station – Constable Edward Thompson, Rev. M Collick, famous for the annual Christmas Party for aborigines in Kalgoorlie.
There is more than one story behind those simple words: several in fact, some being epic tales which were the stuff of legend, even during the early Goldfields years of Reverend Edward Mallan Collick (1868-1959). Rev. Collick was declared a Local Saint and Hero of the Anglican Church in the Goldfields of WA in 1993. A biography of the gentleman is perhaps well overdue and there is no point in even trying to summarise various jaw-dropping high points of his life in this short piece. It suffices to say that he was also a hero figure to police officers serving on the goldfields in the 1890s, just as he was to the poor and downtrodden of various communities and to Australian soldiers he ministered to and cared for while serving as a chaplain in the Boer War and World War I.
The trouble is, as has recently been revealed by the Rev. Father Ted Doncaster, a leading authority on the history and development of the Anglican Church in our State, the identification is wrong. The priest in the photo is the Reverend Robert Henry Moore (1872-1964), the Anglican priest at Mount Morgans from February 1900 until March 1901. WA police officers need not feel cheated – Rev. Moore was a heroic figure in his own right and he went on to become an important prince of the Church in later years.
To place things in perspective, a few words are necessary on some key issues. Mount Morgans was a really unlovely posting way to the north-east of Kalgoorlie. Mining started there in 1897, as did a settlement. The WA Police made their presence felt when Constable John O’Loughlin arrived and opened a police station in August 1899. His living and working conditions may be judged from the picture. The lucky officer was transferred to Laverton (not exactly a salubrious spot in itself) in May the next year, possibly after a bout of illness.
His replacement may have arrived very soon after the date of his own posting, February 12, 1900. He was Constable Edward Thompson, a 29-year old former South Australian farmer who joined the WA Police Force of the day in 1897.
In the same month Rev. Robert Moore turned up. His career details, as supplied by Father Doncaster, are of great interest. Robert Moore was a Protestant Irishman, the grandson of a priest, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and a volunteer for hard Goldfields service. Like Edward Collick and the most senior Anglican man in WA, Bishop Charles Riley of Perth, he deserves to be labelled and honoured as one of the great band of ‘muscular Christians’ active in the Anglican Church of the day. They plunged into pastoral and missionary work of the most difficult and hazardous nature all over the world, with zeal and courage, and in the process won for their Church high levels of public trust, respect, influence and admiration which are hard for us to understand or imagine today.
For police officers on the Goldfields they were perfect and valued working partners when things became very tough, such as in times of plague (notably from 1895-1900), when typhoid epidemics struck down thousands of people on the Fields. The total death toll is still unclear; other infectious ailments added to the human misery, as did accidents, food poisoning, heat stroke, suicides, violent crimes, death from thirst, natural causes and a myriad other reasons. There is every reason to believe that as many as four out of five police officers ‘caught the fever’ at a time when the mortality rate was well over 10%. A lot of young constables are buried around the Fields. When Commissioner George Phillips visited Coolgardie in 1895 he was stunned to find that all but a handful of policemen had the fever and were fighting for their lives.
McDONALD Donald David d. 23 Dec 1903 age 29 police constable, died if Typhoid. Menzies Cemetery
The risks to priests, police officers and the few nurses and doctors available were probably higher than for other sections of the mining settlement communities. Priests had to move around without regard to local health conditions, conducting services, presiding over weddings, baptisms and confirmations and engaging in pastoral care. Then there was provision of comfort for the sick and dying, administration of the last rites, organisation and conduct of funerals, with follow-up care for distraught and sometimes destitute husbands, wives, children, etc.
They had to work closely with the police, who themselves played a major role in collecting the sick or dying and carting them to hospital, or caring for them till help arrived. Gathering and carting dead bodies to the morgue and helping to arrange burials were also very much evidence in police records of the time. Afterwards came horrible aftermaths, such as tracing relatives, lawfully disposing of the property of some unknown dead and organising care for the most helpless human wreckage, especially orphans.
There were no well-organised social welfare agencies at the time. So much depended on the police, who carried out a vast range of ‘community care’ responsibilities well beyond the limits of their official duties. They were fortunate to have clergymen to provide reliable and understanding support
For men like Constable Thompson and other Goldfields officers, the presence of tough, empathetic priests like Edward Collick and Robert Moore was an additional boon in simple social terms. In such scattered, tumultuous communities, their work as law enforcement officers meant social isolation for policemen until the arrival of other law men or marriage. Good local priests of whatever persuasion were a blessing – they were men the police officers could unburden themselves to and honest sources of advice and solace in hard, unforgiving times. This writer saw the phenomenon in action during his own boyhood – in smaller country towns, the establishment of strong bonds of friendship between local police and priests and their respective families was a common thing.
The photograph in question can now be firmly dated. It was taken sometime between February 1900 and March 1901. There is a slight possibility that it may have partly been a posed shot, one taken to mark the arrival of Rev. Moore in the settlement just after Constable Thompson, or vice versa. Robert Moore had already shown what he was made of in fair Kanowna when he arrived there early in 1899, probably just after or during another typhoid epidemic. He built a humpy for himself at first and then bought the mortuary tent from the primitive local hospital as extra living space after the plague ended. One can but hope his living conditions at Mount Morgans were at least on a par with those of Edward Thompson.
After Rev.Moore left, later in 1901 officer Thompson made a flying visit to Perth in order to ‘tie the knot’ with his fiancée. In the same year, a police station was finally built at Mount Morgans, with suitable living quarters to go with it. Edward Thompson remained there until 1907 and went on to serve at various stations until his retirement in 1936. Like a surprising number of other officers, he may have lacked interest in promotion and remained a solid, reliable constable for his entire career, which included a two-year stint working at the Perth Mint.
Things were very different for Moore the priest, who became a widower at some stage after leaving Mount Morgans. Like Edward Collick, he plunged into the horrors of World War I as a Chaplain in the 1st AIF (ranking as a captain) and served in the Middle East with the Australian Cavalry Division, specifically with the 3rd and 10th Light Horse Regiments in turn. He survived three bad bouts of illness, managed to dodge Turkish bullets and shells completely and was awarded the 1914/1915 Star, the British War medal and the Victory Medal.
In 1929 Robert Moore became Dean of Perth, an illustrious post that meant he was also responsible for the administration of St Georges Cathedral. He retired in 1947; his photo portrait adorns a wall in Burt Hall, in the southern part of the Cathedral complex.
The other figures in the photograph remain unknown. The men close to Constable Thompson in the police station (tent) were probably officials of the two mining companies operating at Mount Morgans. The small lad glaring out from the right facing the viewer could be the son of an official, or a ‘stray pup’ (a plague orphan or lost child) in the temporary care of the constable. The teenager approaching the tent from the left may have been working or – perhaps more likely – on his way to have a chat with the police officer or priest, or with both of them.
To return to an earlier point: the mistaken identity in regard to Edward Collick and Robert Moore is a tribute to the power of legend and folklore. Decades later, some police officers made a conscious decision to archive the photograph. It symbolised something important to them and was a way of acknowledging the great work done for the police and the Goldfields community by ‘warrior priests’ of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. They remembered the name Collick and some of his deeds, perhaps dimly, but the focus on him as a symbolic figure is not a negative reflection on Robert Moore and the numerous other stalwart clergymen who were his peers on the Fields.
Moya Sharp
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