AG Fraser of Trinity: A Momentous & Far-reaching Tour of Australia in 1915

The week Alexander Garden Fraser stepped ashore in Fremantle, Australian transports were closing on the Dardanelles. Within days the cliffs of Gallipoli would be taking the bodies of farm boys from Ballarat and bank clerks from Bathurst, and the country he had come to address — its mood pledged to a distant war, its borders sealed by a colour line then less than fifteen years old — would find itself remade by grief. Into this charged atmosphere walked a Scottish clergyman from a hill town in central Ceylon, ostensibly to speak for the Church Missionary Society. What he in fact did, between Melbourne in mid-April and Perth in mid-May, was to challenge — quietly, then less quietly — the racial settlement on which the Australian Commonwealth had been founded.

He was forty two, and he had been Principal of Trinity College, Kandy, for eleven years. When he had arrived in 1904 the school was failing — buildings half-finished, a curriculum modelled on what Australian critics would later call “an imitation of the best in the West.” He had rebuilt it on different foundations: cricket at Asgiriya, science blocks rising, prefectural responsibility carried by Ceylonese boys rather than reserved to English staff, a chapel still in his imagination that would one day rise in indigenous stone rather than Gothic brick. By the time he reached Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald could report that Trinity had won its public schools premiership by margins so substantial the closest match had been settled by 210 runs — and Australian editors introduced him, without irony, as “one of the leading educationists of India.” Sydney University extended him a formal welcome in the Great Hall. The Governor of South Australia took the chair when he spoke at the Adelaide Town Hall. He was a young man at the height of an unusual authority.

What he said, once seated in front of these audiences, deserves to be read slowly. To a missionary conference in Melbourne’s Chapter House, with Archbishop Clarke presiding, he announced that he could not in conscience speak on the White Australia Policy after only days in the country — and then proceeded to dismantle its premises. The peoples of Asia, he said, were “becoming increasingly conscious of their rights and powers.” Eight hundred millions of them. India’s loyalty to the Empire in the present war had been near-total; the Indian Army was already in France. Australians, he urged, would be “well advised to reconsider the admission of some of these people under proper conditions rather than that they should be practically forced later on to take the law into their own hands and to occupy on their own conditions our great empty north.” He pressed the point with a force the missionary press faithfully transmitted: colour prejudice, he said, “should not be a barrier to inter-communication.” And then, addressing the dealings of the Empire’s own representatives, he spoke “strongly against the inconsiderate treatment which is too often meted out by members of the Empire in their dealings with the native races.”

This was not the language of a guest in 1915. The Weekly Times responded that Fraser’s remarks “may well be numbered among the things better left unsaid” — that the subject “cannot be profitably discussed without reference to the Australian point of view,” that he was a man “whose interests are centred in the natives of Ceylon, with whom we have no quarrel, and to whom we have no objection so long as there is a sea between us.” The hostility is worth taking seriously. The editorialist was not mistaken about the awkwardness of his interlocutor’s position: Fraser was telling a country in mourning that the dead at Gallipoli were dying for an Empire whose racial premises were already incompatible with the future they were dying to defend. And yet the Register of Adelaide, observing him at closer range, noted that his White Australia comments “have roused no resentment here, mainly because Australians realised that this man understood what he was talking about.” It is one of those rare moments where a public man pays a perfectly calibrated cost: enough offence to be heard, not so much as to be dismissed.

He went further when he turned from politics to pedagogy. At the Sydney University Christian Union — Professor Anderson presiding — he insisted that the native intellect must be “developed in accordance with its own peculiar traditions.” Western secular education in the East, he said, risked producing “a dangerous hybrid, in the intellectual sense.” The Christian Church had not yet produced theologians in India; it was perhaps time to “allow the natives to develop their own line of religious thought, whether it was Buddhism, Mohammedanism, or Hinduism.” Coming from an Anglican missionary in a colonial capital, this was an extraordinary thing to say. It is also a statement that prefigures, by twelve years, the philosophy he would put into practice at Achimota in the Gold Coast — and that Bickersteth of St. Peter’s would recognise in 1928, when he found Trinity’s new chapel “purely indigenous,” its pillars “gigantic monoliths” raised by native craftsmen, and a Buddhist priest calling down blessings on a Christian edifice.

Then there was the practical gesture. Before leaving, Fraser proposed to Sydney editors that a Trinity schoolboys’ team should tour Australia the following year. The Herald reported that he had Waddy’s support, and that the boys would be granted exemption to land. Behind the cricket lay the real cargo: the proposal had been seeded by the Aserappa case two years earlier, when a Ceylonese ship’s doctor had been refused permission to step off the Orontes onto Australian soil, and the feeling in Ceylon, Waddy admitted, had been “very bitter.” Bring boys instead of polemics, was Fraser’s instinct — let Australian schoolboys discover that the brown boys across the net knew the finer points of the game, and the policy would in time bend before the friendship. The 1916 tour never happened; the war saw to that, and so, one suspects, did the colour bar. But the Adelaide Bickersteth tour of 1927 carried the same logic in the reverse direction, and his St. Peter’s boys returned to write that the Ceylonese they had played against were “the product of two or three generations of European education” and made friends with them easily.

It is here that the Australian dimension turns from history into something closer to inheritance. Trinitians by the thousand have, across the last half-century, made Australia their home. Many will live and die within a postcode of the suburbs Fraser preached in. The country that closed its ports to Dr Aserappa now elects their children to Parliament, fills its tertiary lecture halls with their professional descendants, and counts them among the moral and intellectual furniture of its public life. What Fraser predicted with such uncharacteristic political bluntness in April 1915 — that Australia could not “for ever hold the empty north closed against the teeming millions of Asia” — has been answered not by force but by exactly the kind of slow inter-communication he believed the colour bar would otherwise obstruct. The schoolboy tour he could not arrange in 1916 happens, in a quieter sense, every year at Trinity Old Boys’ gatherings from Perth to Brisbane.

What survives is harder to name than vindication. Fraser was wrong about much — the Empire’s capacity for self-reform, the durability of his missionary frame and the patience of the colonised. But on the central question he put to Australian audiences in those weeks before Gallipoli, he was right in a way that took the better part of a century to become clear. He told them that a country’s borders mark, in the end, the borders of its imagination. And he told the Trinity boys in the years before and after, by the example of how he ran their school, that the imagination of a child bred in the hills of Kandy need not be smaller than the imagination of the men he was being taught to address as equals. The continuity between those two propositions — political and pedagogical, public and personal — is the substance of what an old Trinitian in Sydney or Melbourne can still recognise as Fraser’s bequest.