When writer Doug Buckley’s town, Sydney, staged Alex Buzo’s play Macquarie, the Reverend Samuel Marsden was kitted out throughout with a long black stock-whip in his belt. Indeed, enunciate Samuel Marsden to a Sydneysider and the comeback, even by Christians, will be The Flogging Parson. This offensive label was attached generations after Marsden’s death by lesser men who never knew him. Yet does it convey serious truth? Who indeed was the diminutive, larger-than-life senior chaplain to the brutal British convict colony of New South Wales? Why has he been named Apostle to New Zealand? Novelist Doug Buckley retells the story of this versatile and innovative pastor but with a difference, he seeks to write as Sam himself might have written.

“Some want to live within the sound
of church or chapel bell.
I want to run a rescue shop
within a yard of hell.”
C T Studd