PENETRATING THE AUSTRALIAN FIELD

With a carton of books loaded on his bicycle, American colporteur Arthur Davey set out to bring the Bible’s truth to people in the south of West Australia in 1910. Arthur Williams greatly appreciated his arrival in Donnybrook. He said: “Davey was a little fellow over sixty years of age, stooped, frail and he had consumption. His zeal and loyalty for Jehovah were marvelous.”

By 1914 the Australian field had been penetrated far and wide, the work spearheaded by 21 colporteurs. About thirty-five newspapers throughout the country were publishing sermons, and 908 persons had subscribed for The Watch Tower in Australia and New Zealand. The field had been well seeded, as indicated in Zion’s Watch Tower of 1906: “The best day’s work done by a colporteur in this portion of the field has been in securing orders for 105 volumes of Studies in the Scriptures in one day; 103 of these were afterward delivered in a half-day. The same colporteur maintained an average of 50 volumes per day for two consecutive months.”