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Annie Mary Williams served the Seventh-day Adventist Church in various capacities, including missionary to Fiji and director of the Sabbath School Department in the New South Wales Conference.
Gilbert Temple Wilson was a church administrator, including New Zealand Conference president.
William (Bill) Wilson was the longest serving manager of the Church’s Sanitarium Health Food Factory at Cooranbong, occupying that position for almost 30 years. During that time he worked closely with Avondale College and was very involved in community outreach in the Lake Macquarie and Newcastle districts.
Anna and George Wood, from Australia, committed their lives in service to the people of Java and Sumatra. After Anna Wood’s death, George Wood died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in 1944.
South Pacific Division Biography Missionaries Died/Imprisoned for Faith
John Henry Woods was born at Firth of Clyde, Scotland, on September 8, 1863. He emigrated to Australia with his parents and was raised in the gold-mining town of Maryborough, VIC. He learned the printing trade and entered a business partnership with Walter Miller in Melbourne.
The First World War (1914-1918) radically affected New Zealand and Australian society, but its impact on the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the region was limited by its geographic remoteness from the theaters of conflict and the Church’s circumspection over participation in the war. While almost all other religious groups actively promoted the war and the enlistment of their young men, the denomination walked a largely successful but very fine line between loyalty to the government and opposition to a worldly war that conflicted with the Church’s global mission and vision.
The Second World War had a significant impact on the work of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Pacific, most notably in New Guinea, Papua, and the Solomon Islands, which were the scenes of bitter conflict between Japanese and Allied forces. In particular, the church had to negotiate its interaction with state authorities over support for the war effort and compulsory military service, and manage its work in war-affected regions.
Phillip Wright was an Adventist nurse and mission administrator who trained at the Sydney Sanitarium. He moved into evangelistic work and was for a time the superintendent of the Eastern Polynesian Mission based at Papeete, Tahiti.
South Pacific Division Biography Missionaries Died/Imprisoned for Faith
Charles and Isabel Wrigley were missionaries to the Solomon Islands.
Sara Mareta Young, a descendant of the 1789 HMS Bounty mutineer Edward (Ned) Young, was one of the first Pitcairn Islanders (if not the first) to travel to other Pacific Islands as a Seventh-day Adventist missionary.
South Pacific Division Biography Groundbreakers Missionaries Died/Imprisoned for Faith Women
Sarah Grace Young was among the first Sabbathkeepers and Seventh-day Adventist converts on Pitcairn Island.
Youth programs in the South Pacific Division train youth to be mission-minded and to give selfless service and also teach youth valuable life and outdoor skills.
Wilton Edward (Bill) Zanotti was a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) teacher and educational administrator who worked in church schools in Queensland, Western Australia and New Zealand. He spent ten years at the Aboriginal mission school at Mona Mona where he established a choir and brass band, which became widely known and appreciated.
William Edwin “Bill” Zeunert gave forty-four years of service to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, working for the Sanitarium Health Food Company (SHF) as manager, and as assistant treasurer at the Australasian Division of Seventh-day Adventists in Wahroonga.