Biography
Florence Selina Kingsley Young was born in 1856 in New Zealand, in a family of English origin. Her father, Robert Young, was a man of means who had come to the colonies, and her family was part of the Plymouth Brethren. She grew up in a home that valued Scripture. Her family moved to Queensland, Australia, where her brothers took up sugar planting at a place called Fairymead, near Bundaberg. She went with them as a young woman and kept house for her brother. She was gentle and quiet and had a deep faith.
In those years, the sugar plantations of Queensland made use of laborers from the islands of the South Pacific, especially from the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. These men were known as Kanakas, a word that is now considered offensive. They were brought to Australia under contracts, often under conditions that were little better than slavery. Some of them had been kidnapped, and many were exploited. They worked hard in the fields and lived in rough barracks. Florence Young saw them and felt a burden for them.
In 1882 she began a Sunday school for the island laborers on the plantation. She learned a little of their language and taught them to read. She taught them the Bible, and many of them were drawn to the faith. She worked with other missionaries and with her brothers, and the work grew. By 1886, there were hundreds of men attending, and many were converted. She became known as the mother of the island mission. She also visited other plantations in the area and started similar classes.
In 1904, when the Australian government began sending the island laborers back to their homes, she saw that the converts would carry the gospel to their villages. She formed the Queensland Kanaka Mission, which later became the South Sea Evangelical Mission. Its aim was to follow the converts to their homeland and to support them. She traveled to the Solomon Islands in 1904 and set up the first mission station. The work spread through the islands, and the converts carried the faith to their families and villages. It grew into a large movement.
She wrote about the work in her book Pearls from the Pacific, published in 1925. In it, she told of the faith of the island believers and of the way that God had worked. She was a leader of the mission for many years. She also took part in the publication of the New Testament in the languages of the islands. The South Sea Evangelical Church, which grew out of the mission, became the largest church in the Solomon Islands.
She had her limits. She was a woman of her time, and her views of the island people often carried the paternal attitudes of the age. She was also criticized for the way that she handled some of the early work, with a firm hand and limited consultation. She was ill from time to time and suffered from the strain of the work. She did not marry and lived a plain life.
She died in 1940, at the age of eighty-four. Her life shows the long reach of a small act of kindness. A woman who taught laborers on a sugar plantation planted a church that has served a whole nation for over a century.