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LO, SHUI KWONG (1900–1995), Methodist Minister, was born on 11 November 1900 in Juk-Yuan Village,
Pok-Lo Province, South China. Lo’s father and grandfather were Christians as the London Missionary Society was
active in the area. His mother, however, was not and so he was brought up with Confucian beliefs until he was 12,
when he came under the influence of his father’s family. He was educated at the Pok-Lo Mission School and then
attended the Hip-Wo University in Canton. He spent four years at the Canton Theological College and gained his
Licentiate of Theology in 1929. He could speak a number of dialects including Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin
and served with the London Missionary Society in Macau, Canton and Hong Kong until 1941.
He was married in Hong Kong on 12 December 1931 to Wong Yuk Yuen, who had teaching qualifications.
By November 1941 with the Japanese pressing ever southward he left Hong Kong with his wife and children
bound for Darwin which they reached on 5 December 1941 aboard Burns Philp’s Merkur. Lo came to the Territory
under the auspices of the Methodist Overseas Mission as a Pastor to the Darwin Chinese community and as
a Chinese schoolteacher. He was given a warm welcome and provided with a house near Woods Street next
to the petroleum tanks overlooking Frances Bay. The school was short-lived as by January 1942 many of the
residents of Darwin including Lo and his family were evacuated due to the escalation of the war with Japan. As a
schoolteacher, Lo was allowed to leave Darwin on the same basis as the Darwin public school teacher. Lo and his
family first settled in Townsville as did some of the other Chinese families from Darwin. He was again warmly
received and with the assistance of the Secretary of the Townsville Chinese school, he reopened it with 21 pupils.
On 21 October 1942, Pastor Lo accepted a call to work for the Chinese Presbyterian Church in Sydney. His parish
included the Campbell Street Church, St Luke’s in Redfern, and the Ashfield Methodist Church. On 4 March 1943,
Lo was ordained into the ministry of the Methodist Church of Australia. He carried out his teaching and pastoral
work in Sydney until 1946 when he was posted back to Darwin by the Methodist Overseas Mission ‘to continue his
interrupted work there’. In September Lo with his wife and youngest son reached Darwin, the other three children
remaining at Methodist schools in Sydney. The family settled in a house at Lot 700 Schultze Street, Larrakeyah.
The house had formerly belonged to a schoolteacher, Helena Carruth, but the Northern Territory Administration
had resumed it, along with the rest of the town. At first, it still bore the damage it had suffered during the war.
Later the house was repaired and upgraded to include classrooms and an extra bedroom. Here Lo conducted a
Chinese School and ministered to adult Chinese. Children attended on Saturday morning and on public holidays
and ‘special’ classes were held for adults on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.
In 1948, Pastor Lo received a request to go to Rabaul on New Britain, Papua New Guinea, to relieve the
Chinese Minister who was retiring. It was believed that there were many more Chinese in need of his ministrations
in that area than there were in Darwin. He agreed to go and left his wife to keep the Darwin school open. He was
later to write that he was very happy to live among the Chinese in New Britain as they had lived a ‘rat like’ life in
the bush during the war years. ‘During the Japanese occupation there were about 1280 Chinese people living under
the pressure of 100 000 Japanese fighting forces. I had more than 300 Sunday school children and 20 teachers’,
he wrote.
He returned on leave to Darwin in 1952 and found that his wife had maintained the school in Schultze Street
‘in good order’. Pastor Lo and his wife returned to Papua New Guinea but in 1958 ill health saw them returning
to Brisbane. In March 1964, he returned to live permanently in Darwin. Pastor Lo was among those who assisted
in the fund raising for both the Uniting War Memorial Church (Smith Street) and for the Chung Wah Hall, the
original Temple having been damaged in the bombing of Darwin and demolished in 1948. The Chinese school
was conducted from these premises after it was opened in January 1956, it having operated from the ‘Stonehouses’
in Cavenagh Street from 1952. Pastor Lo led an active life in Darwin and occasionally visited his ‘flock’ at
Pine Creek.
The Reverend Shui Kwong Lo died in Darwin on 8 September 1995 survived by his wife and three sons, David,
John and Michael, their wives, a son-in-law, 14 grandchildren and three great grandchildren. A daughter, Lily, died
in 1972.
A W Grant, Palmerston to Darwin: 75 Years Service on the Frontier, 1990; Lo family information; Northern Territory News, 9 September 1995;
Northern Territory Parliamentary Record, 11 October 1995.
BARBARA-MARY PEDERSEN, Vol 3.
LOCK, ANN (ANNIE) also JOHANSEN (1876–1943), dressmaker and missionary, was born in South Australia
in 1876, the daughter of Walter Lock and his wife Ann, nee Stokes. Her parents had met on Coldstream in 1865
en route from England. They were married in 1866 and settled in the Riverton area of South Australia as share
farmers. Annie, as she was known, was the seventh of 14 children and had only a basic education. She worked as a
dressmaker until she was 24, when she received a ‘call’. She then entered Angas Bible College in Adelaide, and in
1903 joined a non denominational faith mission, the Australian Aborigines’ Mission (AAM) (after 1929 the United
Aborigines’ Mission [UAM]) Although raised a Methodist, she had no formal links with that church’s missions.
Lock worked at Sackville Reach and then Forster in New South Wales until 1909. She then became Matron of
Dulhi-Gunyah Orphanage in Perth, Western Australia. From 1912, Lock worked at Katanning in the south west of
that state, transferring to the nearby government settlement at Carrolup upon its establishment in 1915. Between
1917 and 1923, she worked on Sunday Island near Derby in northern Western Australia before opening a mission
at Oodnadatta in South Australia. She left Oodnadatta in 1926 on furlough, and in March 1927, she established
herself as an independent worker, not fully supported at the UAM at Harding Soak near Ti Tree in Central Australia.
Living in a bush shelter, Lock gathered sick and starving Aborigines around her. The government refused to support