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Cecilia Flynn, nee Mitchell were of Scottish-Irish stock. Cecilia Flynn had immigrated to Melbourne at the death
of her husband in 1853, with her two small sons John and Thomas Eugene. His mother’s parents, Anthony Lester
and Rosetta Lester, nee Ewart of Belfast had also immigrated to Victoria in 1852, finally making their home at
Newbridge. Rosetta was their eldest daughter, born in 1853.
John and his older brother and sister were soon to be robbed of a normal home life because of the death of their
mother on 14 May 1883 after a difficult fourth pregnancy. Eugene, aged seven years, remained with the father.
Rosetta, aged five, and John, aged two and a half years, were bundled off to relatives. The family were reunited
four years later in 1887 when the father was teaching at Snake Valley near Ballarat, moving to Sunshine in 1894
and to Braybrook in 1899, where Thomas Eugene Flynn remained until he retired in 1913. The nearest church to
the family home was the Presbyterian church in Footscray and here the family worshipped, young John becoming
a keen member of the Young People’s Bible Class. When he was 15 years of age he was profoundly affected by
the experience of his father and a pharmacist friend who tried, with disastrous results, to establish a meat-extract
factory on the Victoria River in the Northern Territory. The ‘unknownness’ of the far north of Australia started to
haunt John Flynn’s mind as he was completing his primary education at Braybrock Public School. At 18 years of
age he matriculated from the University High School at Carlton but, not being able to finance a full-time university
course, he decided first of all to become a public schoolteacher and at the same time to develop life-long hobbies
in photography and first aid.
By this time Flynn had shot up to his adult stature of 179 centimetres. He was not athletic, but was of strong
frame, and walked with a loping stride. He wore spectacles and dressed neatly, always with coat, waistcoat and
necktie. His head of thinnish, well-parted brown hair (even when silvery in old age) never showed any sign of
balding. He inherited the studious habits and long hours of his father and in the home spent evenings reading
Browning, Tennyson, Burns, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, the fruits of which were to be revealed later in his
The Bushman’s Companion. He showed a special aptitude, like his father, for the study of world geography and his
mapping and printing skills were almost professional. The death of his brother Eugene from tuberculosis in 1899
was another trauma for the closely-knit family. At this time Flynn shared with his father his growing inclination
toward the ministry. There was no blinding light or convulsive happening but a steadily developing conviction in
his mind about the ‘wonder’ of the Christian message. In 1901, on his 21st birthday, he wrote a long revealing letter
to his father about the soul searching which was going on within him; and two years later, in 1903, he forthrightly
declared that he was going to commence training for the Presbyterian ministry. Working assiduously at the Home
Mission centres of Beech Forest and Buchan, he passed his entrance examination for Ormond Theological Hall in
1907, and commenced the regular four-year divinity course. Flynn took his divinity lectures seriously for the first
year, but in the next three years his exploring spirit discovered a series of outside tasks and interests, which were
of more meaningful importance to him than Hebrew and Greek! He gave ‘magic lantern’ lectures in all sorts of
places, using his own excellent photographs. On two occasions he drove a two-horse buggy around shearing sheds
beyond the mallee country. He spent weeks in writing and publishing The Bushman’s Companion, which was a
useful compendium of medical-social-religious information for bush people.
When the final results of the divinity course were published in 1910 it was only his aggregate pass of 57 per cent
which allowed the faculty ‘to let down the slip-rails’ as Flynn himself put it. On 24 January 1911 he was ordained
a Presbyterian minister. It had become clearly evident that Flynn had long set his compass toward the outback.
In 1911 he accepted a short appointment with the Smith of Dunesk Mission, which was based at Beltana and
funded by trust monies from the estate of Mrs Smith of Dunesk in Scotland. It is clear that Flynn looked upon this
appointment as a springboard to the Northern Territory. After a year the chance came. Flynn was given the task of
going to the Northern Territory to make a report for the Church General Assembly in 1912. He spent seven weeks
of July/August 1912 in the Darwin–Daly–Katherine area. The Administrator, Dr J A Gilruth gave him special
encouragement. Father (later Bishop) F X Gsell at Bathurst Island was his main informant about the Aboriginal
people. On 24 August he boarded ship on his homeward voyage. Flynn’s report entitled ‘Northern Territory and
Central Australia—A Call to the Church’, with a series of photographs and a large map, was a quickly assembled
analysis of the needs of the isolated white people. It received a positive response from the Church Assembly and on
26 September Flynn himself was unanimously appointed as field superintendent of the new national organisation,
the Australian Inland Mission.
Flynn interviewed Mrs Jeanie Gunn (of We of the Never Never) before he set off for the north. Her down-to-earth
emphasis was that if the church was to be serious in its aims to meet the needs of bush people it would be compelled
to institute a combined medical, social and spiritual program of service. Flynn was later to face stern criticism,
even from fellow churchmen, for his concentration on practical projects and for his lack of specific attention to
the Aboriginal people, but from the beginning he directed his total energies to creating what came to be called a
‘Mantle of Safety’. He saw needs as he listened to bush people. He concluded that there must be medical services,
nursing homes, boundary-riding padres and travelling libraries. Finally he realised that his dream could not be
complete without a communication system enabling the scattered people of the inland to be bonded together in
a secure community, and able to call up flying doctors in times of emergency and sickness. Flynn was realistic.
He knew that his total program would have to evolve gradually, depending on patient, experimental phases and
technological developments. But, having admitted that the supreme thing in his life was to survive failures,
he displayed right through his work in the inland a doggedness that surprised even his best friends. With his family
background of Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian influences he welcomed co-operation and
ecumenical unity. This was well evidenced in his promotion of the United Church in North Australia in 1940 as
one of his final visions for the good of the Northern Territory community.