Bevan Meredith

Meredith was born in 1927,[1] the son of Stanley Meredith, who was a teacher,[2][3] and his wife Edith (née Witchard).[4]

He was educated at Towalbyn Public School in Uralba[5] and Ballina High School.[6] In 1945 the family moved to Mango Hill in Queensland.[7] Initially working on the family farm, he then became a clerk at the City Electric Light Company.[8] Meredith then became a teacher, initially at a small Anglican school called St Christopher's in Brookfield, which had been established by Fr Robert Bates, Rector of All Saints, Wickham Terrace, Brisbane.[9]

From 1948 he taught at the Slade School in Warwick,[10] before moving to Papua & New Guinea in 1954 to teach at the Martyrs School in Popondetta.[11] This was only three years after the Mount Lamington volcanic eruption which destroyed the school, and at the time it was still being rebuilt.[12]

Meredith trained for ordination at St Francis' Theological College, Brisbane and was ordained deacon in 1961 and priest in 1962.[13] He served a short curacy at St Thomas', Toowong in the Diocese of Brisbane from 1961 to 1962 and then returned to Papua & New Guinea as a missionary in the Papuan Peninsula from 1962 to 1966.[14] He was then Archdeacon of New Guinea from 1966 to 1967.[15]

He was consecrated a bishop in 1967 and became an assistant bishop of New Guinea, as well as being Archdeacon of the New Guinea Islands.[16] In 1968 he was appointed an Australian Army chaplain (Papua & New Guinea then being an Australian territory).[17]

As late as 1970, Meredith was still finding communities of Papuans in the Highlands for whom Christianity was novel, and he was the first to baptise any of them.[18] In 1977 he became Bishop of the New Guinea Islands,[19] and in 1990 additionally Archbishop of Papua New Guinea.[20] He survived the volcanic eruption in Rabaul in 1994,[21] and retired in 1995. Meredith was a Franciscan tertiary.[22]

In retirement Meredith lived in Brisbane.[23] He died in 2019, aged 92, and his funeral was at St John's Cathedral in Brisbane.[24] He was unmarried.[25] His sister Marion married the Rt Rev George Tung Yep.[26]