Sanitarium & the Birth of Adventism in Australia
Season 2 | Episode 37
Ellen White's work in Australia and New Zealand
was largely a pioneering work.
S. N. Haskell and his team had arrived several years earlier,
but much of the work was yet to be done.
Here in this new country they would go into unentered fields,
opening schools, churches, sanitariums, and publishing houses.
The membership was small, but the vision was big.
Ellen White had mentioned Australia as early as 1874 when she wrote,
'The message will go in power to Oregon, to Europe, to Australia...'
At the age of 64, 17 years later, she would arrive here in Australia.
The original team had originally docked in Sydney,
but they would end up settling here in Melbourne
and this city is really the birthplace of Adventism in Australia.
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This was also Ellen White first settled when she came.
In mid-1892 she sent a message to the conference president A. G. Daniells,
that a school needed to be started for the education of the youth.
This message was both welcome and also troubling.
How could a membership so small and poor in worldly goods accomplish this?
They started the Australasian Bible School
in two rented houses on St George's Terrace on St Kilda Road.
In their first term they had between 25 and 50 students.
Later on the school would grow and a third house would be added.
Still later, the school would move north to Cooranbong,
but its roots lie here.
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Early on, the publishing work was started,
and a building on the corner of Rae and Scotchmer
served as both accommodation and publishing house.
The first copy of The Bible Echo and Signs of the Times
was published in January of 1886.
Later on they would purchase a property here on Best Street for $1,400,
and a three-story building was erected.
The publishing house would stay here until it would move in 1905 to Warburton,
where it remains to this day.
Our early pioneers sought to use
the best means of communication to share the message,
and this was integral to the strategy of the church as it planted in new areas.
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Here in the Edinburgh Gardens they also held the first tent meetings
that would later on lead to the first Adventist Church
in the southern hemisphere,
the North Fitzroy Seventh-day Adventist Church.
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Another work that started early on was a health food company.
This was known as Sanitarium Health Foods
and started in 1898 on Clarke Street in Northcote, Melbourne.
Ellen White strongly encouraged this,
as well as the later move of the company from Melbourne to Avondale
so that the college students could work there.
Today Sanitarium Foods is one of the largest health food companies in the world
and is widely recognized throughout Australia for its wide range of products,
in particular its flagship product, Weet-Bix.
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The financial support given by Sanitarium to the work of the church
is in line with the instruction Ellen White gave
about the health food work,
that it is 'God's gift to his people,
and the profits are to be used for the good of suffering humanity everywhere.'
This is perhaps the best illustration
of this close working relationship anywhere in the world.
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And so the work of the church started in a comprehensive fashion:
evangelism, church planting, education,
a health food company, a publishing house and the sanitarium.
There were many dimensions to the church in its early days,
despite only having a few members.
They worked hard and sought to follow the counsel that God had given them,
even though they only had a little bit of funds.
Sometimes today, I think we are too constrained by our circumstances,
and if the pioneers manifested the same hesitancy that we often have,
I wonder if the work would ever have gotten going.
God is looking for people today who will step out in faith,
who will follow the counsel that He has given,
and seek to accomplish great things in these times in which we are living.