Frank Coaldrake was a significant figure in the history of the Anglican Church in Australia: a founding member of the National Union of Australian University Students; active in the Student Christian Movement; a member of the Bush Brotherhood, which ministered to indigenous Australians in outback Queensland; active in the Brotherhood of St Lawrence in Depression-era Melbourne; President of the Federal Pacifist Council of Australia; a missionary to Japan in the early post-World War II years; Chair of the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) from 1956; and elected as Archbishop of Brisbane in 1970, but tragically passing away before effectively taking up this office.

This collection, compiled by Coaldrake’s son William, draws largely on The Peacemaker and the Newsletter, which was distributed to a group of family, friends and interested Anglican parishioners during Frank Coaldrake’s mission to Japan. At times, the readership of the Newsletter numbered in the hundreds. These records, which have been known to specialist researchers in the University of Melbourne microform collection and archives, have now been made available to a wider audience through this publication, and have been supplemented with newspaper articles, correspondence and oral history interviews with Maida Coaldrake, who accompanied her husband in the latter part of his mission. The documents are mainly concerned with Frank Coaldrake’s years in Japan, and the time immediately before and after.