In a cool, authoritative and gently ironic biography, Don Baker considers the life of the fiery founding father John Dunmore Lang.John Dunmore Lang had a finger in most pies in colonial New South Wales. He arrived in 1823, a young Presbyterian minister in search of a pulpit. Fifty years later his funeral befitted a founding father not only of the Presbyterian Church in Australia but of the nation itself.He established the Scots Church and his own secondary school, the Australian College. He was a populist politician whose republican and democrat leanings strengthened during a quarter-century in the Legislative Council. He ran three newspapers. He circled the globe eight times; one of his many missions was to recruit clerics, along with respectable tradesmen and small farmers from the British Isles-anywhere but Papist Ireland. He wrote a book or two during most voyages.And that is not the half of it. Volatile and vindictive, Lang loved a fight, answered only to God and was never still.
