Matthew Burnett (1839–1896), the ‘Yorkshire Evangelist’, spent more than twenty years denouncing alcohol in the Australian colonies. Born in Yorkshire, he is said to have been a wayward youth, whose conversion in 1857 resulted from the fervent prayers of Sarah Gibson; they subsequently married. In 1863 the couple arrived in Victoria, settling in Prahran. Immediately he began recommending a life of strict sobriety – combined with industry, thrift, self-reliance, pluck, indomitable perseverance and loyalty to principle – to the young men of Melbourne. Between 1864 and 1867 he was on the goldfields, where he is said to have secured 11 000 pledges in the face of personal slander from liquor licensees. In Ballarat he held eighteen meetings for women as a result of which 3 600 women renounced alcohol; he even encouraged children to join the ‘cold water army’. Although he and his wife were Wesleyan, he did not always speak in church; well before the Salvation Army appeared in Australia in the early 1880s, Burnett’s meetings were enhanced by choirs, brass bands and torch-light processions. Sarah Burnett died in 1871; Matthew returned to England for a time in 1873, meeting leading temperance reformers, but he was back in the colonies by the mid-1870s. From early 1880 he was in South Australia, where he campaigned for nearly three years and was influential in the establishment of the city’s huge ‘coffee palaces’; he visited Western Australia and, partly to recuperate from his public appearances, New Zealand and Tasmania. By 1889 he could say that he had received pledges from 140,000 people. Well known as the ‘apostle of temperance’, he gave his first lecture in Sydney that year, supported by representatives of the Independent Order of Rechabites, the Congregationalists, the Blue Ribbon Army, the Sons of Temperance, the Baptists and the Sailors of the Port; it was remarked that he was so hoarse, he could hardly be heard. He returned to England in 1890, seems to have remarried, and died at Scarborough at the age of 57.
