ABSTRACT
William Hall was himself a product of evangelistic endeavour and since his own youthful conversion he had devoted himself to saving souls. His career as an itinerant missionary, however, began only in 1884 when he answered a newspaper advertisement inserted by the Melbourne and Suburban City Mission. The Melbourne City Mission, Hall’s employer, had been founded as a response to the increase in immorality during the early years of the gold rush. The overwhelming impression is one of hard-working women — Hall of course met mainly women in his daytime visiting — stoically repeating an endless cycle of drudgery. The widow in question was Mrs Reid, whom Hall had first encountered while her husband was still alive over a decade earlier. Hall’s career reveals a continuing dilemma. Although he was a most systematic and efficient man, conscientious and dutiful, the aid he provided for Prahran’s poor can only be described as random.
