Rev. Francis Trafford Walker and Mrs Emma M. Walker, his wife, travelled from Sydney to Rabaul on the SS Mataro in June 1925 to take up posts in New Britain with the Overseas Mission of the Methodist Church of Australasia. They were stationed at Kabakada, Watnabara and Vunairima.

Handley Bathurst Sterndale was born in India in 1833, where his father worked as an indigo planter. He was educated in Britain, but ran away to sea at the age of 16. He travelled to the Americas, where he undertook a variety of employment, including labour in Panama and as a mercenary in Nicaragua. Sterndale probably first arrived in the Pacific in the 1850s where he worked in the trade of shell and beche-de-mer. He also worked for plantations in the labour trade, also known as blackbirding. He married Helen Matilda Caulton in Melbourne, Australia in 1867.

In 1870, Sterndale spent some months working as a surveyor for the German trading company Goddefroy & Sohn who sought to establish plantations on the island of Upolo, Samoa. During this time, he made the journey across Upolo - likely in his capacity as a surveyor – and made notes and sketches of the expedition. In 1871, on Motu Kotawa on the islet of Pukapuka atoll in the Cook Islands, he wrote the manuscript ‘Upolu; or, A Paradise of the Gods’ and worked his sketches into finished drawings. In that same year, Sterndale published the first of what became regular articles under the title, ‘My Adventures and Researches in the Pacific’ in the ‘Australian Town and Country Journal’. He wrote under the pseudonym ‘A Master Mariner’. Sterndale also wrote for the New Zealand newspaper ‘The Daily Southern Cross’ and ‘The New Zealand Herald’.

In 1872, Sterndale worked as an agent for King Cakobau of Fiji and in 1874 entered a joint venture with Thomas Henderson, of New Zealand company Henderson and Macfarlane, to develop the Cook Islands atoll of Suwarrow. This ended in a dramatic conflict between the two, with the Sterndales forced to return to New Zealand. He later moved to San Francisco, probably to remedy his poor health, but he died there on Christmas Day, 1878 at the age of 45.

Reverend Peter Milne was born at Stains, Aberdeen on the 17 May 1834. He trained and was ordained as a missionary to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) with the Free Church of Scotland, under the Presbyterian Synod of Otago and Southland. He married Miss Mary Jane Veitch in December 1868 and they quickly departed for the New Hebrides via Dunedin, settling on Nguna Island in 1870. The Milnes faced a number of difficulties in the early years at Nguna, including the unscrupulous activities of European traders and planters. The first baptism took place in 1880, and after subsequent rapid evangelisation, the island was nominally Christian by 1896. Mary Milne left the island for Dunedin in 1906, to 'gather together her family', but died of a malarial illness in 1908. The Reverend Milne continued his missionary work on Nguna until dying at age 90, in 1924. Mary and Peter had at least three children, including the Reverend William Milne, also a missionary on Nguna.