Lorimer Fison

Lorimer Fison (9 November 1832 – 29 December 1907) was an Australian anthropologist, Methodist minister and journalist.

Fison was born at Barningham, Suffolk, England, the son of Thomas Fison, a prosperous landowner, and his wife Charlotte, a daughter of the Rev. John Reynolds, who was a translator of seventeenth-century religious writers. Fison was educated at a school at Sheffield, then at the University of Cambridge where he read with a tutor before becoming a student of Caius College in June 1855. After a "boyish escapade" at college he left for Australia.

In 1856 Fison arrived in Australia and while at the gold diggings the news of the unexpected death of his father led to his conversion to active Christianity. He went to Melbourne, joined the Methodist church, and after some further study at the University of Melbourne offered himself for missionary service in Fiji. He was ordained a minister and sailed for Fiji in 1864 with his wife Jane. His first seven-year term as a missionary was very successful. The Rev. George Brown in an article in the Australasian Methodist Missionary Review wrote that Fison was "one of the best missionaries whom God has ever given to our church". His honesty, kindliness, tact and commonsense were appreciated alike by government officials, white settlers, and the natives themselves. He became much interested in Fijian customs and in 1870 was able to give Lewis H. Morgan, the American ethnologist, some interesting information relating to the Tongan and Fijian systems of relationship. This was incorporated as a supplement to Part III of Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871). When Fison returned to Australia in 1871 he began investigating similar problems in connexion with the aborigines. This led to his becoming acquainted with Alfred William Howitt, with whom he was afterwards to do a great deal of worthwhile work in Australian anthropology.

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