Ian Shevill

Ian Shevill was educated at Scots College, Sydney, and Sydney University,[3] then at Moore Theological College and the Australian College of Theology.[4]

Shevill was ordained in 1941[5] and his first position was as a curate of St Paul's, Burwood.[6] From 1948 to 1953 he worked for the Society for the Propagation of Gospel (USPG).

In 1953, he was ordained to the episcopate as Bishop of North Queensland, a post he held for 17 years. He was enthroned on 23 April 1953 at St James' Cathedral, Townsville.[7] Shevill was nicknamed "the boy bishop" as he was only 34 when he became Bishop of North Queensland, then the world's youngest Anglican bishop.[8]

In 1970, Shevill's wife died and he became secretary of USPG in London. In 1973 he returned to Australia and was enthroned as Bishop of Newcastle[9] on 6 August 1973.[10]

Shevill retired in 1977 following a stroke[8] and died on 3 November 1988. He opened Bible House, Townsville, on 7 November 1964 with Canon Herbert Maxwell Arrowsmith and Preston Walker of the British and Foreign Bible Society.[11]

Shevill was an author, both during his work and after his retirement. Amongst others he wrote New Dawn in Papua (1946); Pacific Conquest (1948); God’s World at Prayer (1951); Orthodox and other Eastern Churches in Australia (1964); Going it with God (1969); One Man’s Meditations (1982); O, My God (1982); Between Two Sees (1988) and an autobiography, Half Time (1966), while bishop in Townsville.

Shevill married June Stephenson, an English missionary he had met in New Guinea, in 1959;[4] she died in 1970. He married again in 1974 to Margaret Ann Brabazon at Bishopscourt Chapel in Darling Point, Sydney.[4]

The then Bishop of Newcastle, Greg Thompson, reported in 2015 that he had been sexually abused by Shevill as a young man when he was 19 and interested in the priesthood.[12]