There was no planned campaign
by The Salvation Army to start in Australia.

John Gore, a builder and Edward Saunders, a railway ganger, both English immigrants who had settled in Adelaide, met at a church service in 1880. They had been converted through Booth’s mission in England.

On Sunday September 5, 1880, with a handful of supporters and a small harmonium on a greengrocer’s cart, they set up under a gum tree at "spruikers corner" in Adelaide’s Botanic Park.

They sang their hymns and issued gospel exhortations, then John Gore closed the meeting with an invitation,

"If there is any man here who hasn’t had a meal today, let him come home to tea with me."

So began the evangelical and humanitarian mission of The Salvation Army in Australia.

Answering the appeal by William Booth in London for reinforcements to consolidate the fast growing laymen-led movement, Captain and Mrs. Thomas Sutherland arrived from London in 1881 as the first officers of The Salvation Army in Australia.

The development of The Salvation Army’s Australian mission was rapid and it mirrored in character the words of concern spoken under the gum tree in Adelaide.

Brass bands were the popular music groups of the day. The Salvation Army band became familiar across Australia, and the movement grew.

Major James Barker, identified in 1883 a need amongst men newly released from prison. He set up accommodation and rehabilitation programs for the men under the title of the Prison Gate Brigade. A prison gate home was established in Melbourne - the first Salvation Army institution set up anywhere in the world.

That initiative became the forerunner of the network of Salvation Army social service and community welfare programs across Australia today.