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DICTIONARY OF AUSTRALASIAN BIOGRAPHY.
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mainly before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in colonial appeal cases. In 1889 he returned to Victoria, and resumed practice at the local Bar.

Wood, Hon. Reader Gilson, was born in 1821, and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, London. He was brought up as an architect, and shortly after his articles had expired left England for New Zealand, arriving in Auckland in 1844. The northern insurrection breaking out in the following year, Mr. Wood was made lieutenant of Volunteer Artillery, and was present at the attempted storming of Heke's Pah at Ohaeawai on July 1st, 1845. He was mentioned in Colonel Despard's despatch describing that disastrous affair. After the war Mr. Wood returned to Auckland, where he practised his profession of architect and surveyor. About 1848 he was employed by the Government as Inspector of Roads, afterwards he was appointed Deputy Surveyor-General, which office he retained till 1856, and in the following year he was brought forward to represent Auckland City East in the General Assembly, but was defeated. In 1861 he was returned for Parnell, and in July of that year took office as Colonial Treasurer and Commissioner of Customs in the Fox Ministry. On August 6th, 1862, this Ministry went out of office, but, with the exception of a brief interregnum of a fortnight, Mr. Wood held the office of Treasurer under the Domett and Whitaker-Fox Ministries till Nov. 24th, 1864. The financial statement put before the House by Mr. Wood in the Whitaker-Fox Government contained the outlines of a scheme of military settlement and the issue of a three million loan, with a view of finally disposing of the native difficulty. Mr. Wood toward the close of 1864 went to England as Colonial Treasurer to negotiate for an instalment of one million out of the three to be borrowed, and he accomplished his object. In 1865 he resigned his seat for Parnell, but in 1870 was again elected. He opposed the great borrowing scheme of Mr. (now Sir Julius) Vogel with great vigour and eloquence. In 1878 he again resigned his seat for Parnell, and took a trip to England on private affairs. On his return to Auckland in 1879 he was elected for Waitemata. In 1871 he carried a resolution for the abolition of Civil Service pensions.

Woods, Hon. John, M.L.A., second son of Richard Woods, of Liverpool, was born on Nov. 5th, 1822. After being trained as an engineer, he was employed in Canada and England; and landed in Melbourne in 1852, after a chequered experience at the Ovens, M'Ivor, Goulburn, Ararat and Fiery Creek diggings, during which he was a prominent exponent of miners' rights. He was returned to the Assembly in 1859 for the Crowlands district, which he represented with an interval of five years, until 1877, when he was elected for Stawell, which he represented till his death. Whilst out of Parliament, from 1865 to 1870, Mr. Woods entered the Government service, and was in charge of the works at the Malmesbury reservoir, when he was summarily dismissed on an allegation, into which inquiry was refused, that he had connived at some laches on the part of the contractors. Mr. Woods took office as Minister of Railways in the first Berry Government in August 1875, and made some sweeping changes in the tariff of charges. He retired with his colleagues in October of the same year, but was appointed to the same post in the second Berry Administration in May 1877, retiring in March 1880. Mr. Woods died in May 1892.

Woods, Rev. Julian E. Tenison, F.G.S., F.L.S., son of J. D. Woods, Q.C., F.S.A., of the Inner Temple, for many years one of the sub-editors of the London Times, was born in 1832 near London. He was educated at Newington Grammar School and under the tutorship of the late Canon Oakley at Balliol College, Oxford, where, however, he did not graduate through becoming a convert to the Roman Catholic Church in his student days. After passing through a course of theology in the south of France, he was ordained a priest in 1856, and went to Australia as a travelling missionary in the following year. Here he laboured in the little-known country on the borders of South Australia and Victoria, and ultimately became Vicar-General of the diocese of Adelaide, where he established a Catholic school and organised a teaching Order of Sisters of St. Joseph, which has spread over the other colonies. He early took a deep interest in the study of geology, and became proficient in all branches of natural history. He was the author of

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