Domains and the Intercultural: Understanding Aboriginal and Missionary Engagement at the Mornington Island Mission,Gulf of Carpentaria,Australia from 1914 to 1942

The Mornington Island Mission in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia, was a site of historical engagement between Aboriginal people and missionaries. In this paper, we apply the theoretical concepts of “domains” and the “intercultural” to the investigation of this engagement between 1914 and 1942, when the mission was overseen by the Reverend Robert Wilson. Through the examination of the removal of Aboriginal children, the establishment of a mission compound and Aboriginal camp and the inclusion of Aboriginal adults into the mission compound through production and economy, we show how mutually constituted domains operated. At the same time, the interaction between Aboriginal adults and children with missionaries within these domains was increasingly intercultural in nature. Thus, both “domains” and the “intercultural” are shown to have relevance to the historical case study.     

In Loving Memory of Mary Belshaw,May McRidge,and the Nyungar People of the Badjaling Mission, 1930–1954

Using examples from his family and religious history, Patrick O’Farrell analysed the transition from Irish emigrant to assimilated colonial in what was perceived as vacant land. Like O’Farrell, this article will also use family history to address the issues of memory, religion, and assimilation. The Irish weaver Mary Belshaw (1879–1960) came to Australia in 1913 and was instrumental in the emigration of her family to Australia during the 1920s. She worked as a Protestant missionary among Aboriginal Australians from 1915, until her retirement in 1953. Although the grave she shares with her co‐worker May McRidge (1882–1943) bears the words “Ever remembered by what she has done,” her story was largely forgotten by her family. In 1986, the Nyungar people erected a memorial stone to Belshaw and McRidge and the thirty‐nine Nyungar families who lived at the Badjaling Mission in Western Australia from 1930 to 1954. This article will address the wider issues in twentieth‐century Australia which contributed to the neglect of the story by Belshaw's Irish Australian family and then led to its recovery. It will reveal how an Irish heritage was rediscovered because the story lived within a Nyungar community who had survived terra nullius and assimilation policies to return to their land at Badjaling.     

Missionary Masculinities,the Homoerotic Gaze and the Politics of Race: Gilbert White in Northern Australia, 1885–1915

The considerable international literature on Christian missions and gender has rarely focused on missionary masculinity, or on the relationship between missionary homoeroticism and the defence of the rights of the colonised. This paper argues that homoeroticism played a part in the humanitarianism of Gilbert White who, from 1900 to 1915, was Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria in northern Australia, a heavily male frontier where inter‐racial tension and violence were common. White's attraction to the Aboriginal male body indirectly assisted all Aborigines by drawing attention to the ill effects of colonisation but his ambivalence to the female body left him uninterested in the plight of Aboriginal women, who suffered ‘extraordinary brutality’ on the frontier.     

Island Networks and Missionary Methods: Locating Charles E. Fox and Frederick G. Bowie in the History of Pacific Archaeology

ABSTRACT

‘Missionary’ and ‘archaeology’ may appear incongruous partners within contemporary archaeological practice, but archival, museum and oral sources reveal historical connections. This paper explores two missionaries, active in the western Pacific from 1896 to 1973. Reverends Charles Elliot Fox (Melanesian Mission, Solomon Islands) and Frederick Gatherer Bowie (Free Church of Scotland Mission, Vanuatu) both conducted studies related to the prehistory and migration of Pacific people. Both produced material assemblages, as well as textual and visual documents, and formed ideas influenced by their own networks and self identities. The paper examines their data collection methods and relationships with others, considering particularly how their relationships with Pacific Islanders and with psychologist and ethnologist W.H.R. Rivers influenced the missionary research process. By understanding these aspects of their work, Fox and Bowie can be placed within a broader genealogy of Anglophone missionary archaeology dating back to the late 18th century.     

Whose Ethics? Which Cultural Contract? Imagining Arrernte Traditions Today

The paper uses an account of ‘tradition’ by the philosopher, Alisdair MacIntyre, to argue for the view that local Aboriginal culture that has been through extensive change is nonetheless still specifying for the Aboriginal people involved. Therefore these local traditions must be taken into account in discussions about ‘contracts’ or ‘policies’ concerning Aboriginal people today. An example is drawn from the Lutheran tradition of Western Arrernte people in Central Australia.     

You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How ‘culture’ is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic and historical exploration of Aboriginal Pentecostalism, which permeated quickly into the Aboriginal community in rural New South Wales in Australia during the early twentieth century. Today the Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in this region renounce Aboriginal ‘culture’. This, however, does not mean they reject Aboriginality. By examining Malcolm Calley's ethnography on the mid‐twentieth century Pentecostal movement in this region and drawing upon my own fieldwork data, I show the way in which this group of Aboriginal Christians of mixed descent in a ‘settled’ part of Australia have maintained Aboriginality and reinforced attachment to the community through faith in the Christian God, whilst, paradoxically, developing strong anti‐culture and anti‐tradition discourses. This paper advocates shifting the study of social change from a dichotomised model that opposes invading moral orders against resisting traditional cultures, to one that examines the processual manifestations of the historical development of vernacular realities.     

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Colony and Difficult History

A recent exhibition staged by the National Gallery of Victoria Australia can be regarded as an expression of the international difficult histories boom. In large part, its representation in Colony of Australia’s black history is in keeping with the Manichean accounts that have come to dominate in the realm of popular culture and is a function of its decision to represent the past in forms that are primarily memorial and performative rather than historical and pedagogical. I argue that any serious attempt to come to grips with this nation’s difficult Aboriginal history requires its settler peoples to rethink rather than merely reject previous settler accounts of the past, and I contend that this task demands the practice of both scholarly history and local Aboriginal community history, which provide more complex accounts of the past.     

Palawa Kani and the Value of Language in Aboriginal Tasmania

Over the past forty years the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, long marked as an iconic case of extinction, have revitalized many elements of their ‘lost’ culture. Palawa kani, the constructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language, is an example of such efforts. The construction and utilization of palawa kani is one element of a broader Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural politics working to strengthen the Indigenous status, authenticity, and presence in Tasmania specifically and Australia more generally. In this article I recount the historical documentation of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages and analyze the process through which multiple historical languages were utilized in the construction and consecration of a single ‘official’ Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Rather than existing strictly as a tool for communication, I argue palawa kani is a cultural artifact that, like an emblem, works to distinguish the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, one that lacks many of the stereotypical components of Australian Aboriginality, within Tasmanian society. As such, it is best understood in relation to Clifford's ‘indigenous articulations’ (2001) and Cowlishaw's mythopoeia of Aboriginality in Australia (2010, 2011). I examine what palawa kani does for, and what it represents to, the larger Tasmanian Aboriginal community.     

Combining Indigenous and Maritime Archaeological Approaches: Experiences and Insights from the ‘(Re)locating Narrunga Project’, Yorke Peninsula, South Australia

This paper details the unique pairing of Indigenous and maritime archaeological approaches in the ‘(Re)locating Narrunga Project’. Narrunga was a ketch built by the Narungga Aboriginal community at Point Pearce Mission (Yorke Peninsula, South Australia) at the turn of the twentieth century and later sunk in the 1940s. It is argued that convergences between the scholarly interests of Indigenous and maritime archaeological approaches have been slow to develop and that maritime archaeology as a sub-discipline has not capitalized on the insights that can be gained from collaborative approaches between communities and practitioners. Similarly, Indigenous communities in Australia have had few opportunities to work with researchers to record their maritime heritage. As is evident in the Narrunga story told in this research, non-Indigenous records have been complicit in underplaying the maritime achievements and skills of Narungga people and collaborative research can work towards decolonizing this past.     

Nurturing Culture Through Country: Resource Management Strategies and Aspirations of Local Landowning Families at Napranum

In the context of generations of living in the ‘long and terrible shadow’ (Berger, 1991) cast by hostile political structures, mission influences and industrial resource management systems, the culture and identities of the local Aboriginal landowning families of the Weipa area have survived. These families actively nurture their culture through the development of resource management strategies. Local landowners' experiences of colonisation and the ways in which they sense their history and geography are explored and various cultural maintenance and transmission practices centred on country and resources are described. Active engagement with wider scale processes is contributing to more effective outcomes for the landowning families.     

“This Greater Issue of Light against Darkness”: Sereno Edwards Bishop,Missionary Religion,and the Hawaiian Islands, 1827–1909

The history of nineteenth‐century missions provide a fruitful field to explore the development of religious thought and practice in a secular setting. This article shows how the religious views of the clergyman and educator Sereno Edwards Bishop, born in Hawai‘i of American missionary parents, were shaped by his childhood among the mission community in Hawai‘i and by his American college education. These instilled in him a liberal approach to theology that was informed by a spiritually alert sense of Hawaiian geography and environment. Contrary to the notion that he cast his faith aside in addressing matters of wider social and political importance, Bishop emerges as someone who thought critically about mid‐nineteenth‐century Protestant Christianity, grounding his perspective on politics, society, and natural history in Hawai‘i according to his religious principles. Given Bishop’s specific intellectual and cultural heritage, it is difficult to subsume his perspective within broader narratives of American expansion; rather, both Pacific and mainland American elements shaped the thought of such mission‐descended figures.     

Provincializing Albert Schweitzer's Ethical Colonialism in Africa

Unlike many commentators who tend to see Schweitzer's mission one-sidedly, I show the coexistence of liberal and conservative elements in his mission. While his mission intent was mostly motivated by the former, his mission practices largely show the latter. In this essay, I analyze them in detail in three parts. I first explain how such opposite elements can coexist by applying Dipesh Chakrabarty's notion of provincializing Europe. Like most nineteenth-century Western liberals, Schweitzer advocated Enlightenment rights for Europeans, but denied them to the colonized. I then argue that Schweitzer's mission was motivated by the liberal elements of his theology. When his critical theology led him to deny the divinity of Jesus, he found a new basis for Christianity in Jesus’ ethical activism, which led him to become a medical missionary to Africa. I then examine Schweitzer's conservative practices in Africa: by applying the developmental model of Hegelian-Marxist historicism to African society, Schweitzer opposed both decolonization and advanced learning to Africans. Schweitzer's missionary practices in Africa, I therefore conclude, were more conservative than those of the typical European missionary.     

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

Changing philosophies of action? Argentine’s cultural policies in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

How can the many institutional and ideological changes of Argentine cultural policy at the beginning of the 21st century be explained? This paper analyses how representations of culture, programs and public actions are translated into different ‘philosophies of action’ depending on the political stripe of each government and the agents of cultural policy. If the predominant philosophy of action during the whole period is ‘culture as an economic resource’, it coexists with other philosophies: ‘culture as show’, ‘a communication tool’, ‘social inclusion’ and finally ‘a factor of citizenship’.     

Rev. Simpson's ‘Improper Liberties’: Moral Scrutiny and Missionary Children in the South Seas Mission

This article explores a case of alleged sexual abuse, by a missionary, of a number of missionary daughters in the South Seas mission. The rich material connected with this case allows for a powerful insight into the fabric of life of missionaries and their children, and illuminates various levels of moral scrutiny and social supervision that were embedded in the mission context. Parental moral scrutiny was the most effective mechanism to neutralise the internal threat posed by the potential deviance of missionary children. The levels of moral scrutiny in the mission were unevenly implemented, however, and the asymmetry of scrutiny that occurred (whereby missionary children were subjected to intense social and moral supervision, while missionaries themselves were permitted a certain level of deviation from spiritual and cultural norms) reflected the hierarchies of power and social dynamics of the mission context. This case led to the systemisation and legitimisation of both these scrutinies and these asymmetries, while further implementing new levels of social control, directed both at the behaviour of missionary children and the efficiency of parental moral scrutiny enacted by their parents.     

The End of Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (2003–17)

The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) ended in June 2017 after 14 years. It was an initiative of the Pacific Islands Forum authorized under the Biketawa Declaration of 2000, which enabled a regional response to crises in the region. Between 1998 and 2003, Solomon Islands had undergone a period usually called the ‘tenson’ in Solomons Pijin, or the ‘Tension’ or ‘Ethnic Tension’ in English, when government processes failed and two rival militia groups out of Malaita and Guadalcanal terrorized Honiara and its surrounds. Prime Minister Ulufa‘alu was removed in a de facto coup in 2000. Although all Pacific Islands Forum nations participated, Australia paid 95 per cent of the costs. This was the first time Australia and New Zealand had led a substantial intervention mission beyond their borders that was not under United Nations auspices. The article places Solomon Islands politics and governance issues into a 20-year perspective and examines the success and failures of RAMSI, which was far more adaptable than is usually admitted. The article also considers the appropriateness of the Westminster system to government in Solomon Islands.     

“Where the spirit of wisdom lies”: Inculturation,self-determination and the authority of First Nations

By the 1970s, Christian missions to Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were enthusiastic supporters of Indigenous self-determination, even as they sought to maintain a missionary presence in Aboriginal communities. This article asks how missions continued to seek to influence and direct Aboriginal churches and communities through espousing self-determination, and how Aboriginal leaders engaged with and exploited this apparent contradiction. Focusing on contributions to the missiological publication Nelen Yubu from Deacon Boniface Pedjert, Patrick Dodson, Miram Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, Dyiniyini Gondarra and Alice Kelly this article considers how Aboriginal leaders and thinkers managed and challenged non-Indigenous expectations set for them around how their decolonisation was to proceed. Self-determination, for missionaries, could be achieved by a new, supposedly more enlightened mission to “inculturate” the gospel. Whereas missionaries presumed Aboriginal church leaders' authority rested in their cultural authenticity, these Aboriginal leaders were also asserting other sources of authority including their culture, but especially the authority that arises from Country itself.     

From Mission to Maynggu Ganai: The Wellington Valley Convict Station and Mission Site

The Wellington Valley Convict Station and Mission site, now known as Maynggu Ganai Historic Site (meaning “people’s land” in local Wiradjuri language), contains the archaeological remains of the convict agricultural station that was established in 1823. The site, subsequently taken over by the Anglican Church Missionary Society as a mission to the Wiradjuri, operated from 1832 to 1844. Drawing upon archaeological survey, the extraordinary historical archive associated with this site, and an analysis of community consultative research, this article explores the role of this site in colonial cultural exchange, as well as the contemporary cultural meanings of this history and its physical remains for the community today.     

The Autocracy of Love and the Legitimacy of Empire: Intimacy,Power and Scandal in Nineteenth‐Century Metlakahtlah

This paper examines the politics of intimacy, power, and scandal at Metlakahtlah, a Church of England mission village in northern British Columbia, Canada, from 1862 to 1885, in order to cast light on settler colonialism and its aftermath. It particularly examines Metlakahtlah's main missionary, William Duncan, his relationships with young female converts and missionary women, and, perhaps more importantly, the stories that were told about them. Stories of Duncan's relationships with young Tsimshian women that circulated throughout settler society reveal the central place of sexuality to both critiques and defences of imperialism, and cast new light on contemporary politics around the historical experience of Indigenous children in settler colonies like Australia and Canada.