Betwixt and Between: Trauma,Survival and the Aboriginal Troopers of the Queensland Native Mounted Police

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about the history of the Queensland Native Mounted Police, mostly focussing on its development, its white officers, how much the Colonial Government genuinely knew about the actions of the Force, and how many people were killed during the frontier wars. Far less attention has been given to the Aboriginal men of the force, the nature of their recruitment, and the long-term traumatic impacts on Aboriginal peoples’ and communities’ psyches rather than broadscale changes to Aboriginal culture per se. This article examines the historical and ongoing psychological impacts of dispossession and frontier violence on Aboriginal people. Specifically, we argue that massacres, frontier violence, displacement, and the ultimate dispossession of land and destruction of traditional cultural practices resulted in both individual and collective inter-generational trauma for Aboriginal peoples. We posit that, despite the Australian frontier wars taking place over a century ago, their impacts continue to reverberate today in a range of different ways, many of which are as yet only partially understood.     

Fortified Homesteads: The Architecture of Fear in Frontier South Australia and the Northern Territory,ca. 1847–1885

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of defensive architectural techniques by civilian settlers in frontier South Australia and the Northern Territory between ca. 1847 and 1885. Four sites were analysed, three of which are located in South Australia and one in the Northern Territory. This study takes a new approach to the archaeological investigation and interpretation of Australian rural buildings, one that identifies defensive strategies as a feature of Australian frontier architecture. These structures represent physical manifestations of settler fear and Aboriginal resistance. Over time, however, the folk stories attached to these structures have also come to play a significant part in Australia's frontier mythology. They are shown to form one component of a wider body of myths which serve the ideological needs of the settler society, justifying its presence by portraying the settlers as victims of Aboriginal aggression.     

“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.     

Land,Labour and Ambivalence: Lutheran Missionaries Managing Land Disputes at Cape Bedford Mission

This article provides a close reading of a land dispute between Lutheran missionaries at Cape Bedford mission during the 1920s and 1930s in order to extrapolate understandings of missionary ambivalence, power, and privilege within colonial processes of dispossession. The main contention is that missionaries felt compelled to promote Aboriginal engagement in agricultural labour in order to ensure that they could visibly demonstrate the land's productivity, and then maintain access to it. It also contributes to understandings about missionary power and privilege within the colonial context and how at times the authority of missionaries was undermined by bureaucracy. It points to the discrepancies between settler and humanitarian discourses around Indigenous land use in Queensland's north during this period, and the relationships between missions and the state.     

Interpreting umeewarra mission

Abstract

Indigenous occupation of Australia for at least the last 60,000 years, was followed by European settlers in 1788. Christian missions and government reserves established at this time, often removed Aboriginal children from their parents, families and land. These children are ‘the Stolen Generation’. One such mission was Umeewarra Mission at Port Augusta in South Australia, which was established by the Brethren church in the 1930s and operated until recently. Some of the former children who were raised at the Mission have established a committee, the Umeewarra Nguraritja (meaning ‘place’ or ‘home'), to oversee the Mission site. The Umeewarra Nguraritja wants to establish an Interpretive Centre to tell the Aboriginal and missionary history of the Mission. It needs to preserve and interpret the mission culture in a way which maintains the integrity of that history and presents the material culture, the oral histories and stories from former children of the mission, sensitively to visitors. This paper reports on the research process being used for strategic planning of site management and interpretation. The paper addresses in particular the need for the researchers to be sympathetic to both indigenous and missionary cultures, playing both supportive and leadership roles in order to give something back to the ‘stolen generation’.     

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.     

‘The Gospel of Health’: American Missionaries and the Transformation of Ottoman/Turkish Women's Bodies, 1890–1932

This article explores an overlooked aspect of American missionary modernisation efforts in the late Ottoman Empire: the attempted transformation of women's bodies. By the late nineteenth century, American missionary women and Ottoman government officials both viewed Ottoman women's bodies as a visible reflection of the empire's weaknesses, yet also as central to its survival and revival. The transformation of women's bodies from ‘uncontrolled’ to ‘robust’, they believed, was a prerequisite for a modern society. Through a close reading of missionary reports, correspondences and student memoirs, this study traces the development of physical education, hygiene and recreational sports at the missionary‐run American College for Girls (ACG) in Istanbul. Over time, the female teachers at the ACG partnered and collaborated with male Ottoman/Turkish government officials to implement these courses at girls’ schools across the region. While the government endorsed physical education as key to national progress and regeneration, the ACG educators framed it as a mode of international, feminist self‐empowerment. In reality, the missionaries continued to assert their own Western superiority and advance Orientalist notions through the education courses. By highlighting the shifts in women's body ideals, curricular development and nationalist rhetoric, I argue that women's bodies must be studied as a crucial site of missionary and republican reform.     

"Mr. Burk is most interested in their welfare": J.G. Burk's campaign to help the Anishinabeg of northwestern Ontario, 1923-53

Although there is a small but growing body of literature on Euro-Canadians who acted "with good intentions" towards the First Nations (Haig-Brown and Nock 2006), precious little has been written about those within the ranks of the Department of Indian Affairs who acted benevolently towards the Aboriginal peoples. James Gerry Burk, Indian agent for the Anishinabeg of the western Lake Superior region for three decades (1923-53), was one such individual. He chose to ignore the department's prevailing racist ideology in favour of nurturing the incipient desire for industry and enterprise that he saw first-hand among the Aboriginal constituents of his agency. In the process, he was compelled to overcome numerous obstacles that Indian Affairs placed in his way. As a result, Burk's career stands as a glowing testament to the indomitable spirit of one departmental official's commitment to assisting the Aboriginal peoples.     

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.     

‘WERE YOU EVER SAVAGES?’ ABORIGINAL INSIDERS AND PASTORALISTS' PATRONAGE

This paper is a reading of the life story of Jack Sullivan, an Aboriginal stock worker employed by the Durack family in the east Kimberley. It draws upon ethnographic and other writing to suggest the processes of pastoralist hegemony. Durack rule constituted several male Aboriginal workers as trusted intermediaries with those who were more distant from the colonists. Autonomous and skilful, Jack aligned himself with the ‘inside’ world centred on the homestead, against the danger ‘outside’. The ‘inside’ position seems to have had some roots in waves of Aboriginal cultural renewal (from the south and east). The paper uses ethnographic evidence to interpret the local eminence of one agent of this renewal, Boxer, a Queensland Aborigine who helped raise Sullivan.     

Kinship,Organisations and ‘wannabes’: Aboriginal Identity Negotiation in South‐western Sydney

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ambiguous and dynamic nature of Aboriginal identity in south‐western Sydney. While for most of the Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas, identity has been primarily a matter of kinship ties associated with their perceived place of origin, Aboriginal people often recognize each other as Aboriginal by sharing and recognizing certain ‘Aboriginal’ cultural mores and traits. These two principles of identity are flexible enough to be extended to those who are not raised in an Aboriginal family environment; one meeting with their Aboriginal family is a minimum requirement. In south‐western Sydney, where organizations dealing with Aboriginal issues provide ways of connecting Aboriginal people from various backgrounds, in line with the government's homogenized notion of Aboriginality, Aboriginal people from Aboriginal family environments encounter those who cannot even meet this compromised criterion. Their presence gives rise to tension and conflict revolving around the concept of Aboriginality. Aboriginal cultural values that emphasize actual engagement provide ways of overcoming such dilemmas. Through common participation in the activities of the aforesaid organisations, Aboriginal people in south‐western Sydney develop a new sense of ‘Aboriginality’, which embraces those who cannot claim kinship ties.     

Anthropology,Self-determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God

Over the past forty years the Aboriginal people of Galiwin'ku (Elcho Island) in north-east Arnhem Land have successfully incorporated Christianity into their world view. However, a Uniting Church report characterises members of this same Yolngu (Aboriginal) community as being overwhelmed with feelings of inferiority and powerlessness and unable to function within structures established by Balanda (non-Aborigines). This paper contrasts the ways in which Christianity has helped break down the separation between cultural groups with its function as a structure for explicit discourse on Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations and inequality. While some Elcho Islanders see anthropologists as people who listen in order to work for Aborigines, Aboriginal Christians see them and other ‘scientists’ as attempting to undermine Aboriginal belief in the Christian God. They are seen as degrading a spiritual movement which has its foundation in the Dreaming and as posing a potential threat to the momentum of Aboriginal directed change in the community.     

Antipodeans Abroad: Trends and Issues in the Writing of New Zealand Mission History

There has been a paucity of reflective and contextual analysis of New Zealand's historical involvement in the international missionary movement. This article suggests that existing literature falls into four categories: denominational/organizational histories; biographies and personal narratives; unpublished university theses; and a small body of more reflective and contextual works. Historical analysis since 1990 reflects wider historical discourses, rather than being the specific product of mission history. Valuable analysis has focused on women's involvement, culture contact, and the relationship between New Zealand missions, European colonialism and indigenous nationalist movements. Yet the theological nature of missionary involvement has been less extensively understood, obscuring the nuanced nature of things like missionary motivation and the relationship with colonialism. A lacuna still exists with respect to: a comprehensive and comparative analysis of post‐1945 missionary involvement; micro and macro‐historical analysis of missionary support; the gendered nature of missionary support; and the role of children and young people in missionary structures and discourse.     

Salutary Lessons: Native Police and the ‘Civilising’ Role of Legalised Violence in Colonial Australia

Over much of the nineteenth century, recurring problems of covert and opportunistic conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples produced considerable debate across the British settler world about how frontier violence could be legally curbed. At the same time, the difficulty of imposing a rule of law on new frontiers was often seen by colonial states as justification for the imposition of order through force. Examining all the mainland Australian colonies from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, this paper asks how this contradictory dilemma played out through deployment of ‘native police’ and the ‘civilising’ role of legalised violence as a strategy for managing the settler frontier. In light of wider debate about a humanely administered empire, Australia’s first native police force established in New South Wales in 1837 was conceived as a measure that would assist in the conciliation and ‘amelioration’ of Aboriginal people. In the coming decades, other Australian colonies employed native police either as dedicated forces or as individual assistants attached to mounted police detachments. Over time, the capacity they held to impose extreme violence on Aboriginal populations in the service of protecting pastoral investments came to reflect an implicit acceptance that punitive measures were required to bring order to disorderly frontiers.

By tracing a gradual shift in the perceived role of native police from one of ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people to one of ‘civilising’ the settler state itself, this paper draws out some of the conditions under which state-sanctioned force became naturalised and legitimated. It concludes that, as an instrument of frontier management, native policing reflected an enduring problem for Australia’s colonial governments in reconciling a legal obligation to treat Aboriginal people as subjects of the crown with a perceived requirement to bring them under colonial authority through the ‘salutary lessons’ of legalised violence.     

Sexual Misconduct and Church Power on Scottish Mission Stations in Xhosaland,South Africa,in the 1840s

Tensions over the control of improper sexuality were a key concern of African converts and Scottish missionaries in Xhosaland, South Africa, in the first part of the nineteenth century. Missionary preoccupations with sexual behaviour meant that sexual acts became key sites for the negotiation of status and identity. Reading the case of Jan Beck, which is represented in unusually rich detail in the mission archive, allows us to see how converts used European understandings of sexual morality to gain access to mission resources as well as to exclude other converts from them. In the process, male converts were mediating between Xhosa and missionary evangelical sexual mores and identities. Their ability to do so reveals both the power of local figures to influence colonial outcomes, and the relative fragility of missionary authority in these contexts.     

George Weekes: Rogue Missionary to New England Indians, 1731–1755

During the mid‐1700s, an uneducated layman named George Weekes began preaching to Native Americans in the town of Harwich, Massachusetts. Weekes’ missionary activity triggered a passionate response from Nathaniel Stone, the local minister, and inaugurated a debate regarding ministerial qualifications within the community. Scholars who study English missionary activity in colonial New England tend to focus upon the careers of trained clergy, such as John Eliot or Josiah Cotton. Other individuals, who possessed questionable moral character and little education, also preached to New England Indians, however. In this instance, the career of George Weekes, a rogue missionary, reveals that contact with Native Americans could shape ecclesiastical life in colonial Massachusetts. It also suggests that Native Americans encountered popular, as well as elite, English religious culture when they interacted with English missionaries in early New England.     

Body,Vision and Movement: in the Footprints of the Ancestors

Ethnographic writings on Australian Aboriginal ontology and epistemology have overlooked the phenomenological significance of the body and notions of embodiment in the relationship between people and land. In focusing on the body as a spatio-temporal ‘hinge’ between people and place, I explore the pervasive images of bodily transformations, directional movement and traces, in the cosmogony, cosmology and life-world of the Yolngu people of Northeast Arnhem Land. The image of the footprint as a synthesis of living body, vision and movement, perception and intentionality, embodies the dynamic and creative nature pertaining to the fashioning and negotiation of group identity.     

Strange Relatives: Mutualities and Dependencies between Aborigines and Pastoralists in the Northern Kimberley

In the northern Kimberley (WA) Aborigines and Europeans living and working on pastoral leases have improvised means of staving off, incorporating and generally managing the other's demands on their psychophysical resources. Local racial politics configure a hierarchised social field around a few central figures: founding European lease‐holders and their male children by non‐local, mixed‐descent Aboriginal women, mixed descent head‐stockmen born of a European leaseholder and a local Aboriginal woman, and then local Ngarinyin people who constitute most of the work‐force. In this paper, I analyse the inter‐cultural dynamics of this social field employing R.D. Laing's notion of the ‘family phantasy‘. The subject‐matter also entails theoretical reconsideration of questions concerning the relative openness or otherwise of Indigenous Australian socio‐cultural categories.