Early NSW and Aboriginal missions

John Harris, One Blood, chapter one

As promised, here is the first of my entries working my way through John Harris’ book One Blood, which is a massive tome of 1400 pages, working through the history of Christianity in relation to Australian Aboriginal peoples. I plan to work at roughly 100 pages per post, and to provide something of a summary and digest.

Chapter one covers a full hundred pages, and begins by laying out the scene and the major problems. Why did mission work fail so dismally in the new colony? Harris lists three primary reasons (pp 22-23):

1. The colony itself, with its aggressive occupation of land and subjugation of people

2. Missionaries could not disentangle Christianisation from ‘Civilisation’ (aka Europeanisation).

3. The widespread belief that Aboriginal people were sub-human.

He evidences these things remarkably. Harris covers the first point with some detail, but I won’t re-tread that ground, as it overlaps with the material in Reynolds’ book.

The belief that Aboriginal people were sub-human was widespread. Europeans found them incomprehensible, and made almost no effort to understand them. In the 1830s opinions such as that of James Dawson and Peter Cunningham put them at the “very zero of civilisation”, and prevalent Darwinian theories placed them on the cusp of being classified with monkeys or apes. This horrendous viewpoint lent widespread justification to killing Aboriginal people without a shred of moral concern.

Things were better among genuine Christian believers and missionaries. They, for the most part, did indeed hold that Aboriginal people were human, had souls, and had an inherent dignity. This did not stop them from still holding a pervasive belief that they were degraded. So the Rev. Samuel Marsden in 1819, “The Aborigines are the most degraded of the human race… the time is not yet arrived for them to receive the great blessings of civilisation and the knowledge of Christianity”¹

The colonisation of Australia occurred right around the rise of the modern Protestant missionary movement, although the major organisations (CMS, LMS, BMS, WMS) were not founded by 1788 and the first specific missionary sent to work among Aboriginal people did not come until 1821. Early chaplains such as Richard Johnson and Samuel Marsden did evidence a compassionate attitude towards Aboriginal people, but this played out by having Aboriginal children live with them. On the whole they were raised as servants, were forever alienated from European life, became alienated from Aboriginal society, and generally led short and miserable lives. Such endeavours amply demonstrate the prevalent attitude that dominated: Aboriginal people needed to be both ‘civilised’ (i.e. made to conform to British society and culture, settle down, do agriculture, and accept a servile place in the empire) as well as ‘Christianised’; and to do this, you had to separate the children from the adults, and separate them from Aboriginal society. Here are the seeds of generations of abuse.

Nor were mission endeavours helped in any way by the immoral lifestyle of white colonials, coupled with the immoral treatment of Aboriginal people. The gospel had little to commend itself when coupled with British society.

Harris traces the work of the first few missionaries. These include William Walker, who considered Aboriginal people to be descendants of Ham and under a curse. He had lots of conflict with local religious figures and officials, and made little headway. George and Martha Clarke who were headed to New Zealand, but stayed two years at Marsden’s direction. The third was Lancelot Threlkeld, who was badly treated by the London Mission Society, but worked tirelessly and with little fruit. He did learn the Awabakal language and complete probably the earliest Bible translation into an Australian Aboriginal language.

The story of the Wellington mission is told in some detail, where CMS sent their first missionaries, William Watson and Johann Handt. The Wellington area saw systematic military pursuit and massacre of local Wiradjuri people. Despite the presence of military force, they established a school and provided invaluable medical aid. But their presence was always fraught. Harris writes of the widespread sexual abuse of young Aboriginal girls by white settles. No wonder local Aboriginal people thought that the missionaries “wanted children to attend school at the mission for sexual purposes."² The Watsons developed a policy of aggressively removing Aboriginal children from their families, including by force, which Aboriginal people (rightly) considered kidnapping. But Watson and Handt, and then James Gunther whom CMS sent to replace Handt, saw little genuine results from their labours. A few young people did grow up in the faith, though often the missionaries’ exactingly high standards, and expectations of ‘civilising’, meant they were never afforded recognition as genuine believers. One exception among this was Jane Christian Marshall, confirmed by Bishop Broughton - “first and only Aboriginal admitted into full adult membership of any church before the middle of the nineteenth century."³

The chapter ends with what I can only describe as a bitter tragic irony. Marsden (among others) evinced a real frustration that the Aboriginal people could not be lured by the material comforts and goods of European culture. They actually lamented that Aboriginal people seemed immune to crass materialism and covetousness, because without that lever, they seemed to have no means to induce them to embrace ‘civilisation’, and if they couldn’t make them European, how on earth could the receive the gospel. And yet even “Marsden began to see towards the end of his life that Aboriginal people were more degraded by the European presence than they had been before white settlement.”⁴

1. Harris, One Blood, 22. Citing a letter of Marsden to Pratt.

2. Harris, One Blood, 80.

3. Harris, One Blood, 93.

4. Harris, One Blood, 104.