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Looking very much unstable

The Lutherans were able to establish a permanent Christian community at Hope Vale, while irrevocably failing at Bloomfield and Marie Yamba. The missionaries formulated their ideas concerning their potential evangelization of the blacks in terms of cultural contact. They believed that Aborigines in their traditional life had few, if any, religious susceptibilities and possessed only the rudest and most elementary forms of culture. Furthermore, pagan heathenism was felt to be far easier to eradicate than civilised vice. From the assumption that "the raw aboriginal is only a child" 134, it logically followed that those who had experienced little cultural disarrangement, such as the Bloomfield blacks, would be simple to convert whilst those who had been 'contaminated' by the European vices of alcohol and opium and who languished in the towns would maintain resistance to any evangelical efforts. Yet, in fact, the opposite situation was to 'otcur. Ultimately, Bloomfield and to a lesser extent, Marie Yamba, were to fail because of the strength and well-integrated nature of Aboriginal society while Hope Vale was to triumph because of the social and cultural disintegration which the Cooktown natives had experienced. But was 'Hope Vale' a success? To the missionaries, it may have been seen as such for the 'Children of Darkness' were true transformed into earnest, industrious, Christians. Yet if one is to regard missionary activity from the blacks' point of view, it is apparent that the process of evangelization was but another agent which the dominant European culture employed to destroy traditional forms of Aboriginal life. Source: espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_246274/Qld_heritage_v2_n... "Marie Yamba, Bloomfield and Hope Vale: The Lutheran Missions to the North Queensland Aborigines, 1886·1905" by Kay Elizabeth Evans, B.A. *

" Indigenous knowledge and manipulation of plants is neither simple nor pre-agricultural, and can only be understood by detailed study of the particular cultural and biological systems within which they operate. These patterns can be extremely dynamic and can affect both people, and the environment through occupational continuity. Most importantly, some plant communities may have been not merely modified by Created by Aboriginal cultural activity. Aboriginal interaction with plants are the outcome of strategies that include not only physical resource exploitation but as well systems of locality and territoriality that recognize ties between particular individuals and groups and particular home environments." Source: Plants, Sites and Domiculture: Aboriginal Influence upon Plant Communities in Cape York Peninsula R. A. Hynes and A. K. Chase, 1982 www.jstor.org/stable/40386578