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Looking very much unstable

This was the first mission on Cape York Peninsula, and became the oldest surviving mission in north Queensland. It was initiated by Lutheran staff from Cooper Creek (South Australia) who established Elim and it became a stable community with the assignment of two young Neuendettelsau missionaries, Schwarz and Poland who stayed for 55 and 20 years respectively and added the Hope Valley site. The whole community was evacuated during World War II, because of its German missionary and lugger connections with Japanese. After the war Hope Vale was established on a new site. Outspoken and indomitable Missionary Schwarz is still remembered at Hope Vale which has remained a cohesive community and is home of a number of active and high profile indigenous activists. Source: missionaries.griffith.edu.au/qld-mission/cape-bedford-mis...

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. *