hopevalley

The situation at Hope Vale was somewhat unusual: The two missionaries Schwarz and Poland, while getting on with each other reasonably well, were entirely different natures. Schwarz, the senior missionary, was of an independent nature and a good worker, but did not see the need for reporting to the mission authorities back home. The station was never self-sufficient and continued to be a financial burden to the church. However, his spiritual work bore fruit: He established a church and school and the small congregation continued to grow. In June 1900 the government agreed to fund a school at the mission and to pay a school teacher. The new school teacher was to turn Schwarz’s life around. A year after her arrival, Mary Allen, the daughter of the Cooktown postmaster, married Schwarz on 31 May 1901. The new couple’s plans for a honeymoon in Germany were foiled by the news that Bloomfield was to be closed down and its residents assigned to Hope Valley. One year later the Mari Yamba mission was also closed down and its residents brought to Cape Bedford. Schwarz’s first daughter Grace (later Behrendorff) was born in November 1903, and his second daughter Marie (later Bennett) three years later. These two were not allowed to speak any language other than English, just as their mother taught only in English, with the result that the mission girls were noted for their fine command of the Queen’s English. Surrounded by his Australian family, and with the question of the mission language settled by government funding requirements, Schwarz gradually distanced himself from his German background. Source: missionaries.griffith.edu.au/biography/schwarz-georg-hein...

The Aboriginal community of Hope Vale on Cape York Peninsula was established as the Cape Bedford Mission by the Johann Flierl, a missionary of the Lutheran Church in 1886, with the settlement at Elim on the beach. Due to worries that the Aboriginal people might cooperate with the advancing Japanese in World War II, the total population was evacuated south to various communities by the military. The German Lutheran missionaries were sent to internment camps. Most of the people were sent to Woorabinda, near Rockhampton, in Queensland. In just one month, 28 people lost their lives, with nearly a quarter of the people dying over the next 8 years. Hope Vale was re-established as a Lutheran Mission in September 1949. Aboriginal people from the Hope Valley and Cape Bedford Missions settled there. A work crew was allowed to return in 1949 and the first families came home in 1950. Hopevale is no longer run as a mission by the church, but by its own elected Community Council. In 1986 it received a "Deed of Grant in Trust" (or "DOGIT") which "granted title to 110 000 ha of land which was previously Aboriginal Reserve Land held by the Under Secretary as trustee, to the Community Council to act as trustees of the land for the benefit of the residents." The Aboriginal Land Act 1991 (Qld) transferred into Indigenous ownership all previous reserve land under DOGIT (Deed of Grant in Trust) titles. Source: www.pocketoz.com.au/cairns/hope-vale.html

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. *