hopevalley

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. *

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...