mission

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. *

It is hard to imagine Christianity being taken in worse circumstances to a people than has been the case with Aborigines throughout much of Australia. Christianity has been an intrinsic part of the colonization process and, as a consequence, has been a companion to frontier violence, dispossession, disease, depopulation, and degradation. Christianity was the religion of the white conquerors who assumed authority and control over Aboriginal people. Missionaries were part of the new law that dominated Aboriginal law. This has certainly been the case in North Queensland (Loos 1982). The missionaries were, of course, as much prisoners of their culture as other colonists. From the hindsight of the twentieth century, many of their attitudes toward Aboriginal people can be seen as offensive. Yet, unlike the other colonists, they came to give Aborigines the greatest gift they had to offer: the salvation they had found in Jesus Christ. They confused their salvation with their culture and both with the 'civilization' they tried to impose on Aborigines. Source; Concern and Contempt Church and Missionary Attitudes Towards Aborigines in North Queensland in the Nineteenth Century Noel Loos