The work of mission : race, labour and Christian humanitarianism in the south-west Pacific, 1870-1930

Abstract

This thesis centres on the varying representations in missionary and other contemporary writings of Pacific Islanders by Anglophone Protestant missionaries, particularly Methodists, between the 1870s and the 1920s. I examine the attitudes of missionaries, focussing on their roles in training, education and employment, and recognising that all such attitudes were vitally influenced by prevalent assumptions and debates about racial hierarchies and differential racial abilities. Alongside racially-based social evolutionism developed by metropolitan anthropologists, often with the aid of observations from missionary-ethnographers, missionaries also held a profound belief, grounded in Christian theology, in human similitude. Many Protestant writers believed 'their' Islanders to be low on the evolutionary ladder and feared that observed or assumed depopulation was the result of contact with 'more advanced' cultures, but this view was tempered by the assumption that Christianity could reverse the dismal trend through education, both spiritual and practical. The thesis examines missionary attitudes to Islanders through the prism of work: the role of work in creating new Christians and in bring modernity to the islands; its benefits and hazards, especially those of indenture; and Islanders' suitability for particular employment, in particular on the sugar plantations in Queensland and Fiji. In both cases the prevailing secular attitudes towards 'race' and the demands of a Christian ethic were held in tension. In Queensland, the protective arguments of Christian humanitarians against Melanesian indenture became entangled with those of union activists for a White Australia policy and controversies over the climatic suitability of tropical Queensland for white labour, debates in which religious figures were involved on both sides. In Fiji, Methodist objections to the importation of Melanesian indentured labour were complicated by varying attitudes towards chiefly labour exactions from commoners. The initial acceptance on legalistic grounds of Indian girmitya labour was superceded in the 1910s when humanitarian objections to indenture were extended to Indians. Many missionaries believed that manual work was instrumental in the formation of a desired Christian 'character'. In this context, I examine two areas of practical concern: the establishment of 'industrial missions' and the employment of Islanders as teachers, catechists and ordained leaders. 'Industrial missions', based on evolutionist assumptions about the virtues of manual training in forming Christian 'character', developed in the Pacific Islands with varying conformity to overseas models and were received unenthusiastically by most Islanders. Islanders favoured academic education thus, ironically, conforming to mission aims to develop an indigenous leadership for the growing Christian communities. Europeans represented the resulting Islander Christian leaders variously as heroic fellow evangelists or less competent junior partners; less flattering representations could lead to conflict with Islander leaders who had internalised a Christian hierarchy at variance with more racially-based ones. The public debates in the 1920s over Australia's role in New Guinea suggest a degree of resolution to the tensions investigated throughout the thesis, as religious figures rejected racialised claims of difference and countered them by employing the discourse of international relations.