Converting salvation : protestant missionaries in Central Australia, 1930s-40s

Abstract

Using the intellectual, political and discursive ‘construction’ of Presbyterian mission site, Ernabella, in Central Australia during the 1930s and 40s, and against the background of the established and iconic Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg, missionary discourse on Indigenous Australians is examined, particularly the discourse in which significant Presbyterian missionary JRB Love and his fellow churchman Dr Charles Duguid participated. Discursive and political interactions between these two and missionaries such as FW Albrecht of Hermannsburg and John Flynn of the AIM are utilized to explore the fraught and fragmented nature of the missionary discourse in Central Australia in relation to issues such as rationing and feeding, curing indigenous illnesses, ‘half-castes’ and the removal of children, work and education issues, language and translation, and the christianization, conversion and ‘civilising of indigenous people. Missionary discourse and praxis is approached through a provocative reading of the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas whose delineation of the face to face encounter with the other, where responsibility is taken for ‘men dispossessed and without food’, is posited as having some relevance and resonance to and within the mission site itself. While conflict, unequal power relations and paternalism were evident, the missionary discourse sharing traces of racial and cultural disparagement of Aborigines with a wider colonial/settler discourse, the general ‘avidity of the colonial gaze’ was diluted I the mission contact zone with traces of hospitality which at least to some extent replicated and reciprocated the politics of hospitality proffered to the missionaries by ‘their’ Aborigines. Central to this discourse of hospitality was the unorthodox preparedness of the Love/Duguid administration at Ernabella and (to a lesser, but surprising, extent) FW Albrecht’s regime at Hermannsburg, to ‘convert’ the notion of ‘salvation’ from one with mainly spiritual connotations to one more to do with the physical ‘saving’ of the indigenous body and the indigenous collective: saving bodies became as important, if not more so, than saving souls, the traditional missionary imperative. While some complicity with colonial, cultural and religious regimes for re-forming and re-making the indigenous body is acknowledged, some reassessment is suggested to postcolonial (or postmodern) readings of mission sites as always places predominantly of cultural destruction, domination and hegemony.