I'm feeling slightly pleased with myself at the moment because after hearing about it for years, I finally made it to the end of John Harris's One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter withe Christianity - A Story of Hope. I'm only 35 years late - the book was published in 1990, although I first heard of it around 10 years ago. In my defence I would say that until recently it was out of print, and also that it's LONG at almost 900 pages. This year I finally stopped making excuses, bought a second hand copy and have read it from beginning to end.
He is someone with a lot of skin in the game. Not only is he an evangelical Christian and hence positively disposed to the missionary idea, his parents were missionaries on Groote Eylandt and he spent part of his childhood there. As an adult he worked as a teacher and school principal in schools on Aboriginal communities, did a PhD on Aboriginal language development post-colonisation and has worked on translating the Bible into a number of different Aboriginal languages.
This personal history creates kind of push and pull for him. On the one hand, he honours his parents and their co-religionists in their missionary endeavours. On the other hand, he has lifelong friendships with Aboriginal people, including being traditionally adopted into a family on Groote Eylandt with the privileges and responsibilities that go with that. The result is a telling of the story that is positive towards missionaries without giving them a free pass.
It's hard to summarise such a long, complex book in a short review, but let me just say a few things. First of all, it includes two quite different approaches. The parts of the book dealing with the 19th century and and the various pioneering missions around the country are told from documentary evidence, largely from the point of view of the missionaries and mission societies and other Europeans. Very few Aboriginal voices appear in the first 600 pages or so, and when they do they are filtered through the diaries and letters of the missionaries. I suspect this is as much out of necessity as preference, since the parts of the book dealing with the 20th century draw heavily on the accounts of Aboriginal informants, including interviews conducted by Harris himself. This gives the second part a very different feel, particularly as in the latter part of the book he narrows his focus down from a broad national overview to the case study of the missions where his own family served.
Although Harris doesn't quite put it in these terms, I would suggest it tells the story of two conversions. The first is the story of the efforts to convert Aboriginal people to Christianity, which obviously what the missionaries saw as their main purpose. The second is the conversion of the missionaries themselves, from a firmly Eurocentric view of Christianity to one that distinguishes the Christian faith from its European wrappings.
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The missionaries had two aims - to convert Aboriginal people to Christianity, and to 'civilise' them. They saw these two things as a package deal - in looking for evidence of conversion they didn't only look for devotion to Christ and evidence of love for neighbour, they also looked for adherence to European norms - a settled life, adoption of agriculture or employment in the colonial economy, monogamy, European clothing, abandonment of Aboriginal religious and cultural practices. According to Harris, many missionaries refused baptism to people who showed clear evidence of faith because of their ongoing engagement in their own culture.
For Aboriginal people, on the other hand, missions were sanctuaries, places of safety from the violence of the surrounding culture. The colonial frontier was a place of extreme danger for the original inhabitants - shootings and massacres, rape and sexual exploitation of women and children, enslavement, or else chronic food shortages and starvation as they were banished from their most productive lands. Their communities were also decimated by European diseases. These who took refuge on the missions were a remnant, struggling for survival and often exiled from their own lands. There they could be safe from violence, be fed, and their children could be cared for and educated in European ways.
Yet the price was high. On the mission, the missionary was king. In order to live there, Aboriginal people had to submit to his authority, often backed by the power of the State. The best missionaries used this power with integrity and were remembered fondly by Aboriginal people, but it was also a system that was open to abuse. Repeatedly, Harris tells of charismatic, much loved founders who were succeeded by progressively more authoritarian, restrictive managers or who became more authoritarian as their power increased. The missionaries adopted the view of 19th century anthropology that Aboriginal people were on the very lowest scale of human evolution. Theologically, they tended to view them as s 'children of Canaan' subject to the curse, as black people were throughout the colonial world. Perhaps they were destined to die out in the face of a higher culture, in which case the best the missionaries could do was ensure their place in heaven. If they survived it would only be by abandoning their 'primitive' ways.
This meant that the price of safety could well be humiliation. They might be told their culture was irreparably evil. They might be subjected to repeated sermons about their sinfulness and need for repentance. They might be told that they were the children of Canaan, living under God's curse.
Sometimes this was based on sheer ignorance - missionaries simply adopted the prevailing views of their society. At other times there were misunderstandings. For instance, Aboriginal people misunderstood the English word Devil, thinking it simply meant 'spirit', and so told the missionaries that many of their practices involved communication with devils. The missionaries believed their were engaged in devil-worship and forbade it wherever they could. They also saw Aboriginal religious tales as childish, because as uninitiated people they would only be told the children's versions. It was many years before anthropologists took the time to immerse themselves in Aboriginal communities for long enough to hear the adult versions.
The missionaries found themselves in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, they wanted Aboriginal people to adopt their idealised version of European culture. On the other hand, the actual European culture which they encountered was literally killing them, and not by accident. Missions that were set up anywhere near European communities became places of tragedy where people died of diseases, were enticed by European alcohol and rapidly gave up on life. This led the missionaries to form the view that the only way to minister to Aboriginal people was to do so at a distance from Europeans.
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| Children at Poonindie Mission |
Indeed, most missionaries saw the children as their primary mission field and sought as much control over them as they could in the effort to 'civilise' them. They were rarely stolen from their parents in the way that happened in the 20th century - they still had contact with their families and families often initiated the arrangement. For many families, handing them to the mission to be cared for was a survival measure as they themselves faced food shortages and risks of violence as result of colonisation. Many were genuine orphans, their parents having died by violence or disease. However, the focus on 'civilising' children by removing them from the malign influence of their families and communities was fundamentally the same mindset as led to the the Stolen Generation, and church institutions were to become integral to this atrocity.
Most struggled to sustain their missions in the face of huge obstacles. The Aboriginal people they tried to minister to were decimated by violence and European diseases and demoralised by the loss of their lands. They found their charges rapidly dying on their hands. At the same time they had meagre and unreliable support from the European missionary societies who sponsored them and the local churches which were supposed to oversee them. Many ended up having to close in frustration. Others survived, and for better or worse became home to remnants from multiple nations.
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When Harris moves into the 20th century, his account becomes a lot less complete. Where he provides a fairly comprehensive treatment of the 19th century mission movement, he struggles with the scale and complexity of the movement in the 20th century and ends up focusing on a small number of examples. These include an account of the role of Aboriginal Christians (especially William Cooper and William Ferguson) in the Aboriginal Rights movement of the early 20th Century, and some descriptions of the operation of the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM), a fundamentalist faith mission whose missionaries operated among Aboriginal people on the fringes of European towns, often living in poverty themselves.
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| William Cooper |
This meant that although the missions were still very much European institutions, they engaged with Aboriginal people on much more equal terms. There had been violence between Aboriginal people and pastoralists, and the first missionaries were warned that they faced dangers and advised to go armed. Fortunately they didn't follow this advice. Once Aboriginal people understood that they intended friendship, they saw the benefits of cooperation and collaborated in the establishment of the mission stations. These became places of refuge for people from a number of different groups, but rather than the totalising institutions of the 19th century they provided a venue for Aboriginal people to develop their own terms of engagement with colonial civilisation.
He also talks about Yarrabah, an Anglican mission turned government reserve near Cairns in Far North Queensland. Initially founded by John Gribble, a fierce advocate for Aboriginal rights, and his son Ernest along with John Noble, the first Aboriginal person to be ordained (as a deacon) in the Anglican church, it later passed to the control of the Queensland Government. In the 1960s and 1970s this was community in distress, with high levels of alcoholism, violence and social conflict.
In the 1980s Aboriginal people in Yarrabah experienced a Christian revival, with many seeing visions and experiencing dramatic conversions. This movement was entirely Aboriginal, led by church workers of whom the most prominent was the Anglican Arthur Malcolm, who was ordained Bishop in the late 1980s. The movement spread out from there with priests from Yarrabah taking on leadership roles across northern Aboriginal churches. Yarrabah didn't turn into a paradise but people saw lasting change and the movement has seen Aboriginal people begin the process of appropriating Christianity from the missionaries and exploring what it means in their own cultural context.
This is a much more hopeful story, and Arnhem Land remains a stronghold of Aboriginal culture to this day. However, it is not the full story. He recounts two shameful events of mission collusion with mining interests in the 1960s. In Mapoon on Far North Queensland the Presbyterian mission authorities collaborated with Comalco and the Queensland Government to relocate the mission to make way for a bauxite mine. The Aboriginal residents of the mission, many of whom were traditional owners, protested vehemently and only left under police compulsion.
In Yirrkala in the Northern Territory the same thing happened except that the local Methodist mission manager, Edgar Wells, sided firmly with the mission's residents. As result he was excluded from negotiations along with them and eventually removed from his post while the mission board made a deal with the Commonwealth Government to hand over the mission land. Ironically the Aboriginal people, who once again included traditional owners, did not oppose mining. They simply felt they should share the benefits, and that it should be done in a way that protected their sacred sites - rights which are now legally protected, even if often honoured in the breach.
However, he skates over some things that are even worse. He omits, for instance, the role of Christian institutions in the Stolen Generation, and the role various missions played as places of compulsory detention during the 'protection' era of the first half of the 20th century. Like Yarrabah, many of the places founded as missions transitioned to government management, but others did not. There was little difference, all operated under the same rules and Aboriginal people refer to them all as 'missions', not in a complimentary way. It is disturbing just how fine the line was between these missions being places of sanctuary and places of confinement, and how easily the churches went along with the change.
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The conversion of the churches from Eurocentrism is slow and painful, and is far from complete. As recently as September 2023, the General Assembly of the Australian Presbyterian Church banned the use of Acknowledgement of Country in worship services. Embedded in their reasoning is the idea that such acknowledgements are somehow pagan and opposed to Christianity, and that an acknowledgement of prior occupation is incompatible with the worship of the Christian God. It is surely not accidental that this decision was made in the midst of the Voice referendum, drew on advice from prominent 'No' campaigners and was made without input from the church's small number of Aboriginal staff.
Not all churches are so recalcitrant. Many have issued apologies for their past wrongs towards Aboriginal people. They have been slower to recognise Aboriginal leadership, or to reckon with the challenge that Aboriginal perspectives pose for the European understanding of Christianity. There were few Aboriginal people ordained in any church before the 1960s, despite the charismatic leadership displayed by many from as early as the 19th Century. Yet where Aboriginal leaders have flourished it has been transformative, as the Yarrabah example shows.
Why did they need to do such a thing? They put it this way:
To help our people face the future with confidence, we need to examine closely what remains of our traditional spirituality in the light of the Christian Gospel. We have begun to construct our own Christian theology to strengthen our people for the future and to offer new directions for Australia....
As one participant at the workshop confessed: "Jesus was thrust down my throat. I was not encouraged to think for myself or allow a theology to grow from within me as an Aboriginal. I had to get rid of the 'dependency baggage'. I was told what to do, what to think, where to live. I was not free. I now need to think things through, to feel my own needs, work through my own faith, and develop my own Aboriginal theology."
Later on they say this:
As Christian Aboriginal people, we ask whether the Gospel, brought to us by the missionaries, is part of the culture which enslaved us, or whether the power of the Gospel frees us to be true to ourselves and our land.
They find plenty of material to answer this. For instance, they reflect that Aboriginal people had their own understanding of a Creator Spirit. This Spirit went by different names - the Rainbow Serpent, from which they take the title of the book, was one of the most common, shared across multiple cultures and peoples, and there were also others. They view this as God revealing Godself to Aboriginal people through the creation, as Paul refers to in Romans 1:18-20.
They go on to trace other links. For instance, the Old Testament's emphasis on land and place resonates deeply with Aboriginal spirituality which is strongly place-based. They perceive the Creator as crying along with them for the suffering of their people and of the land. They then see that just as Christ was the full revelation of the Creator partly revealed in the Old Testament, he was also the full revelation of the Creator Spirit revealed to Aboriginal peoples through their own stories and traditions.
Their critique of the missionary movement is cutting. They quote an earlier piece of writing from George Rosendale:
St Paul's approach to the 'heathens' was very different to how the missionaries approached the Aboriginals. The words 'heathen' and 'rubbish' were two strong words the missionaries used against our religion and beliefs.
They then go on to assert their own view.
We as Aboriginal Christians, are now asserting that, in spite of the missionaries, the Holy Spirit has been among us and was leading us to know that Christ is indeed one of us, an Aboriginal person 'camping' among us, giving life to our people and our stories.
In spite of the missionaries!
In Aboriginal traditions, many of their ancestor spirits took the form of animals, and living humans become their representatives via the system of 'totems'. They apply this to the Spirit of Christ living in us. In the words of one participant:
When Christ's Spirit lives in us as human beings, it is like the way the ancestor spirits lived in our totems. This means that the totem of Christ is not an animal or a bird but human beings. We Christians are Jesus' totems. We bear Jesus' image, the true image of God. Jesus is our true spiritual ancestor. 'By this shall all people know that you are my totem' (John 13:35).
They are liberating not only themselves, but also Christ Himself from the missionaries and their limited view of Christ as dwelling in European institutions. Yet they do this in a spirit of reconciliation rather than pure critique, seeking the acknowledgement and repentance of the wider Church so that the two can go on together in a new unity based on a fuller understanding of the Gospel.
In the preface to the 2007 edition which we are using, we read how this work, tentative though it was, proved revelatory to many Aboriginal readers who, for the first time, heard the Gospel communicated from within their own culture. No longer was this the word of the European missionaries, brought from overseas along with the invasion and desecration of their country. Instead it was the word of the Creator Spirit who has always been here, revealing themself in a new way.
This work was an early essay, although not the first, in a theological movement that has continued to grow in the years since. Some examples include Gary Worete Deverell's Gondwana Theology, Auntie Denise Campion's Yarta Wandatha and Anatidj, and the more recent series (still ongoing) by Anne Pattel-Gray, George Rosendale and Norman Habel on decolonising the Old Testament narrative.
I haven't read anything where John Harris has commented on this recent growth in Aboriginal theology. He is now in his 80s but still active, working with the Bible Society helping to translate the Bible into various Aboriginal languages. I believe he has also updated One Blood in a more recent edition. However, the work of these Aboriginal theologians is very much in the spirit of his critique of the missionaries. He says several times that they should have preached the 'simple Gospel' and then left it to Aboriginal people to judge how it related to their own culture. Had they done so, they my have been seen less as foreign oppressors and more as friends and helpers.
Many Christians and parts of the church, have begun to hear this message and make amends, and to build a more equal, affirming vision of Christianity in Australia. Others are still struggling to hold on to the European Christ. If we can all learn to listen closely to the voice of Christ in our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, we will all be stronger for it.
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