Marion Diamond

Review of: Death or liberty: Rebels and radicals transported to Australia 1788-1868 by Tony Moore

Combining historical research and archaeological evidence, Fantastic Dreaming maps the culture contact between Wergaia speakers of the Wotjobaluk people and Moravian missionaries in north-west Victoria. The focus in this valuable work is on the relationship between European material culture and the spatial and gendered organisation of the mission station, and the Aboriginal Australians who lived there. Using Ebenezer Mission as her primary case study from its inception in 1859 until its closure in 1904, Jane Lydon charts the changes experienced by the Wergaia people, from the missionisation process in the nineteenth century through to the contemporary issues facing these people and the site itself today. Though Ebenezer Mission was founded to transform its Aboriginal occupants, Lydon shows that it became vital to those occupants’ physical and cultural survival over time. Situated on traditional Wergaia country, Ebenezer became an escape for the people sent to live there: whether from the ravages of dispossession as a result of the ever-encroaching colonial frontier, or from discriminatory policies aimed at regulating Aboriginal peoples’ lives. Lydon also shows that Ebenezer provided the space for the continuation of cultural traditions, including those associated with kinship and ceremony, in what she calls ‘‘strategies of mobility, evasion, and concealment’’ (p. 159). That Lydon repositions the mission as crucial to its occupants’ survival is a key strength of this book. Often viewed as sites of oppression and dispossession, mission settlements became, and continue to be, a highly important part of Aboriginal identity. Although the spiritual and cultural connection to traditional country remained strong, the mission site itself also became the site of a new type of dreaming. This can be seen on Palm Island, to which people from across Queensland and as far away as Western Australia were forcibly moved in the first half of the twentieth century. In later decades, these same people would collectively identify as Bwgcolman, with the island itself the geographic locus for their identity. While an insistence on the role of missions in sustaining Aboriginal traditions and creating new ones is an important aspect of Fantastic Dreaming, its main focus is on the missionising process, and specifically, the use of material culture in the domestic setting to achieve this. European notions of gender and domesticity were transposed into the mission houses, as was European material culture. Accompanied by assumptions of acculturation, Aboriginal use of Western goods was taken as evidence that the occupants sought to escape their perceived evolutionary position to become part of ‘‘civilised’’ society. Lydon challenges this by moving beyond the Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, March 2012, 111 121