Peggy Brock

Two-way food: bush tucker and whitefella's food

Abstract From earliest colonial encounters Aboriginal people supplemented bush foods with food rations issued by governments, missions and pastoralists. Over time rations became the primary source of food. Taking two central Australian missions as case studies I analyse the challenges facing both the providers of rations who wanted to encourage assimilation while preventing Aboriginal dependency; and the Arrernte and Pitjantjatjara/ Yangunytjatjara who tried to provide themselves with an adequate diet as they juggled the inherent contradictions of a system which issued rations at a fixed location while requiring mobility to enable them to access bush foods.

Mission Encounters in the Colonial World: British Columbia and South‐West Australia

This paper considers various aspects of the interactions of missions and indigenous peoples in regions of Canada and Australia. An analysis of first encounters indicates that the introduction of Christianity was dependent on both evangelist and client population agreeing to a «modus operandi» for the mission. The structure and operation of the mission were determined by the pre-existing indigenous society and the financial and personnel resources of the mission organizations. Attitudes towards, and acceptance of, Christianity were not static, they depended on changing material and political circumstances both within and outside indigenous communities. This comparative analysis indicates that religious change was not only negotiated between missionary and «convert», but among indigenous peoples themselves. The decision to profess Christianity was not a one-off decision made by individuals or communities. Rather it was a long process of change which was contingent on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of the mission world and countervailing pressures from within indigenous and colonial societies.

Evangelism, Ethnography and Linguistics: Carl Strehlow and J. R. B. Love

ABSTRACT This article considers the intersection of evangelism, ethnography and linguistics in the work of two missionaries living among Aboriginal communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carl Strehlow was one of several German missionaries working in central Australia in the 1890s and into the twentieth century. J. R. B. Love met Strehlow briefly in 1913, but did not become a fully committed missionary himself until the 1920s. This paper first considers Strehlow’s evangelical, linguistic and ethnographic interests in relation to some of his German contemporaries, before comparing his approach to that of the younger, Presbyterian, Love to elucidate the inter-relationships between evangelism, linguistics and ethnography in the 1890s and early twentieth century in Australia.

Evangelists as Ethnographers among the ‘Heathen’ Cannibals: Ta’unga and Maretu of Rarotonga and the Sherbroan Wilberforce

Cartoonists of the early twentieth century routinely poked fun at missionaries by picturing them being cooked in an enormous pot while their savage tormentors dance round the fire. In fact, documented encounters between missionaries and cannibals are extremely rare, even rarer substantiated accounts of cannibalism as a cultural practice. Mission journals contributed to the caricature of their agents as frontline warriors in the campaign for the suppression of savage customs by featuring lurid articles on distasteful or revolting rituals. Ethnographic writing by missionaries generally served a dual purpose of advancing knowledge and stirring up supporters to speed the work of civilization through Christianization. Discussions of cannibalism are of exceptional interest when penned by indigenous evangelists writing of their own or closely related societies. This chapter examines ethnographic writing on cannibalism produced in the Pacific and West Africa. Ta’unga (1818–1896) and Maretu (1802–1880) of Rarotonga in the South Pacific lived in a preor proto-colonial situation.1 They had encountered missionaries over an extended period of time, as well as traders and other Europeans who found their way to the South Pacific, but they had not been subjected to formal colonization. R.G. and Marjorie Crocombe, who translated and edited Ta’unga’s writings, point out that during his lifetime societies in the western Pacific experienced major changes due to the impact of two influences. Moving from Tahiti westwards ‘was the increasingly confident army of militant Christianity of which Ta’unga was one small advance party of reconnaissance scouts’ who prepared the ground for missionaries from Europe. From the coast of Australia ‘there were simultaneously moving east the vanguards of commerce, equally confident of success as they developed the trading potentialities of the various island groups, exchanging the products of England’s industrial revolution for salt pork, sandalwood, beche-de-mer and any other island products from which profit might be made.’2 The lives, work and writings

The Reverend Tiyo Soga: Negotiating Culture, Race and Nationality among the Embattled Xhosa of South Africa

Born of a father who served as an adviser to an important chief, Tiyo Soga became a Christian through the agency of his mother, who welcomed his education at a mission school, and later in Scotland, where he married a Scotswoman and became the first black South African ordained as a minister of the Presbyterian Church. He returned to his native land as a missionary to a people ground down by decades of warfare with an advancing tide of white settlement. During his fifteen-year ministry he sought to reconcile what he regarded as the best features of Xhosa culture with the commandments of his Christian faith. In a long document written for his children as tuberculosis tightened its grip on his fragile body, Soga laid out a programme for the preservation of the Xhosa as a Christian nation in defiance of white settlers’ claims of racial superiority and the alleged doom of his people. His texts exemplify the difficulties of reconciling the conflicting authorities he had to accommodate as a Xhosa man and a Christian minister. This conflict increased, particularly from the 1860s onwards, when circumstances in the Cape Colony fuelled his growing opposition to settler depredations and colonial rule. Although his early biographer Donovan Williams saw him as a proto-nationalist, this probably exaggerates his commitment to national independence for the Xhosa.1 In fact he better exemplifies the ways in which indigenous Christians in the colonial period straddled several contradictory positions and these continue to be reflected in the ways they are represented by competing groups in the modern period. Tiyo Soga remains a hero of the standard contemporary histories of Christianity in South Africa which emphasize his commitment to the conversion and modernization of his people. But for other contemporary commentators he exemplifies collusion with colonization. His conversion set him against the more resistant figures of his time who engaged in direct action through warfare and who refused to adapt to the new ways. Neither view does justice to the complex story told by the texts he left behind.

Generational religious change among the Arrernte at Hermannsburg, central Australia

This paper traces the introduction of Christian ideas to the Arrernte at Hermannsburg and how Arrernte attitudes towards Christianity changed over a generation from the 1890s to the 1920s. It compares the first generation of Arrernte to encounter Christianity with their childrens generation, a number of whom became Christian evangelists. Under the guidance of these evangelists many Arrernte were baptised. We consider why these evangelists succeeded in bringing an acceptance of Christianity to the wider mission community where earlier Lutheran missionaries had only influenced children, young adults and very few mature adults.