humanities research journal series: volume xii. no. 1. 2005 · ations of the many tentacled beast...

humanitiesresearch Vol XII, No.1, 2005

The journal of the Humanities Research Centre and The Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at

The Australian National University

Bigotry and Religion in Australia

1865 - 1950

HUMANITIESRESEARCH

GUEST EDITOR Benjamin Penny

EDITORIAL ADVISORS

Tony Bennett, Open University, UK; Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago; James K. Chandler, University of Chicago; W. Robert Connor, National Humanities Center, USA; Ian Donaldson, The Australian National University; Saul Dubow, University of Sussex; Valerie I. J. Flint; University of Hull; Christopher Forth, The Australian National University; Debjani Ganguly, The Australian National University; Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Connecticut; Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge; Lynn Hunt, University of Pennsylvania; Mary Jacobus, Cornell University; W. J. F. Jenner, SOAS, The University of London; Peter Jones, University of Edinburgh; E. Ann Kaplan, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University; David MacDougall, The Australian National University; Iain McCalman, The Australian National University; Fergus Millar, University of Oxford; Anthony Milner, The Australian National University; Howard Morphy, The Australian National University; Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Australian National University; Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago; Paul Patton, University of New South Wales; Benjamin Penny, The Australian National University; Paul Pickering, The Australian National University; Monique Skidmore, The Australian National University; Carolyn Strange, The Australian National University; Mandy Thomas, The Australian National University; Caroline Turner, The Australian National University; James Walter, Monash University; Iain Wright, The Australian National University.

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VOL XII, NO. 1, 2005 ISSN: 1440-0669

Contents

Bigotry and religion in australia, 1865-1950

1 BigotryandReligioninAustralia,1865-1950

3 Malcolm Campbell InMemoriamPatrickO’Farrell

7 Patrick O’Farrell DoubleJeopardy:CatholicandIrish

13 Henrika Kuklick InterpretingAboriginalReligion:From nineteenth-centuryevolutionismto Durkheimiansociology

27 Mickey Dewar YouinYourSmallCorner:Thelovesongof AlfredJDyer:earlydaysofChurch MissionSocietymissionstotheAboriginesof ArnhemLand

41 Howard Morphy MutualConversion?:TheMethodistChurch andtheYolŋu,withparticularreferenceto Yirrkala

55 Rodney Gouttman WasItEverSo?:Anti-SemitisminAustralia 1860–1950?

67 Malcolm Campbell A‘SuccessfulExperiment’NoMore:The intensificationofreligiousbigotryineastern Australia,1865–1885

79 Judith Godden A‘RegionofIndecencyandPruriency’: Religiousconflict,femalecommunitiesand healthcareincolonialNewSouthWales

93 Anne Monsour ReligionMatters:TheexperienceofSyrian/ LebaneseChristiansinAustraliafromthe 1880sto1947

107 Benjamin Penny TakingAwayJoss:Chinesereligionandthe WesleyanMissioninCastlemaine,1868

Vol.XIINo.1,2005 ISSN:1440-0669

Contributors

is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Auckland. He is currentlyworking on a history of bigotry in Australia.

MALCOLM CAMPBELL

is employed as Curator of Territory History at the Museum and Art Gallery ofthe Northern Territory. She has researched and published widely in the areasof Northern Territory history and museum studies.

MICKEY DEWAR

is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Public Health, University of Sydney. Herbiography of the founder of Nightingale nursing in Australia, Lucy Osburn, willbe published by Sydney University Press in late 2006.

JUDITH GODDEN

is Senior Policy Analyst at the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission andhonorary researcher in the School of Historical Studies, Monash University. His

RODNEY GOUTTMAN

research covers all aspects of anti-Semitism, the Australia-Israel relationship,and Australian Jewish history.

is Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in the (overlapping) categories

HENRIKA KUKLICK

of the history of the human sciences, the history of the field sciences, and thesociology of knowledge.

completed a PhD in history at the University of Queensland in 2004. Her thesis,‘Negotiating a Place in a White Australia’, is a study of the settlement of Le-banese in Australia from the 1880s to 1947.

ANNE MONSOUR

is Professor and Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the ANU.He has published widely in the anthropology of art, aesthetics, performance,

HOWARD MORPHY

museum anthropology, visual anthropology and religion. His books includeAncestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Universityof Chicago Press) and Aboriginal Art (Phaidon).

is a Research Fellow in the Division of Pacific and Asian History, RSPAS, ANU.His research concerns the history of Chinese religions and he is currently com-

BENJAMIN PENNY

pleting a book on the Falun Gong. From 1999 until 2005 he was ExecutiveOfficer of the Herbert and Valmae Freilich Foundation, Humanities ResearchCentre, ANU.

iii

BIGOTRY AND RELIGION IN AUSTRALIA,1865-1950

The papers in this issue of HumanitiesResearch are based on a conference

convened by the Herbert and ValmaeFreilich Foundation, which forms part ofthe Humanities Research Centre. Estab-lished in 1999, the Foundation exists tostudy bigotry in all its manifestations,wherever and whenever it occurs, or hasoccurred in the past. Being an Australianorganisation the focus of the Foundationhas naturally been on this country and itsactivities have addressed topical issuessuch as anti-discrimination law, contem-porary xenophobia, and reconciliation. Inthe case of this collection of essays – andthe conference that preceded it – we de-cided there was an opportunity to examinemanifestations of bigotry on the basis ofreligion in the period from the latter partof the nineteenth century until the after-math of the second world war. In this waywe hoped to bring into clearer focus thesituation in present-day Australian society,to trace important social changes, toprovide historical contexts for currentmanifestations of religious prejudice, andto examine specific incidents or practices,or patterns of discrimination and preju-dice, in our past.

The articles in this collection concernboth prejudice directed against one reli-gious group as in the case of anti-semitismas well as inter-religious bigotry, particu-larly in Australia the conflict betweenProtestant and Catholic Christians. Theyaddress specific incidents that took placeunder very particular local conditions and

patterns of discrimination over the broadsweep of time. They examine prejudice inface-to-face situations and in academicdiscourse. In other words, we have attemp-ted to include as many different manifest-ations of the many tentacled beast that isreligious bigotry as we have been able.

When planning this conference, onefigure stood out as someone without whomthe meeting would not be complete. Thatfigure was Patrick O’Farrell, ProfessorEmeritus of the University of New SouthWales, the doyen of historians of IrishAustralia. Professor O’Farrell was keen tocome to Canberra and wrote his presenta-tion, ‘Double Jeopardy: Catholic and Irish’for the occasion. Unfortunately, ill-healthprevented him from attending but his pa-per was read and he graciously answeredqueries from those at the conference byemail overnight. He was also keen to havehis presentation published with othersfrom the conference. Unfortunately he didnot live to see the volume come to fruitionbut we are honoured to present his paperhere in the form it was delivered. In addi-tion, Malcolm Campbell of the Universityof Auckland kindly agreed to write anobituary for this issue of Humanities Re-search which we dedicate to ProfessorO’Farrell’s memory.

1

IN MEMORIAM PATRICK O’FARRELL

MALCOLM CAMPBELL

Patrick O’Farrell, Emeritus ScientiaProfessor of History at the University

of New South Wales, passed away onChristmas Day 2003. His death at the ageof seventy, mourned by family, colleagues,and generations of his students, markedthe loss of one of Australia’s best histori-ans.

Patrick O’Farrell was born in Grey-mouth, New Zealand, in 1933. His familybackground and childhood experienceson the West Coast are described in one ofhis finest books, Vanished Kingdoms. Edu-cated at the local Marist Brothers College,Patrick took degrees from the Universityof New Zealand at Canterbury beforemoving to Australia in 1956 to undertakehis PhD at the Australian National Univer-sity. An historian with a strong interestin labour history, Patrick was appointedto a lectureship in the School of Historyat the University of New South Wales in1959, and he remained at that institutionuntil his retirement.

Despite his lifelong interest in the his-tory of labour, Patrick O’Farrell is best re-membered for his seminal works on thehistory of the Roman Catholic Church inAustralia, his internationally respectedcontributions to Irish history, and hispath-breaking research on the Irish inAustralia. In 1968 he published The Cath-olic Church in Australia: A Short History1788-1967, a book that was revised andrepublished in 1977 as The Catholic Church

and Community in Australia: A History. Afurther edition was published in 1985. Inthe mid-1960s and early 1970s Patrickspent terms as a visiting professor atTrinity College Dublin and UniversityCollege Dublin. His interest in Irish historyresulted in two remarkably influentialmonographs on Ireland: Ireland's EnglishQuestion: Anglo-Irish Relations 1534-1970(1971) and England and Ireland Since 1800(1975).

In 1977, Patrick suffered a stroke thatleft his right side paralysed. He recoveredand with characteristic determinationtaught himself to write left-handed. Afterhis recovery more books followed: Lettersfrom Irish Australia 1825-1929 (1987), theaward-winning The Irish in Australia(1987), republished several times since,and Vanished Kingdoms: Irish in Australiaand New Zealand: A Personal Excursion(1990). Patrick also wrote the history ofhis university UNSW: A Portrait: TheUniversity of New South Wales 1949-1999(1999). In June 2004 Patrick was a recipi-ent of the Order of Australia.

My first encounter with Patrick wasas a first-year student in 1981 when hegave a few lectures in the nineteenth-cen-tury Australian history course. I then en-rolled for his course on the Irish in Aus-tralia as a third-year student. Patrick’scourse that semester was a wonderful ex-ample of research-based teaching and amodel of why this nexus should be at the

3

heart of any university’s mission. Thelectures were memorable ones, based onpre-publication excerpts of The Irish inAustralia, replete with the musings anddilemmas of the professional historian atwork. The course also introduced me toPatrick’s quirkier, more mischievous sidewhen I was confronted with an examina-tion question proposing that the entirecourse had been an extravagance, utilisingsparse resources that could better havebeen devoted to doing something else. Ithought it was bravely provocative anddecided it was an obvious question to an-swer. Happily, I did well in the exam.

About this time I had been ponderingenrolling for the Honours year in Historyand asked Patrick if he would be willingto supervise my dissertation. I soon real-ised I had made a good choice. Eschewingthe feudalism fourth-year option, I alsotook his course on historiography, whichwas based on an idiosyncratic selection oftexts including Leon Trotsky’s History ofthe Russian Revolution, Norman F. Dixon’sOn the Psychology of Military Incompetence,and the recent Australian ‘oral historydebate’ in which Patrick himself hadplayed a prominent role. Excited bynewly-opened horizons I decided to under-take a PhD, a project Patrick supervisedgenerously and rigorously but with char-acteristic candour along the way.

Patrick continued to work after hisretirement: he once inquired saltilywhether I imagined he now spent all histime sitting in the sun. I had no doubt thatthis was not, and never would be, the case.His attention was particularly committedto a project on sectarianism, a topic he hadwritten about in previous works but hadnever received the sustained attention hefelt it deserved. I believe he was therefore

pleased to be invited to speak at the Frei-lich Foundation’s conference on religiousbigotry, held in Canberra in December2001. Unfortunately, a bout of ill-healthprevented Patrick attending in person todeliver his paper.

In ‘Double Jeopardy’, Patrick O’Farrellexplored in a new framework themes andissues which had arisen in his previouswork on the Catholic Church and IrishAustralians. As the paper shows, he wasparticularly concerned to historicise Aus-tralia’s experience of sectarianism. Thetiming of European occupation of thecontinent, in between the American andFrench revolutions, cast the new societyin a distinctive mould—‘Australia emergesas the first post-American society, the firstplace where toleration was viewed as anoperating principle rather than arrived atas a last-resort pragmatic necessity’, hecontends. The consequences were pro-found for Australia and its future. In thenext two centuries Protestants and RomanCatholics in Australia engaged in a com-plex process, sometimes cooperatively,often maliciously, to establish a core-cul-ture of tolerance. Patrick’s paper suggestshis deep concern that this common groundneeded to be safeguarded from those un-able or unwilling to subscribe to its values,not taken for granted.

As Patrick points out in this paper, hewas sometimes typecast on account of hisname by those who were poorly acquain-ted with him. In my experience he wasintensely independent. Numerous ex-amples could be cited of his censorious eyebeing cast over the behaviour of Aus-tralia’s Irish, or the Catholic Church andits hierarchy, as well as their vociferousopponents. It is a fitting tribute that thisvolume, the product of a Freilich Founda-

4

Humanities Research Vol. XII No 1, 2005

tion conference on religious bigotry, in-cludes this article in which the pre-emin-ent historian of the Catholic Church inAustralia considers the origins and mean-ing of bigotry in the nation’s experience.

5

In Memoriam Patrick O’Farrell

DOUBLE JEOPARDY

CATHOLIC AND IRISH

PATRICK O’FARRELL

The term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ is commonlyapplied, especially by persons to

which neither ethnicity applies, to de-scribe the predominant present characterof Australia’s population. It is a grosslymisleading, false and patronising contem-porary convenience, one crassly present-oriented. Its use removes from conscious-ness and recognition a major conflict fun-damental to any comprehension, not onlyof Australian history but of our presentcore culture. Mainstream contemporaryAustralia is not to be predicated as somesort of static, immutable monolith. Itevolved, and evolves, under tension andstress, the product of two centuries of in-numerable complex human transactions,accommodations, competing value sys-tems, grudging concessions, tolerated di-versities, all within sensed or instinctivesocial limits. And all under the umbrellaof the development of the Western culturaltradition—the rule of law, political demo-cracy and individual freedom, the secularstate, toleration of diversity, economiccapitalism, change and modernity. Therewas, in both Catholic and Protestant, Irishand English, Australia, a basic broadagreement on the practices and institutionsembodying these: sectarian conflict waswithin implicit boundaries, about ways ofsharing, controlling, operating, prioritising

generally accepted organisational and be-havioural propositions, not about whatsuch basic institutions and values actuallywere.

That Australian society should haveachieved harmony and prosperity is noaccident. Nor should it be taken for gran-ted, as it so often is. The present is notimmutable or immune from damage ordestruction. It is itself a hard-won and re-latively recent solution to the problem ofa legacy of bitter and divisive religiousdifferences between Protestants andCatholics. At least the terms ‘Protestant’and ‘Catholic’ are less dismissive of theactualities of history: no conflatory termhas been suggested to avoid that embar-rassing unpleasantness. Religious differ-ence and conflict have simply been movedwell off any stage of contemporary atten-tion or even comprehension.

The abandonment of personal religionhas had profound disabling effects notonly on interpreting the past, but on per-ceiving the constituent underlying assump-tions operating in the present. Australiahas recently battled its way out of thedangers associated with divisive religiousmindsets into agreement on secular neut-rality. What emerged was not the abolitionof bigotry but its containment.

7

The achievement of a religiously recon-ciled Australia dates from the 1970s. Theidea that Australia was riven by ethnicand religious conflict and division, embod-ied in destructive individual animosityand periods of extreme social fragility, isnow not one easily accepted or even recog-nised. Why? Because Irish–English hostil-ity has been subsumed—but only veryrecently, the 1980s, 1990s—into a senseof Australian commonality. And becausereligion as any thinkable influential socialfactor has been buried, both by dismissivesecularism, and religion’s embrace of thewhole paraphernalia of the politicallycorrect: it is an irrelevance and an embar-rassment now, a private aberration, andshould always have been so.

That is not how things began, but theybegan in such a way as to lead, if onlyafter protracted travail, to a happy eventu-al outcome. Australia was the first secular,state-controlled society established inmodern times: in a sense what hashappened has been a two-century painfulexploration which has returned to its ori-gins. Those origins were secular, but onlyin the sense of not being religious, not inthe sense of being militantly anti-reli-gious—an important distinction oftenblurred. Neutral, for the common good.

Consider what happened, and its rad-ically formative consequences. Here wasa state-controlled society before its time.Up until Australia’s foundation, it wasaxiomatic that Church and state were in-timately linked. The ruler enforced thetrue religion. Until the 18th century, itwas assumed that the state would, indeedmust, discriminate between religious tradi-tions. The idea that any other course waspossible was first born in 17th centuryAmerica and first given significance by

the American Constitution in 1787, insituations where religious monopolyproved impossible to enforce. Tolerationfirst appeared, not as a desirable virtue,but as the only possible solution to intract-able problems of religious difference.Australia emerges as the first post-Americ-an society, the first place where tolerationwas viewed as an operating principlerather than arrived at reluctantly as a last-resort pragmatic necessity: the contrast iscrucial in terms of the way in which reli-gion is culturally regarded. Australia isalso a society subsequent to the FrenchRevolution of 1789, but in it the role ofreligion was very different. Its dispositionwas militantly anti-religious, anything butneutral, and religion remained in Frenchhistory central to social and political con-cern as a matter of vigorous and vehementconflict.

In Australia, the churches werecast—and cast themselves—in a suppliantand subservient role. Witness the Churchof England’s unsuccessful attempt to claimthe position of Established Church. Wit-ness the Catholic Church’s bid for libertyand equality. Who was the arbiter in this,the determining authority? The state, inthe person of the colonial governor. Andwhat was the disposition of that state inregard to religious adherence? Neutrality.Seen religiously, the state had arrogatedto itself the power to be above religion, tohave authority superior to it—heresy in-deed. But the state was acting for the bestof reasons—not merely to avoid the disrup-tion of civil society by endemic sectarianconflict, but to positively support all reli-gion, which it did in NSW until 1862. Thisis the governmental and societal context,an atmosphere conducive to fair play, andan instinctive moderate mind-frame, which

8


mutes and controls Australia’s sectarianhistory.

About a quarter of Australia’s popula-tion at any given time up to say the 1970s,was subject to denigration, hostility, pre-judice and discrimination, both personaland public. The grounds were both reli-gious and racial. It is extremely difficult,if not impossible to distinguish or separatethese two grounds for bigotry, particularlyas they were interwoven with a third, asocio-economic dimension of class differ-ence and antagonism. The prevailingcommunity image of the Catholic was notonly that of a deluded, superstitious,priest-ridden, disloyal and dangerousPapist, loyal only to Rome. He was also adirty pig-loving, ignorant, subhuman Irishrebel; and a member of the lower orders,with all their contemptible characteristicswhich made them both offensive and amenace. These stereotypes—and thecounter-reaction of the persons so categor-ised—were built into historical experienceand imported into Australia from GreatBritain and Ireland from 1788 onward.They constituted not only obvious de-clared animus, but also what J. H. New-man called ‘a stain on the imagination’,cultural conditioning that lives stronglystill. An illustration. I would like to writethe hidden history of the flicker I see be-hind some people’s eyes when I say myname. My most intense recollection of thatwas in Belfast in 1992 when my wife andI were introduced, on an official occasion,to two Unionist members of the NorthernIreland parliament. Their eyes showed memore about Irish sectarianism than anywords ever could. About hatred, disdain,anticipation and the conviction that suchfeelings would be reciprocated.

Australian sectarianism derived fromthe legacy of 16th century events, that is,the English variant of the Protestant Re-formation, and the English conquest ofIreland. These generated divisive issuesboth massive and potent—nationalism,political power, religious principle andbelief, all seen in the context of fear. TheReformation divided Christendom intothose who supported the authority anddoctrines of the Papacy and the RomanCatholic Church, and those who violentlyrejected this, and supported independentnational state churches, and/or the Bible-oriented teachings of the reformers. TheEnglish conquest of Ireland from 1534,sought to dispossess the Irish of their landand impose on the Catholic Irish, Englishgovernment and Protestant religion. Veryimportantly for subsequent history, Eng-lish propaganda sought to morally vindic-ate this invasion with an ideology of justi-fiable colonial subjection. So the Irish be-came, forever after, seditious Catholicbarbarians, sub-human anthropoids, viol-ent, dirty, ignorant, on whom it was a ne-cessary duty to impose English rule,civilisation and religion. For their owngood: their resistance proved their inferi-ority and primitive savagery.

Australia was heir to three centuriesof bitter and violent religious and racialconfrontation. The penal colony was notonly a prison but embodied those sectarianassumptions in its structures and adminis-tration: its governance was British andProtestant. But the philosophy of the En-lightenment had weakened religion’s intel-lectual hold, and the power and influenceof the Church of England was in seriousdecline. Although the colony’s derivationimplied institutional sectarianism, practic-ality and common sense dictated that it

9

Double Jeopardy

not be rigidly enforced: to impose it onthe one-third of the convict populationwhich was Irish Catholic raised majorquestions of colonial security and stability.Authority saw religion as a force support-ing and encouraging social order, andclergy as moral policemen, in a sensitiveprison situation. Some degree of recogni-tion of Catholic worship was a practicalnecessity.

Provided Catholics played the game,were not too pushy. Which of courseevangelical Anglicans thought they were.To which the government response wasin Governor Bourke’s 1836 Church Act,an attempt to arbitrate towards religiousequality.

Up to this time, the hostility towardsCatholicism was on religious grounds: itwas idolatrous, inquisitorial, opposed toBible reading, jesuitical, that it was doc-trinally false and dangerous. This viewendured. But from the 1840s it wasmassively supplemented by the other in-gredient in the sectarian stew, anti-Ir-ishism. Increasing numbers of Irish Cath-olic immigrants prompted the reactionsummed up in the title of John DunmoreLang’s 1841 pamphlet The Question ofQuestions: or is this Colony to be Trans-formed into a Province of Popedom? Thisquestion was to be the enduring sectarianquestion, right down to Dr H. V. Evatt’sdenunciation of the Movement in 1954. Itexpressed a fear and suspicion of potentialIrish Catholic threats to the future compos-ition and character of Australian society.The influx and activities (often assertiveand truculent) of Irish Catholics were astanding menace to the majority assump-tion that British Protestant values andoutlook would prevail harmoniously in aracially homogenous Australian society.

Major issues of social organisation andcontrol—immigration, education, politicalorganisation and power, national loy-alty—emerged from the 1840s. A morecomplex and sophisticated society grewfrom convict and pioneering beginnings.So too grew contention over what thepresent and future Australia would be,and who would control it. There were twoover-arching world views in conflict,Protestant and Catholic, which wouldsubsume all other considerations and en-gage passionate emotion, high principle,loyalty, tribalism, and a sense of history.That third world view, Enlightenmentreason and scepticism, which promoted asecular society, was in abeyance, until theothers had exhausted their aggressive dy-namic in conflict. Sectarianism was theresult and product of the idea that thereshould be one Australian identity, andthat of a particular kind. To the extent thatit expressed legitimate differences of beliefand values, the Catholic–Protestant dividerepresented appropriately contendingvisions of truth: to the extent that thesebeliefs were made the vehicles of intoler-ance, ignorance, fear, discrimination, sus-picion and mistrust they inflicted humandamage and encouraged social malaise.

The central issue was always whoshould possess political power. The firstcolonial elections of 1843 saw rival Cathol-ic and Protestant candidates, clerical in-volvement, Irish and Orange mobs riot-ing—and vehement press disapproval ofCatholicism as selfish, menacing, and atodds with the rest of society. But Catholicsdemonstrated then as they did in Australiathereafter, that there was no such thing asa monolithic Catholic vote. They weresplit, even fragmented, and their votescould not be directed either by Catholic

10


clergy or by Irish nationalists. They votedon local issues and personalities, the ordin-ary range of political considerations. TheIrish Catholic reaction to sectarian attackwas always informed by the overridingwish to belong, assimilate, rather than stayapart. Catholics were never united politic-ally, but Protestants always thought theywere: it was a prejudice impervious todenial or contrary demonstration, feedingon itself and generating bigotry in return.

Bigotry in Australia was at its mostpublicly intense between 1880 and 1925.What were the major issues? Education.The education question was answered ina secular way by various colonial govern-ments, ending with the NSW Act in 1880.The general expectation was that Catholicschools would die through lack of funding.Their continuance remained an enduringsectarian grievance: Catholics demandedstate aid. Protestants saw them as sociallydivisive. Then there was Ireland, its turbu-lent history a great disruptor of colonialharmony. In 1883 the Sydney MorningHerald pronounced, ‘ … an Irish Australi-an is a creature of whom we cannot pos-sibly conceive. He is or he is not one of us... ’ This is mild in comparison with thevenom and fury associated with the pro-longed storm centred on the 1916 Irishrebellion, the conscription referenda, andArchbishop Mannix. The Irish were malig-nantly dangerous, arrantly subversive,patently disloyal, however much theyprotested their Australian patriotism. Noone thought to consider or ever grasp thefact that for Catholics in Australia Irelandwas the medium, not the message. It wasa convenient allegory, the languagethrough which local points were made, asalutary example of the potential extremesto which tendencies within the Australian

commonality might develop. Ireland’shistory demonstrated the predicament ofAustralia’s Catholics writ large. NSWtopped this off with an aggressively Prot-estant anti-Catholic Nationalist govern-ment, defeated in 1925. The peace thatfollowed was a standoff of exhaustion andsegregation.

These sectarian years were the timewhen Australia’s social fabric was put tothe test. It held, but it is easy to overlookthe very real dangers that it might not. In1900, the main topic of public interest wasnot Federation (remember, only half thoseeligible bothered to vote) but a spectacularsectarian case. And that the Cathol-ic–Labor alignment, so central to Australi-an political history, was a reflection notof economic determinism, but of the milit-antly anti-Catholic bigotry. Of the non-Labor parties: Catholics had nowhere elsepolitically to go. The Catholic claim toloyalty to Australia in 1914–18 strained tothe limit the sufferance of those whothought in terms of British Empire.

Why did Australia avoid those lapsesinto sectarian violence that marred thehistories of other Western countries?

The basic reason lies in the pragmaticnature of its foundation and its continu-ance as an open society and economy.From the beginning, Irish Catholic con-victs, when freed, could move to owner-ship, prosperity and respectability, a pathfollowed by migrants thereafter. Pioneer-ing circumstances in a vacant landrendered irrelevant old world divisionsand hierarchies. Free immigrants experi-enced months of religious mix: the voyageout was an ecumenical experience. Bigotryand racial denunciation on arrival wasobjectionable, but had no practical bite:in colonies starved of labour, few employ-

11

Double Jeopardy

ers had the luxury of being able to avoidIrish Catholic workers. When faced withthe notice ‘No Irish Need Apply’ theywent elsewhere, set up their own businessor professional practice: here was a societyof ample resource and choice—and spaceto move. The natural petty frictions, thetransaction costs of daily living, inevitablein religious and cultural mix, were minim-ised by dispersal and a population con-stantly mobile. Distance and movementbred tolerance: in rural areas, St Patrick’sDay was everybody’s day.

It was the close living of cities that lentitself to tensions. Still, when urbanisationand industrialisation produced a workingclass, its Catholic elements found in thelabour movement, not denominationalseparatism, but a way out and up withinthe general community.

Here developed a fluid society willingto make mutual adjustments, to teach itselfto adapt to social interaction—so long asits elements played the rules, engaged infair dealing, shared common purpose ingetting and spending, and subscribed tobehaviour patterns which promoted peace,security and prosperity for all. In this so-ciety it was religion itself which chal-lenged the limits of tolerance. In so far asreligion, both Catholic and Protestant, wastribal and troublemaking, it generatedtension and conflict inimical to the co-op-eration necessary for social progress anda modem economy.

Sectarianism gave religion itself a badname: it is the source of that distrust, sus-picion, hostility, embarrassment, which isone side of Australia’s religious coin. Theresponsibility of clergymen—and manipu-lative politicians—for generating andsustaining sectarian attitudes is very great.But they—at least the big names, Lang,

Parkes, Cardinal Moran, ArchbishopMannix, H. V. Evatt—had reputationsvery much larger than mere sectarians,claims to national greatness. Their poten-tial for divisive provocation was curbed,not only by their own sense of proportion,but by the fact that the balance of popularconsensus, the tolerance limits of themoral economy, was against it. The wishto belong together was stronger than anyimpulse to stay apart. Sectarianism cameto be regarded as un-Australian.

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INTERPRETING ABORIGINAL RELIGION

FROM NINETEENTH-CENTURY EVOLUTIONISM TO DURKHEIMIANSOCIOLOGY

HENRIKA KUKLICK

I begin this paper with what may seeman unlikely starting point: the cordial

relationship of the scientific polymathHerbert Spencer and the Liberal politicianW. E. Gladstone. In the late 1870s andearly 1880s, Spencer flattered the then-prime minister extravagantly, telling himthat his Liberal Party programme wasnothing less than the realisation of theethical system that Spencer believed to bescientifically based. 1 And though the re-lationship surely mattered less to Glad-stone than it did to Spencer, Gladstonewould later indicate that he held Spencerin high regard. 2 Yet in 1873 and 1874,Gladstone and Spencer had conducted anepistolary feud, both in private correspond-ence and on the pages of the ContemporaryReview (during the course of which Spen-cer’s friends told him that he was beingtoo much the gentleman, urging him toact to mobilise public support for his pos-ition). 3 Gladstone initiated the feud,writing a letter to the Contemporary thatwas critical of the last chapter of a newedition of Spencer’s The Study of Sociology,which the journal had printed in advanceof the book’s publication. Spencer retali-ated by reprinting Gladstone’s letter inthe book, presenting it as the expressionof ‘anti-scientific’ sentiment. 4 But Glad-

stone would not allow Spencer to have thelast word, and badgered Spencer until heeliminated his criticism and the reprintedletter from subsequent printings of TheStudy of Sociology; Spencer submitted threerevisions of the offending portion of thebook to the prime minister, finally produ-cing an innocuous account of their disputethat met with Gladstone’s approval. 5

That Gladstone took such pains tocensor a printed record of his debate withSpencer is remarkable, indicating just howseriously social scientific argument couldbe taken in the public discourse of the latenineteenth century. Of course, the interna-tionally renowned Herbert Spencer wasan extraordinary figure. Perhaps no othersocial scientist whose generalisations reliedon evidence gathered among non-European peoples has ever achieved fameequivalent to his, although J. G. Frazer, aclassicist-anthropologist more than thirtyyears Spencer’s junior, arguably approx-imated it (on Frazer, more shortly). ButSpencer and Gladstone’s dispute becameso intense because they were both certainof the immense importance of its sub-ject—the role of God in human affairs.

In Gladstone’s letter to the Contempor-ary Review, he had asserted that the forceof ‘Providence’ could be seen in public

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life, that God intervened in human affairsand raised up great men when the timesrequired them. For Spencer, Gladstone’sargument was fundamentally anti-scientif-ic, suggesting that the steady operation ofnatural laws was occasionally suspended;as he stated in a draft portion of the textof The Study of Sociology that Gladstonemanaged to suppress, this view was

certainly incongruous with theconception entertained by scientif-ic men; who daily add to the evid-ence, already overwhelming, thatthe Power manifested to usthroughout the Universe, from themovements of stars to the unfold-ing of individual men and the for-mulation of public opinions, is aPower which, amid infinite multi-formities and complexities, worksin ways that are absolutely uni-form. 6

But note that Spencer had invoked the‘Power manifested to us throughout theUniverse’. His dispute with Gladstonecannot be reduced to one episode in thesupposedly long-standing conflict betweenscience and religion. To be sure, the youngSpencer had expressed hostility to reli-gion. But no later than 1860, he proclaimedthat he had to ‘admit that there exist inthe environment certain phenomena orconditions which have determined thegrowth of [religious] feeling’, and that ‘onthe hypothesis of a development of lowerforms into higher, the end towards which… must be adaptation towards the require-ments of existence; we are also forced toinfer that this feeling is in some way con-ducive to human welfare’. 7 Indeed,among members of the Victorian intelli-gentsia, there was broad agreement that

religion and science had to be reconciled;the issue was not whether they could be,but how they should be reconciled. 8

My point is that the debate betweenSpencer and Gladstone highlights the ex-traordinary importance of religious consid-erations in late-nineteenth century life.Disputes about the character of the su-preme being, the proper relationship ofthe religious sphere to other social spheres,and the types of ritual that should be per-mitted in religious worship were vitalmatters in consideration of the conduct ofaffairs of both the state and civil soci-ety—throughout the societies ofEuroamerica and their colonies, hardly justin Britain. Moreover, whatever their dif-ferences, figures such as Gladstone andSpencer agreed that religion supportedsocial order.

We should not be surprised, then,when we find that late-nineteenth centuryanthropologists devoted a considerableportion of their intellectual energies toanalysis of religion, and that they believedthat the spiritual quality of religious be-liefs and practices found in any given so-ciety constituted an index to its overallcharacter. 9 Truly spiritual religion wasamong the highest of human achievements,along with the institution of monogamousmarriage—developments that anthropolo-gists believed were concomitant. Investig-ative efforts were driven by objectives:many anthropologists agreed that theirenterprise was, as the Oxford professor E.B. Tylor was wont to say, a ‘reformer’sscience’, the findings of which would‘enable the great modern nations to under-stand themselves, to weigh in a just bal-ance their own merits and defects, andeven in some measure to forecast … thepossibilities of the future’. 10 The concep-

14


tual scheme that was most clearly articu-lated by Anglophone anthropologists madereformist ambitions seem practicable inTylor’s day. That is, anthropologists as-sumed that all aspects of human evolu-tion—physical, mental, moral, and mater-ial—were highly (though certainly notperfectly) correlated, and that progressfrom the most primitive of human condi-tions to the most advanced entailed nego-tiation of an ordered sequence of stages ofevolution. Anthropologists’ expertisewould permit acceleration of the course ofevolution, identifying so-called ‘survivals’of earlier evolutionary phases of a people’shistory in order that these might be erad-icated.

When they considered the develop-ment of religious institutions and beliefsin particular, evolutionist social thinkersincluding, but hardly limited to, Spencerand Tylor judged that progress meant re-cognition of the solely spiritual purposeof religion. As humans learned to under-stand the natural world scientifically, theyceased to expect the deity to respond toworshippers’ special pleading for one de-sired outcome or another—jettisoningmagical thinking—and they abandonedritual per se because it was irrational. In-deed, though it was more implied thanexplicitly stated in evolutionists’ accountsof the spiritual progress of humankind, ahost of Christian beliefs and practices wereevident ‘survivals’. (We must rememberthat Spencer and Tylor were representat-ives of a population of social thinkers whocame, for the most part, from dissentingreligious backgrounds. 11 )

If anthropologists’ research pro-gramme was plotting the course of evolu-tion, and accelerating evolutionary pro-gress was their reformist mission, inform-

ation about the most primitive forms ofhumankind was vital to their tasks. Thiswas why information about the peoples ofAustralia was so important for anthropolo-gists, since it was axiomatic to many ofthem that the best, still-extant approxima-tion of humankind in its most primordialcondition was to be found in Australia,which had long been believed to be thehome of archaic life forms of every descrip-tion, a zoological garden of ‘living fossils’. 12 I must stress that practitionersof anthropology were hardly unique.During the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, various types of sci-entists and other educated persons wereaccustomed to render judgments predic-ated on the assumption that AustralianAborigines were a baseline of humanity,that they were exemplars of humankindat its most primitive in every particu-lar—in spiritual, behavioral, and physicalterms.

I give just a few illustrations of diversepronouncements made at this time thatexpressed this view. The German Darwini-an biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose indexto a people’s level of evolutionary develop-ment was teeth, not religious practices,characterised Australian Aborigines as‘distinctly pithecoid’, the closest of livingpeoples to a link between humans andapes. 13 The American psychologist JohnB. Watson, who sought to formulate cov-ering laws that explained responses tostimuli among all living organisms, as-sumed that ‘Aborigines’ adaptive behaviorwas a limiting case of a mode of humanresponses, the simplest of human behavi-oral patterns, far less complex thanEuropeans’. 14 And an American professorof theology, B. L. McElroy, objecting tosome physicians’ recommendations that

15

Interpreting Aboriginal Religion

seriously defective newborn babies beeuthanised, pointed to infanticide amongAborigines and argued that eugenicistswere advocating a base morality, attempt-ing ‘to Australianize our Ethics’. 15 Thus,J. G. Frazer was hardly alone when heproclaimed in 1899 that in Australia the‘scientific inquirer might reasonably ex-pect to find the savage in his very lowestdepths ... to mark the first blind gropingsof our race after freedom and light’. 16

Not only did the assumption thatAustralian Aborigines constituted ‘livingfossils’ of early humankind have a longhistory, but it also, unhappily, proved re-markably persistent—and persistent inmany quarters. Consider, for example, thatin the post-World War II era, an eminentAmerican physical anthropologist, WilliamHowells, made this assumption in evaluat-ing the significance of ancient skulls foundin Java by Eugene DuBois. In his highlyregarded Mankind So Far, Howellsreasoned in nineteenth-century anthropo-logical fashion, presuming that the livingand the dead could be graded on a singlescale of evolutionary development, pro-nouncing that the Java skulls resembledskulls found in Europe which dated to theUpper Paleolithic period, observing thatthey ‘stand in relation to the living abori-gines of Australia as the Upper PaleolithicEuropeans do to living Europeans of thepresent day’. 17

But the facile equation of AustralianAborigines with primitive humankind hadlong ceased to seem plausible to sociocul-tural anthropologists. By the era of WorldWar I, these had disaggregated the phys-ical, mental, moral, and material compon-ents of human evolution. And examinationof Australian Aborigines’ religion hadplayed a prominent role in modifying their

position. For example, though R. R. Mar-ett, Reader in Social Anthropology at Ox-ford, stated in 1912 that Central AustralianAborigines were ‘people with skulls inch-ing toward the Neanderthal type’, he hadbeen persuaded by Baldwin Spencer andF. J. Gillen’s study of them that ‘very plainliving’ did not preclude ‘something thatapproached to high thinking’, concludingthat ‘we must recognize in this case, as inothers, what might be determined a differ-ential evolution of culture, according towhich some elements may advance, whilstothers stand still, or even decay’. 18 Mar-ett was among the last of a breed that alsoincluded such figures as Spencer, Tylor,and Frazer, an ‘armchair’ scholar who didno field research, but relied on reports sentfrom the field by others, such as those thathad been sent from Australia by Europeanobservers for two centuries. Of special in-terest to us, however, are nineteenth-cen-tury reports from the field, many of theminformed by knowledge of the uses towhich they were being put by social the-orists in Europe and America. The judg-ments rendered in these reports were notunanimous, and observers’ occupationalpositions shaped their interests and opin-ions. While an Australian police troopermight consider whether Aborigines werenaturally deceitful, 19 a missionary wasbound to ponder the quality of Abori-gines’ spirituality and morals. For ex-ample, in 1839, James Günther of theChurch Missionary Society discerned be-lief in a high god in Aboriginal reli-gion—and was the first European mission-ary to do so—though he did not see thisas equivalent to Christian belief, conjectur-ing that Aborigines had once had a notionof the supreme being resembling theChristian god, but had degenerated and

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lost their earlier revelation. 20 And in1841, a German missionary in South Aus-tralia, who had had little success in mak-ing converts, reported that even thoughAborigines had evidently the same mentalaptitudes as Europeans, they had no reli-gion whatsoever—not even ‘idol-atry’—having neither ‘the idea of any be-ing superior to themselves nor any kindof worship’; their morals were ‘in manyinstances almost upon a lower scale thanthe beasts’. 21

Regardless, in the second half of thenineteenth century, there was evidence ofa shift in opinion—which coincided withlocal investigators’ growth in confidencethat their interpretations of Aborigines’behavior, grounded in direct observation,were superior to those produced by arm-chair theorists. R. Brough Smyth, for one,criticised the stereotype of Aborigines asintellectually deficient, suggesting thatthey might have independently madeprogress toward the development of highcivilisation had their country not been in-vaded by white settlers. 22 In particular,missionaries’ representations of Aboriginalreligion grew more sympathetic. TheCongregationalist George Taplin, for ex-ample, was certainly determined to con-vert Aborigines, but he judged that theytraditionally believed in a supreme being,who made the world and prescribed reli-gious rituals—though he insisted that theirconception of God was different from theChristian one. 23 And by the end of thecentury, such figures as the missionary-ethnographer Lorimer Fison and his collab-orator A. W. Howitt were arguing thatnative Australians were neither degeneratenor frozen in a truly primitive condition,but had made evolutionary progress, andthat their development of precursors of

the idea of god as the All-Father testifiedto the progress they had made independ-ently—without guidance from any putat-ively superior race. 24 Indeed, it was argu-ably a missionary, Carl Strehlow, who firstproduced evidence that belied the stereo-type of the Australian Aborigine as thequintessential primitive. 25

Certainly, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century ethnographic writersdrew on this stereotype. Consider J. D.Woods’s judgment in 1879: ‘Without ahistory [the Aborigines] have no past;without a religion, they have no hope; andwithout habits of forethought or provid-ence they can have no future’. 26 Decadeslater, W. Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillendescribed the Arrernte of Central Australiaas ‘naked, howling savages, who have noidea of permanent abodes, no clothing, noknowledge of any implements save thosefashioned out of wood, bone, and stone,no idea whatever of the cultivation ofcrops, or of the laying in of a supply offood to tide over hard times, no word forany number beyond three, and no beliefin anything like a supreme being’. 27 Tobe sure, Spencer and Gillen observed Ab-original practices that seemed to be reli-gious—their totem ceremonies. But as J.G. Frazer, who brokered the publicationof their works, stated, these ceremoniesrepresented magic, not ‘religion, in thesense of a propitiation or conciliation ofthe higher powers’; totemism was ‘thor-oughly democratic’, premised on an ‘ima-ginary brotherhood’ joining humans withthings, whereas ‘religion always implie[d]an inequality between the worshippersand the worshipped’. 28

Nevertheless, Spencer and Gillen’s firstmajor work, Native Tribes of Central Aus-tralia, published in 1899, marked a turn-

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ing point in the anthropological analysisof Australian peoples. Certainly, the qual-ity of Spencer and Gillen’s sympathy forAborigines can be debated. 29 Considerthat they judged the Arrernte way of lifeextraordinarily primitive, and by thistoken doomed to extinction—followingthe pattern observed ‘in the case of tribeafter tribe elsewhere in Australia’. 30 Butconsider that they insisted that it was‘necessary to put oneself into the mentalattitude of the native’. 31 Their intentionto persuade their readers that they hadbeen able to do this explains Spencer andGillen’s false (or, at least, hyperbolic) andoft-repeated claim that they had been ableto observe all features of Aboriginallife—including secret ceremonies—be-cause they were ‘fully-initiated’ membersof the Arrernte population; their particip-ation in Arrernte life fell far short of this,since they had not undergone the ceremo-nial ordeals that rendered males socialadults, but their claim bespeaks their in-tention to describe the Arrernte sympath-etically. 32 Spencer and Gillen explainedhow Aborigines’ remarkable survivalskills—developed ‘far beyond those of theaverage white man’—were applications oftheir ‘mental powers along the lines whichare of service to them in their daily life’.Moreover, their accounts contradictedlong-established stereotypes in many par-ticulars. Aborigines did not tolerate abuseof women and unregulated sexual behavi-or, but lived by a distinctive and rigor-ously enforced moral code, which shouldnot be judged by a ‘white man’s standard’.If at least some Australian people practised‘group marriage’—a truly primitive modeof social organisation, allowing all men inone division of a population to havesexual relations with all women in another,

the existence of which had long been thesubject of anthropologists’ specula-tion—this practice provided the founda-tion for evolutionary advance, both be-cause it led to the development of individu-al marriage and because it served ‘to bindmore or less closely groups of individualswho are mutually interested in one anoth-er’s welfare’, thus serving as ‘one of themost powerful agents in the early stagesof the upward development of the humanrace’. And though Aborigines were ‘boundhand and foot by custom’, they were notundeveloped because they were eitherdegenerate or incapable of initiating pro-gressive changes; indeed, they self-con-sciously adopted progressive recommend-ations suggested by the exceptionally tal-ented persons among them. 33

And to interpret the meaning thatNative Tribe came to have for socialthinkers, we must also note its impact onJ. G. Frazer, who was largely responsiblenot only for its publication but also formaking it the basis of an international de-bate. 34 To Frazer, the book’s most import-ant feature was its discussion of totemism,which he had sought to understand forvirtually his entire anthropological career;thanks to Spencer and Gillen, he believed,he had found what had heretofore eludedhim—an explanation of the origin of totem-ism—as well as evidence explaining therelationship of totemism to religious beliefsand marital practices. 35 In the first edi-tion (1890) of his Golden Bough, Frazer hadunderstood Australian totem ceremoniesas a truly primitive form of religion, not-ing that Aborigines believed their totemsto be repositories of their souls, and de-scribing their initiation rites as ‘a simula-tion of death and resurrection’, effecting‘an exchange of life or souls between the

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man and his totem’. 36 As he told hispublisher, George Macmillan, ‘The resemb-lance of many of the savage customs andideas to the fundamental doctrines ofChristianity is striking’. 37 Learning ofSpencer and Gillen’s findings, Frazer de-cided that Australian totem ceremoniesrepresented magic, not religion; thus, theydenoted an even lower order of spiritualdevelopment than he had previously ima-gined. But in Frazer’s new understandingof Australian beliefs, he had a new basisfor finding in them a precursor to an irra-tional element that survived in modernChristianity: ‘conceptional totemism’. Thatis, Spencer and Gillen had found peoplewho were so primitive that they were ig-norant of the most basic fact of life, of theprocess of procreation, imagining that to-tem spirits were themselves responsiblefor conception, lying in wait in their par-ticular habitats for likely female candidatesfor impregnation. 38 Apparently, Abori-gines regularly entertained fantasies ofvirgin births. And Frazer suggested thatthe very association of the divinity ofChrist with a virgin birth represented asurvival in Christianity of the truly prim-itive thinking that Spencer and Gillen hadreported. 39 Thus, as measured by Frazer’sstandard of superior religiosity, Abori-gines were certainly primitive. But by thisstandard, so were many persons in the so-called civilised world, at least insofar astheir religious notions were concerned.

For social thinkers all over the world,Spencer and Gillen’s work was a revela-tion. 40 And Frazer could not control thereception of Native Tribes, however vigor-ous and sustained was his campaign to doso (which included acting to discouragere-analysis of Spencer and Gillen’s subjectsby other anthropologists). 41 In the inter-

national—and extremely heated—contro-versy it generated, Spencer and Gillen’sempirical material was turned to variouspurposes by a congeries of theorists, ÉmileDurkheim and Sigmund Freud the mostnotable among them. 42 As E. SidneyHartland observed in his 1900 PresidentialAddress to the British Folk-Lore Soci-ety—which would soon issue a question-naire on totemism designed to elicit evid-ence on the phenomenon from potentialinformants everywhere—the debate overtotemism had attracted such widespreadinterest, and prompted so much discus-sion, that ‘The quiet non-combatant stu-dent is astonished to find himself in thetheatre of war, and hardly knows whereto seek a bomb-proof burrow that he mayhide his head from the shells of [dis-putants’] polemics’. 43

In Britain, Frazer faced various oppon-ents. His chief antagonist was his erstwhilefriend Andrew Lang. From 1900, whenthe second (Spencer and Gillen-influenced)edition of the Golden Bough appeared, tothe time of his death in 1912, Lang wagedsustained intellectual warfare againstFrazer, accusing him of willful distortionof information about central Australianpeoples. In sum, Lang argued that Frazerought to have paid more attention to thefindings of other authorities, particularlyCarl Strehlow. Had Frazer done so, hewould have recognised that ‘conceptionaltotemism’ was a secondary development;in the form of Australian totemism thatLang judged oldest, totemic affiliationswere linked to rules of exogamy, whichindicated knowledge of the biological factsof procreation. Equally important, whileLang agreed with Frazer that totemism wasnot initially a religious system, he believedthat in time it became one, for ‘certain low

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savages are as monotheistic as someChristians’. 44 But many rejected Lang’sassertion that Australian Aborigines hadspontaneously developed a belief in highgods. 45 The Tylorian anthropologicalfaction faulted Frazer’s interpretation oftotemism for reasons different from Lang’s:totemism was just one social form, peculiarto specific peoples, but it had analoguesamong other peoples, all testifying to auniversal pattern of social evolution; reli-gious institutions developed because allhumans were instinctive ‘animists’—in-clined to develop spiritual beliefs becausetheir experiences of dreams and visionsconduced to the notion that the world’sanimate and inanimate objects were inhab-ited by souls. 46

Lang’s ideas were well received in theGerman-speaking world, however—andpossibly gained some attention becauseFrazer had a large audience there. 47 Oneof Lang’s most vicious attacks on Frazerwas published in a special issue on totem-ism of the journal Anthropos, 48 whichwas founded by Father Wilhelm Schmidt,who was trained and worked in Germanyand Austria. Schmidt was loosely alliedwith a number of anthropologists inclinedto ‘cultural-historical’ explanations, 49

whose concerns included tracing the originof religion among those whom German-speaking anthropologists called ‘naturalpeoples’ (as opposed to ‘cultural peoples’).Cultural historicists valued informationabout Australian Aborigines because theyagreed with British evolutionists that somecontemporary primitives were akin to (ifnot identical to) the earliest humans. 50

But they saw ‘natural peoples’ as a pureform of humankind. Perhaps ‘naturalpeoples’ were not fully evolved membersof the human species in physical terms,

but they were fully evolved in spiritualterms, ‘capable’ as Schmidt said, ‘of receiv-ing a real primitive revelation’—indeed,possessed of ‘interior purity and nobility’that was not sustainable under conditionsof growing material sophistication.Schmidt agreed with Frazer that totemismbegan in efforts to establish beneficial re-lations with animals and plants. UnlikeFrazer, however, he saw totemism as thebasis of genuine religion, for its primitivepractitioner not only believed himself‘protected by the animals’ but also‘humbl[ed] himself to them in prayer’. Andhe agreed with Lang that the most primit-ive of peoples had not required contactwith Christian missionaries to develop‘knowledge of a Supreme Being as Creator,Protector of the world, and Lawgiver toman’. But consistent with the German so-ciocultural anthropological tradition,Schmidt and his colleagues did not believethat there was a single pattern of evolution-ary development, found among peopleseverywhere, and argued that totemismfigured in only one of the culture com-plexes that had diffused over the globethrough the migrations of peoples—anddid not emerge until the bearers of thiscomplex had progressed beyond thehunting and gathering stage. 51

Schmidt was a committed internation-alist, maintaining correspondence withanthropologists worldwide and publishinga truly international journal. And theviews of the cultural historicists had afamily resemblance to the American diffu-sionism associated with the school of theGerman-trained Franz Boas, which sup-planted evolutionism as the dominantmodel in American anthropology in theearly twentieth century. The rise of theGerman cultural historicists and the

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American Boasians denoted an internation-al intellectual convergence: while socialthinkers in different countries approachedthe debate over totemism from differentvantage points, they came to join in repu-diation of the evolutionist paradigm. Per-haps the only social scientific controversythat has been truly international, the de-bate had begun in the expectation thatunderstanding of the role that totemismplayed in the evolution of religion—andof human social life entire—would providethe key to explaining the developmentaltrajectory of humankind from the species’earliest days to its development of highcivilisation. Instead, attempts to explaintotemism helped to discredit the evolution-ist paradigm, for it was impossible to re-solve such questions as whether totemismwas a truly primitive social form, or hadantecedents, or whether it was a form ofreligion, and, if so, if there were forms ofplant and animal worship that were nottotemism. 52 Participants in the debatebecame embroiled in controversies overmethods and evidence, as well as theories.They were unable to decide which (if any)of anthropologists’ informants had respon-ded truthfully to fieldworkers’ questionsand fearful that researchers’ interpretivebiases contaminated their reports. 53 AsSigmund Freud observed, not only was‘the theory of totemism a matter of dispute’but there was also considerable confusionabout ‘the facts themselves. ... There [was]scarcely a statement which did not call forexceptions or contradictions’. 54 In sum,there were no generally accepted stand-ards by which any of the issues raised inthe study of totemism could be resolved.

If a consensus emerged in the debateover totemism, it was that totemism wasneither a universal phenomenon nor one

that inevitably gave rise to a specific pat-tern of development, as Max Weber(among many) observed. 55 Perhaps, asFreud said, information about primitivepeoples aided speculation about early hu-mankind, but the first humans and contem-porary primitives could not be equated.In Totem and Taboo, subtitled On somePoints of Agreement between the MentalLives of Savages and Neurotics, Freud hadused anthropological evidence (largelygleaned from Frazer’s work) to constructan ingenious (and convoluted) argumentthat totemism was a source of religiousbelief and was grounded in the incest ta-boo that experience made instinctive. Butthough he believed that ‘a well-preservedpicture of an early stage of our own [men-tal] development’ could be gained fromknowledge about Australian peoples, asopposed to, say, Polynesians, becauseAborigines were ‘the most backward andmiserable of savages’, he recognised thateach of the populations anthropologistshad studied had its own ‘long past his-tory’. 56 Many social thinkers agreed withBronislaw Malinowski that the attempt todiscern different patterns of evolution wasworthwhile. But, as the British psycholo-gist-anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers stated,researchers had erred in equating thephenomenon of totemism entire with ‘thenature of totemism as it exists among theaborigines of Australia’—’the chief reason’that discussion of the subject was plaguedwith ‘doubt and difficulty’. 57

By 1914, then, the Boasian anthropolo-gist John Swanton was able to dismiss thedebate over totemism entire. It had beenpredicated on the ‘cardinal error’ that ‘to-temism [was] one concrete thing’, denotinga ‘social condition ... normal to and univer-sal in primitive society’. Some peoples de-

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veloped totemic complexes through pro-cesses of independent invention, whileothers acquired them by diffusion, imitat-ing the habits of peoples with whom theycame in contact. And where totemism wasfound it had no necessary relation to thevarious features diverse thinkers had pos-tulated as essential to it—no inevitableassociation with exogamous norms of anydescription; with belief in ancestral con-nections joining humans and beasts; withtaboos; with differences of social rank;with calculations of descent from mothersrather than fathers; with allocations of titleto conduct specific sacred ceremonies tospecific groups or, indeed, with the veryfoundations of religious belief entire.Thus, the evidence gathered in pursuit ofgeneralisations about totemism led to thegeneralisation that evolutionary develop-ment did not follow a predictablecourse. 58

In the years immediately prior toWorld War I, then, social theorists whosegoal had originally been calculation of thetrajectory of human evolution began toarticulate proto-functionalist argu-ments—analyses of the properties that allsocieties shared—at least when they con-sidered religious phenomena. The title ofÉmile Durkheim’s The Elementary Formsof Religious Life (and subtitled The TotemicSystem in Australia), published in 1912,itself conveyed an emergent theoreticalposition. Largely based on the findings ofSpencer and Gillen, whom Durkheim de-scribed as ‘two remarkably astute observ-ers’, Elementary Forms presented totemismas the most primitive form of religion. Butthe primitive character of this religionmeant that it was easy for the social scient-ist to analyse, presenting in stark outlinethe characteristics of religious beliefs and

practices that were found in all societies.All religions, said Durkheim, belonged to‘a species of delirium’—though he insistedthat all religions were suffused with‘meaning and objective significance’ thatwas grounded in experienced reality. Thatis, religious beliefs were not illusory forthose who sustained them: they en-gendered intense emotions and had prac-tical consequences. 59

For Durkheim, religion was notdefined by belief in a deity or the super-natural. The essence of religion lay in theunderstanding that the world was dividedinto sacred and profane realms, and in theorganisation of a moral community joinedby beliefs and practices about the sacred.Perhaps desire to control the food supplyinspired totem ceremonies, but these cere-monies became associated with the specialrealm of the sacred by virtue of their spe-cial, non-routine character, as well as inconsequence of the emotional pleasuresparticipants derived from them (whichconduced to belief that they were practic-ally effective). And totemism was just oneexpression of a general social pattern: allsocial groups mobilised around symbolsof their collective unity, and the totem wasthe symbol of the clan, just as the flag wasthe symbol of the nation-state. AcceptingSpencer and Gillen’s assertion that Abori-ginal peoples were ignorant of the mechan-ism of human reproduction, Durkheimunderstood totem ceremonies as both cre-ation and expression of celebrants’ feelingsof kinship for one another—so that societyitself was the object of their worship. 60

As he wrote in his own (unsigned) reviewof Elementary Forms, published in hisjournal, L’Année sociologique, ‘religion thusunderstood appears as consisting aboveall of acts which have the object of perpetu-

22


ally making and remaking the soul of thecollectivity and of individuals’. 61

In 1909 Frazer took a position on theplace of religion in society that was similarto Durkheim’s. Durkheim and Frazer hadto a degree defined their positions in op-position. Though Frazer established rela-tionships with the Durkheimians and madesure that review copies of his works weresent to L’Année sociologique, over timeDurkheim and members of his school grewhighly critical of Frazer, so that Frazerconsidered himself misinterpreted by theDurkheimians—and took Durkheim totask for according Australian totemism thestatus of religion. 62 Nevertheless, the ar-gument Frazer made in his 1909 Psyche’sTask, and repeated in 1910 at the conclu-sion of Totemism and Exogamy, bore afamily resemblance to Durkheim’s (as wellas to Freud’s): though religion was a ‘su-perstition’, it had generally had a positiveeffect on the development of human insti-tutions. 63 Indeed, in Totemism and Exo-gamy, Frazer intimated that he doubtedthat evolutionary progress was marked byprogression through a series of culturalstages, each exhibiting a coherent patternof interdependent features. 64 But thenext generation of social thinkers—andgenerations to follow—would readDurkheim, not Frazer.

And of Durkheim’s works, ElementaryForms has been judged the most import-ant. It is, indeed, the most sacred offoundational, classic social scientific texts,a work that is still read by both anthropo-logists and sociologists—as well as oth-ers. 65 And I think it extremely significantthat the book’s subtitle was dropped fromits English and German translations (thefirst of which appeared shortly after itspublication), if not from its French re-is-

sues. By this token, Elementary Formsceased to be a work about Australian to-temism. It became a theoretical text—abook understood as Durkheim wished itunderstood, as a book about the essentialcharacteristics of religion, which wereidentical for peoples everywhere, regard-less of the material circumstances in whichthey lived. Thus, the status accorded Ele-mentary Forms denoted a fundamentalchange in social scientific opinion, whichhad been effected through considerationof Australian Aboriginal religion: religiousbeliefs were no longer to be examined inorder to gauge their adherents’ level ofevolution. And, in general, qualitativejudgments about the relative evolutionarylevels of the worlds’ peoples would sub-sequently disappear from polite social sci-entific conversation. The practical impactof changed social scientific opinion is an-other matter, of course—a subject for adifferent paper.

ENDNOTES

1 Spencer to Gladstone, 17 June 1877, in GladstonePapers, British Library (GP) 44454; Spencer to Glad-stone, 21 June 1879 and 23 June 1882, GP 44460.2 Note Gladstone’s letter to The Times, December1896, in GP 44785.3 Spencer to Gladstone, 14 January 1874, GP 44442.4 Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, Otto Zeller,Osnabrück, 1966 [1904], Vol. 2, p. 254.5 See the proofs of December 1873, GP 44441, and15 January 1874 and 20 January 1874, GP 44452.6 See Gladstone’s draft letter to Spencer, 12 June1874, GP 44442; the quotation is from one of Spen-cer’s proofs, and the underlinings are those Spencerinked onto the copy he sent to Gladstone in Decem-ber 1873, GP 444417 Herbert Spencer, ‘Religion and science’, in FirstPrinciples, New York, D. Appleton, 1892 [1860], p.16.

23


8 Bernard Lightman, ‘Victorian sciences and reli-gions: Discordant harmonies’, Osiris, Vol. 16, 2001,pp. 343–66.9 George W. Stocking, Jr, Victorian Anthropology,New York, Free Press, 1987, pp. 190–97.10 E. B. Tylor, ‘Introduction’, in Friedrich Ratzel,The History of Mankind,London, Macmillan, 1896,p. v.11 Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within. The SocialHistory of British Anthropology, Cambridge, Cam-bridge University Press, 1992, p. 72.12 Robert A. Stafford, ‘Annexing the landscapes ofthe past’, in John M. MacKenzie (ed.) Imperialismand the Natural World, Manchester, ManchesterUniversity Press, 1990, pp. 81–2.13 Ernst Haeckel, The Last Link. Our Present Know-ledge of the Descent of Man, London, Adam andCharles Black, 1898, pp. 17–18.14 John B. Watson, ‘Psychology as the behavioristviews it’, The Psychological Review, Vol. 20, 1913, p.168.15 Quoted in Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork,New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 59.16 J. G. Frazer, ‘The origin of totemism’, FortnightlyReview, Vol. 71, January–June, 1899, p. 648.17 William Howells, Mankind So Far, Garden City,New York, Doubleday and Company, 1947, pp.191–92.18 R. R. Marett, Anthropology, London, Williams andNorgate, 1912, pp. 39, 121.19 Samuel Gason, The Dieyerie Tribe of AustralianAborigines, edited by George Isaacs, Adelaide, W. C.Cox, Government Printer, 1874, p. 11.20 Hilary M. Carey, Believing in Australia, London,Allen and Unwin, 1996, pp. 29–30, 66–68.21 B. T. (or C. G.) Tiechelmann, Illustrative and Ex-planatory Notes of the Manners, Customs, Habits, andSuperstitions of the Natives of South Australia, Com-mittee of the South Australian Wesleyan MethodistAuxiliary Missionary Society for the German Missionto the Aborigines, 1841, Adelaide, pp. 5, 10.22 R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria,Melbourne, John Ferres, Government Printer, 1878,Vol. 1, pp. liv, xxxiii, liv.23 Rev. George Taplin, ‘The Narrinyeri’, in TheNative Tribes of South Australia, E. S. Wigg and Son,Adelaide, 1879, p. 55.24 See: Lorimer Fison, 1892, quoted in Russell Mc-Gregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australiansand the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939, MelbourneUniversity Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. 35; A. W.

Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia,Macmillan, London, 1904, p. 507.25 Moritz Freiherr von Leonhardi, ‘Preface’, in CarlStrehlow, The Aranda and Lorita Tribes of CentralAustralia, edited by von Leonhardi, Part 2, MunicipalEthnological Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 1908,unpublished translation by Hans D. Oberscheidt,1991, in the possession of the Strehlow ResearchCenter.26 J. D. Woods, ‘Introduction’, The Native Tribes ofSouth Australia, op. cit., p. xxxviii.27 Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The NorthernTribes of Central Australia (hereafter Northern Tribes),Macmillan, London, 1904, p. xiv.28 J. G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Macmillan,London, 1910, Vol. 4, pp. 5, 27; Frazer, ‘The begin-nings of religion and totemism among the AustralianAborigines’, Fortnightly Review, Vol. 84, 1905, p.162; and see Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, NativeTribes of Central Australia (hereafter Native Tribes),Macmillan, London, 1899, p. 170.29 For one discussion of this issue, see Patrick Wolfe,Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthro-pology, Cassell, London, 1999, pp. 9, 11.30 Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, Across Australia,Macmillan, London, 1912, p. 300.31 Native Tribes, p. 48.32 That Spencer and Gillen’s ‘fully initiated’ statuswas a pretense—as Howitt’s had also been—did notescape at least one critic; von Leonhardi, ‘Preface’,in Strehlow, op. cit., Part 3, 1910. And see NativeTribes, p. v.33 Native Tribes, pp. 25, 26, 46, 108–9; NorthernTribes, p. 74; Native Tribes, p. 11.34 See A. A. Goldenweiser, ‘The views of AndrewLang and J. G. Frazer and E. Durkheim on totemism’,Anthropos, Vol. 11, 1916, p. 953; Stocking, VictorianAnthropology,p. 260.35 J. G. Frazer to George Macmillan, 22 April 1898,Macmillan Papers, British Library (MP) 55135.36 J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, Macmillan, Lon-don, 1890, Vol. 2, p. 343.37 J. G. Frazer to George Macmillan, 8 November1889, MP 55134.38 J. G. Frazer, ‘The beginnings of religion and to-temism among the Australian Aborigines’, FortnightlyReview, Vol. 78, 1905, p. 455; and see Native Tribes,pp. 265, 356, 124.39 Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. 4, p. 63.40 For some early assessments of the importance ofSpencer and Gillen’s work, see reviews of Native

24


Tribes—H. Ling Roth, Nature, Vol. 59, 1899, pp.511–2; W. W. Newell, Journal of American Folk-Lore,Vol. 13, 1900, pp. 72–5—reviews of NorthernTribes—C. H. R. (Charles Hercules Read), Man, Vol.4, 1904, pp. 143–4; W. I. Thomas, American Journalof Sociology, Vol. 10, 1905, 700–1; N. W. T. (North-cote W. Thomas), ‘The Spencer-Gillen expedition’,Man, Vol. 1, 1901, pp. 82–3; Bronislaw Malinowski,Review of Across Australia, Folk-Lore, Vol. 24, 1913,pp. 278–9; and see Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim,Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1973,p. 452 fn., which quotes Marcel Mauss’s 1900 enthu-siastic review of Native Tribes in L’Année sociologique.41 Frazer acted to prevent the British Association forthe Advancement of Science from sponsoring an ex-pedition to Central Australia to check Spencer andGillen’s findings; see J. L. Myres to J. G. Frazer, 14March 1909, and Frazer to Myres, 16 March 1909,MS Myres 15, Bodleian Library, Oxford.42 Spencer and Gillen’s evidence figured promin-ently in Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms ofReligious Life, translated by Karen E. Fields, FreePress, New York, 1995 (orig. 1912), as well as inSigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, translated byJames Strachey, W. W. Norton, New York:, 1950(orig. 1913).43 E. Sidney Hartland, ‘Totemism and some recentdiscoveries’, Folk-Lore, Vol. 11, 1900, pp. 57–8; Folk-Lore Society, Notes and Queries on Totemism, DavidNutt, London, 1901.44 Andrew Lang, ‘J. G. Frazer’s “Totemism andExogamy”’, Anthropos, Vol. 5, 1910, pp. 1092–1108;Lang, 1898, quoted in George W. Stocking, Jr, AfterTylor, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1995,p. 59.45 See E. S. Hartland, ‘The “high gods” of Australia’,Folk-Lore, Vol. 9, 1898, pp. 290–329.46 See Edward B. Tylor, ‘Remarks on totemism, withespecial reference to some modern theories respectingit’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. 28,1898, pp. 138–48; see also R. R. Marett, Tylor, JohnWiley and Sons, New York, 1936, p. 156, fn; Stock-ing, After Tylor, pp. 42–4.47 For Frazer’s cultivation of his German-speakingaudience, see his letters to George Macmillan: 5 Oc-tober 1890, MP 55134, 4 June 1898, MP 55135, 26December 1902, MP 55135.48 Lang, loc. cit.49 Others included Bernhard Ankermann, LeoFrobenius, Fritz Graebner, and Father Wilhelm Kop-pers.50 Wilhelm Schmidt, Primitive Revelation (a compil-ation of Schmidt’s writings produced from 1912 on-

wards), B. Herder Book Company, London, 1939, pp.108, 120.51 ibid., pp. 69, 107, 21, 121; and see pp. 100–5, 162,214–5, 286.52 F. B. Jevons, ‘The place of totemism in the evolu-tion of religion’, Folk-Lore, Vol. 10, 1899, p. 371.53 See E. S. Hartland, ‘Australian gods: Rejoinder’,Folk-Lore, Vol. 10, 1899, p. 48; Lord Avebury (JohnLubbock), Marriage, Totemism and Religion, Long-mans, Green, London, 1911, p. 19; Native Tribes, p.108.54 Freud, op. cit., pp. 3–4, fn., italics his; and seeBronislaw Malinowski, ‘Totemism and exogamy’, inThe Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, edsRobert J. Thornton and Peter Skalník, translated byLudwik Krzyzanowski, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1993 [1911], esp. p. 280, fn. 18.55 Cited in Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies ofReligion, Cambridge University Press, New York,1987, p. 71.56 Freud, op. cit., p. 1 and see footnote on p. 4.57 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘The terminology of totemism’,Anthropos, Vol. 9, 1914, p. 640.58 John R. Swanton, ‘The social and the emotionalelement in totemism’, Anthropos, Vol. 9, 1914, p. 290;see also pp. 291–5, 297.59 Durkheim, op. cit., pp. 88, 85.60 ibid., p. 55.61 Quoted in Lukes, op. cit., p. 471.62 See Durkheim, op. cit., p. 88; Robert Ackerman,J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work, Cambridge Univer-sity Press, Cambridge, 1987, p. 165; Frazer, Totemismand Exogamy, Vol. 4, p. 100. For Frazer’s efforts toreach a French audience, see J. G. Frazer to GeorgeMacmillan, 2 May 1901, and 26 December 1902, MP55135; Frazer to Macmillan, 26 May 1906, MP 55136.63 See Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, Vol. 4, p. 169.64 ibid., pp. 59–60.65 Philip Smith and Jeffrey C. Alexander,‘Durkheim’s religious revival’, American Journal ofSociology,Vol. 102, 1996, pp. 585–91.

25


YOU IN YOUR SMALL CORNER

THE LOVE SONG OF ALFRED J DYER: EARLY DAYS OF CHURCHMISSION SOCIETY MISSIONS TO THE ABORIGINES OF ARNHEM

LAND 1

MICKEY DEWAR

In this paper I use some of the personalaccounts of two Anglican missionaries

to the Arnhem Land area in the earlytwentieth century to gain an understand-ing into their perspectives and motiva-tions. It is a story of love; the love thatbrought these missionaries to north Aus-tralia, and the relationship they shared.

Permanent European settlement of theNorthern Territory took place more thanthree quarters of a century after the settle-ment of New South Wales. The townsiteat Port Darwin was surveyed in 1869 andwas ‘the last of the colonial capitals to beestablished, and … the only one to lie inthe tropics’. 2 Settlers in the NorthernTerritory were both informed by experi-ences of other settlers elsewhere in Aus-tralia, and of the brief but consistent his-tory of failure of European settlement inthe region. 3 There was a distinct parallelbetween the experiences of permanentEuropean settlement and the role ofChristian evangelical missionary work inthe region. Missionary work in the TopEnd proceeded relatively late in Australianmissionary history and similarly, followeda string of unsuccessful attempts. 4

Elsewhere in Australia the experienceof European settlement had accompanied

loss of life for Aboriginal people throughusurpation of resources and spread of dis-ease and so it was widely believed thatAboriginal people were dying out. Mission-ary work was a sacred obligation for Aus-tralian men and women of Christian goodwill to take up work to disseminate God’smessage to those who had not heard it,and might not ever have the opportunityto do so.

The great question for Australiawas how to deal with the masses ofheathen who were within our bor-ders … it would not be long beforethe last of the blackfellows turnedhis face to mother earth, and gaveback his soul to God who gave it.Any work … might be merelysmoothing the pillow of a dying race;but that pillow should be smoothed… 5

There had been some nineteenth-cen-tury missionary activity on the north coastof the Northern Territory, but it had notbeen very enduring. Jesuit missionariesestablished a mission at Rapid Creek (nowDarwin) in 1882 which was soon aban-doned, and then later three separate sta-tions at Daly River between 1886 and 1891

27

but by 1899 none were operational. Cath-olic missions in the Territory ceased tem-porarily until 1906 when Father Gsell (laterBishop) arrived to establish Our Lady Starof the Sea mission to the Tiwi at BathurstIsland. The Protestant missionaries in theTop End had not been any more success-ful. An Anglican mission station, ‘Kalparl-goo’ (‘Coparlgoo’, ‘Kapalgo’), was estab-lished in 1899 in the Alligator Rivers re-gion 6 but after a decade or so, little re-mained. 7

The next attempt by the Anglicanswas to prove more successful. The Bishopof Carpentaria, Gilbert White, suggestedthe Church Missionary Association ofVictoria (CMS), the evangelical arm of theAnglican Church, found a mission onRoper River. In 1908 a party sailed fromMelbourne for the Roper via Thursday Is-land, Yarrabah, Mapoon and MitchellRiver missions and: ‘Landed at RoperRiver … homesick but full of love for thepoor degraded blacks around us.’ 8

The missionaries had to build the mis-sion from a completely (from their perspect-ive at least) virgin site. They had to con-struct the dormitories, kitchen, church,outbuildings. They had to establish horti-cultural gardens for a food supply. Theyhoped to begin running cattle and at thesame time intended the Roper site tofunction as a base for further evangelicalmissionary incursion into ArnhemLand. 9 They called it, ‘The Gospel ofWork’ and together with the ‘Gospel ofLove’ this formed the two planks for theiraim of ‘protecting and uplifting … theblack race in Northern Australia’. 10

But while the Aboriginal people wereat home, secure in their physical, spiritualand cultural ways of life that had existedfor time untold, life at Roper for the mis-

sionaries was isolated and difficult. Phys-ically and emotionally the conditions weretough. At the same time, the vigour ofAboriginal people and culture was para-doxical to the missionaries. Their positiveobservations of the society they en-countered contradicted the rhetoric. ‘ADoomed Race …Their days are numbered.They are a strong race, fine and active,and when working develop wonder-fully’. 11 This was in something of a con-trast to the personal experiences of themissionaries themselves; many of thejournal entries and letters contain descrip-tions of physical ailments such as tropicalulcers, sores, fever and so on, suffered bythe missionaries themselves.

Missionary society formed a tiny en-clave in a world and people that theycould only comprehend in terms of theirown culture and experience. As the mis-sionaries struggled to build a little outpostof empire at the Roper, their hopes laywith the children:

In my class I have such nice littlelads. They are called Campbell,Percy and Wilfred. We have greattalks and songs together, and whenI have coaxed them to have a goodwash each day their little blackbodies fairly shine. They sit aroundme with wonder and amazement intheir eyes, while I read them BibleStories and tell them about the dearLord Jesus … I wish we had acricket set, we could have suchgrand games … 12

The missionary numbers were small,their resources minimal and their know-ledge of the people and environment inwhich they were working, very limited.As a consequence of their isolation, their

28


language, behaviour and custom took onan exaggerated formality, no doubt as amechanism of mediating control betweenindividuals, but also as a way of definingdifference and cultural solidarity.

Into this scenario then, comes MissMary Crome (mostly called ‘Katie’) whoarrived at the Roper to begin work on themission just five years after the station hadbegun. At 39 years of age, Katie was ma-ture and skilled; she had trained as a nurseand was an excellent seamstress who lovedgardening. There are references to heracerbity of conversation, so perhaps shehad been disappointed by her lack of loveror family. By evidence of her own accountand others, she was skilled and practical,moral and supportive of women, particu-larly with regard to issues of domestic vi-olence or health and child rearing.

Some years later, in 1915, Alf Dyerarrived at the mission. Alf was in his latetwenties ten years younger than Katie.Like Katie, Alf had no problem with faith;he was called directly and literally by God;his difficulties only arose when communic-ating His directions to the Church author-ities. Alf was called to serve first in Africa,then in northern Australia, but the CMS,perhaps wary of such witness, did notimmediately respond to Alf’s message. Inall, he applied unsuccessfully at least fourtimes before becoming accepted and ittook many attempts before his final andsuccessful ordination. After a considerablecareer in the field, he was made a layreader at Christ Church in Darwin, 13

deacon in 1927 and then ordained to thepriesthood the following year. 14 Dyer’sfaith and conviction in a direct call fromGod was never challenged by the CMSauthorities, but it is clear that the hesita-tion they showed in appointing him, indic-

ated they suspected a certain erraticism ofpersonality.

* * *Katie had arrived in 1913 to the little

hamlet on the low-lying banks of the cro-codile-infested Roper River. 15 Althoughremote, a police station at Roper Bar andpastoral leases adjacent to the mission leasemeant that Europeans were not unknownin the district. The number of Aboriginalinhabitants at the mission station variedfrom a handful to number in hundredsdepending on seasonality, cultural obliga-tions, hunting, and other causes externalto, and largely unrecognised by the mis-sionaries. Amenities on the mission stationwere basic. The physical layout of themission included the church, single roomhuts for accommodation, kitchen/diningfacility and larger huts which were dorm-itories for children from the communitywho were fed and accommodated at themission away from their families. In thefive years of operation before Katie’s ar-rival, the station had nearly faltered dueto problems of infighting amongst staff. Itwas somewhat regenerated by the pres-ence of a new Superintendent, HubertWarren who had arrived only a littleearlier than had Katie that same year.

Although it is reasonable to refer toRoper River as a community, it is apparentfrom descriptions that there were differentsocial groupings who existed more or lessindependently. One section comprised thewhite mission staff. Their language wasEnglish. They lived in very basic accom-modation on the mission station. Anotherdiscrete group were those Aboriginalpeople in a position of proximity and trustwith the mission and staff. They weregiven ‘Christian’ names, Percy, Wilfredand so on. The missionaries addressed

29

You in Your Small Corner

them in English, although this was clearlynot their first language. They did not seemto have been given accommodation at themission and at this stage, were not neces-sarily converts to Christianity, althoughthey did provide practical assistance tothe mission staff on the day-to-day run-ning of the mission and through mediationwith the camp. The final group consistedof the ‘camp’ Aborigines. They did notusually come into the mission unless it wasa holiday or celebration day of some kind(such as Christmas). They sometimes calledinto the mission or were brought in bytheir friends or family, when they wereill. Otherwise, missionary interaction withthe ‘camp’ people took place in the camp. 16 Missionaries visited the camp,usually with the children visiting families,but sometimes with each other, to provideaccess to Christian spiritual fellowship ormedical assistance. The language spokenby the missionaries to the ‘camp’ peoplewas pigeon English. There were at leastthree distinct groups within the mission,each with their own distinctive languagesof interaction, accommodation and physic-al space. Much of the interaction wastaken up with negotiating these boundar-ies.

But there were other bounded spacesevident; the world of Roper River was alsospiritually delineated. In this period ofmissionary endeavour, religion for themissionaries was a force that directed notonly beliefs, but also day-to-day activities.Although clearly practical, Katie’s ac-counts are full of cooking, dressmaking,nursing and teaching basic literacy, thepredominating sense of her personality isher extreme piety. She mediated everyexperience through her spiritual beliefs.

Nov 23rd [1913] Seven weeks todaysince I arrived here and it has beensuch a quiet but blessed day. Thereis such a joy in being here to try totell of Jesus and His wonderful love.If the children will only take in &really realise His love. My heartdoes ache for the poor old woman inthe camp – so sad and desolate noidea of love & Jesus loves her &wants her [and] died for her… MonNov 24th Attended to the sick onestoday. Poor Mary looks dreadfullyill & I don’t know how to speak toher but I told her over and overagain Jesus loved Mary and wantedher… The children are very lovable& so funny at times. I do want tohave the great love & compassionfor these people to love them into thekingdom to stretch out for them Godmade me faithful & true & have Hisway in me for them. 17

This is an area of surprising common-ality between the two, both those minister-ing and those ministered to, that they wereoperating in a climate where God and thespiritual world was invested in every en-counter with every animate and inanimateobject. Aboriginal people as a result oftheir own encompassing spirituality, andthis is indicated by their reluctance to en-gage with Christianity, were clearly awareof the implications of adopting anotherepistemology. Initially at least, the Christi-an missionaries appeared less aware 18

and Katie often expressed disappointmentat the failure to convert.

The physical and social structure wasnot fixed, however, since the whole pointof the missionary operation was to convertAboriginal people to Christianity and tosettle people within a village-style com-

30


munity. Accordingly, there had to be somemovements to enable this to occur. Likepieces around a chessboard there was oneparticular move that occurred in nearlyevery game play.

Thurs 8th [1913] This morning sev-eral of the smaller girls said theywere going to run away. So aftertalking it over we decided if theywere going, they were to be made toleave their things. Mr Joynt said hehad found it [to] answer very wellin the early days. They said they didnot want to go but afterwards gottogether & talked it over & went.They are in the camp tonight. Poorlittle things I feel so sorry for them.It is just a bush hunger seems tocome over them & they want to getaway. How helpless one feels & cando nothing but pray that God willkeep them & in His time & waybring them back here to learn to love& serve Him. Had the women fortheir reading lesson today expectedthey would have forgotten what theyhad learned but they had not & didvery well. I do long for them to un-derstand God’s word … 19

It is not useful here to enumerate thenumber of times this account is repeatedin the writings of Katie Crome, but it wasan ongoing problem for the missionaries.The above narration does explain a num-ber of attitudinal values held by both themissionaries and the Aboriginal people. Itwas difficult for the missionaries todemonstrate the benefits of conversion tothe children. Even the first stage of accept-ance meant relinquishing family, socialand community life and living in a dorm-itory. In addition, such a move left the

individual subject to missionary discip-lines for infractions, and this could includedeprivation of treats, or at a more severelevel, head shaving, temporary confine-ment or being physically beaten. On theother hand, children became the focus forsustained interest by the missionaries, theyreceived a more regular food supply andthey gained access to material objects.When the attractions on either side areweighed in the balance, it is less surprisingthat the children moved between campand mission so frequently. Katie spentmuch of her journal entries recording thedepartures and arrivals between camp andmission and correspondingly alternatingbetween hope and disappointment:

Mon Jan 17th [1914] Have had arather quiet day. My women wentwalkabout so was not able to givethem their reading lesson. I wasvery tempted today to a lack oflove…Tues Jan 18th [1914] Greatexcitement today Bet Bet and Katiecame back … 20

Limits and boundaries were extremelyimportant to maintain order and to separ-ate the godly from the ungodly. ‘Rightlyor wrongly’ as Dick Harris observed, ‘Wemissionaries were always a “separatepeople”.’ 21 Not only was it necessary tomaintain a daily routine, rung in by a bellbefore dawn calling people to work, butin order to demonstrate the differencebetween European and Aboriginal society.After one absconding, the Superintendent,Hubert Warren decided that the girlsshould be locked in the bathroom all day.Katie recorded, ‘They did not seem veryunhappy about it. It is hard to know whatto do. They must be punished or we couldnot maintain discipline’. It must have been

31


extremely difficult to communicate eitherpunishment or disapproval. The next daythe girls absconded again, ‘It was a greatshock,’ Katie wrote. 22 Later she added,when several of the boys also ran away,‘They do not seem at all sorry for runningaway & did not want to come back’. 23

There is a strong indication that ‘camp’was seen as undesirable and Katie andother staff appear to have successfullycommunicated this to some of the missionAboriginal girls. After one absconding,Katie noted, ‘They got the strap & are tobe treated like camp girls for a week’. 24

For the mission staff, debating the issue ofhow to communicate the disapproval ofthe children’s rejection of the mission wasongoing, complex and unsuccessful. Dis-cussion generally focussed on methods ofcoercion. Interestingly there appears tohave been little attempt to entice the chil-dren through access to material objects orfood. As previously noted, in one instancethe staff refused to let the children takesome of the objects given to them by themission when running away, but apartfrom that single incident, little additionalincentive was provided. Presumably thiswas because the missionaries believed thatthe ‘Gospel of Work’ and Christian fellow-ship, would be incentive enough. Thisprinciple did not necessarily apply toadults although both Katie and Alf disap-proved of either the supply of tobacco orwithholding of food to encourage religiousattendance. Katie wrote to Alf in 1923 thatshe could not tolerate working under apolicy that refused a nursing mother tea,cocoa or milk on the basis that ‘she was acamp woman … & that she could not haveany priviledges [sic]’. 25 Within thebounded spaces then, there were differingcodes of behaviour for children and adults.

It was a tacit acknowledgement that therewas little likelihood of Christian conver-sion when dealing with adults from thecamp. Children simultaneously offeredmore hope and at the same time, could bephysically removed from the camp.

But it was also difficult for the mission-aries internally. The relentless proximityto their fellows and isolation from anyother non-Aboriginal contact meant thatthey too were bounded within the geo-graphical space of the station. In the peri-od that Warren was Superintendent heorganised a mechanism for escape. A smalland basic accommodation was set up aboutsixteen kilometres away at a place theycalled Mission Gorge. The hut was somehours’ walk from the main mission stationand provided a holiday retreat fromeveryday mission life. At intervals, staffmembers and children, would relocate,perhaps for a week at a time, apart fromthe mission station and its routine. Thechildren would run messages between thetwo residences and commodities were sentto those at Mission Gorge.

Katie found the whole experience ofrelocation from the mission space verypleasurable although, characteristically,she initially did not at first want to leavethe main station. But the physical act ofbeing away, once she had come to termswith the idea, thrilled Katie. On the firstevening she walked to the top of the hill‘& had a distant view of the Mission Stn’.The next afternoon they returned afterpreparing the fire for the next day to findtwo messengers from the main station with‘notes & tomatoes milk and berries etc. Itwas quite exciting & there are more mes-sengers to follow’. Not only did the Mis-sion Gorge hut offer another view of themission, there were opportunities for notes

32


and messages and to act in ways that werenot usual at the mission station. Katie wentfishing and enthusiastically recordedcatches of fish and a freshwater cray. Sheslept in the afternoon for three hours.Again, Katie went to the top of the hill tosee the ‘splendid view of the mission’. Themissionaries themselves also needed to es-cape. They too oscillated between the sta-tion and another place. By the end of thefirst week, Katie was longing to be home.Yet when the party arrived with the girlsand others on horseback, Katie wrote, ‘Itseemed more than I could stand & did notfeel a bit glad to see them’. 26 Spatialboundaries, limitations and barriers seemto constrain Katie almost completely. Sototally enmeshed was she within theboundaries, she could not understand howthe Aboriginal people could resist them.

The other metaphor that defined inter-action, was the duality of light and dark.This, like the notion of bounded space,was employed to delineate between themissionaries and their flock. Official re-ports, particularly of the early days of theRoper River mission, repeatedly used thismetaphor. Within the writing that tar-geted the lay audience, the writers re-ferred to the Aborigines as the ‘Blacks’,and used terms like ‘spiritual darkness’ or‘darkness and awful filthiness’. 27 TheChristian Fellowship shared by the mission-aries as part of their routine was called the‘Daily Light’. Insofar as this kind of gener-alisation can be made, institutional or offi-cial writing depicted a message of binarysimplicity, of light (good, Christian andclean) and dark (bad, heathen and dirty).

The general assumption of the ‘dark-ness’ and ‘superstition’ of the Aboriginalpeople was probably widespread and notconfined to the missionary experience. 28

The intimacy of the mission station andclose contact with Aboriginal people, infact, elicits a more complex response fromindividuals. Katie wrote of her first attend-ance at the birth of an Aboriginal baby:

The baby arrived at about 11pm.The 1st black baby I have ever seenborn – poor little thing such a littlegirl & not very much different to awhite baby & in fact it does not lookquite as puffy & not showing red[She] looks better than some whiteones. 29

Katie could only express her responseto the infant in terms of her colour or size.How universal is the assumption thatdarkness means dirt? Dyer reported aconversation following Katie working inthe garden at Oenpelli, ‘Is she a whitelady? She makes her hands like ours.’ 30

Was the comment about Katie dealing withcolour or with the issue of what might beseen by the Aboriginal people as atypicalwork for a non-Aboriginal woman? Chris-tian and heathen, light and dark, cleanand dirty, white and black, mission andcamp, male and female, child and adult:all these binary divisions served to dis-tance and constrain the people within thecommunity. That such images were preval-ent in the official mission literature sug-gests that they would have been powerfulpredeterminates and predictive in themodes of contact.

Katie emerges as a practical lovingperson, whose chief outlet for that lovewas her spirituality. Part of the sadnessand misunderstandings that arose in herrelationship to the Aboriginal people, seemto have arisen because of their rejectionof settled life at the mission and theChristian religion. Equally, she appeared,

33


at least in the early stages of her time atRoper, to be completely unaware that theAboriginal people themselves had any re-ligious or spiritual obligations that mightmake them reluctant converts or absenteesfrom mission life. At the same time, Katiewas not totally oblivious to the problemsof transmission of the Christian messagein an Aboriginal context. At one point,when an elderly woman called Maggie wasdying she noted, ‘Yesterday she [Maggie]told Ada she saveyed [sic] Jesus loves her.It is so hard to know because it has notbrought any brightness or change in theirlives’. 31

Katie Crome achieved her own lifechange, however, after Alf Dyer’s arrivalat the Roper. There are hints that Katiewas looking to give love when she arrived.She recorded the comparatively few socialevents of the mission station, the picnicsand riding excursions with hopeful enthu-siasm. Yet after describing a group ofmission people going off on an excursionKatie wrote wistfully, ‘Sometimes I feelvery lonely but oh I would not have itdifferent with all the disappointments. Itis such a privilege.’ 32 Anglican historianJohn Harris notes: ‘She particularly en-joyed being rowed down the river byHubert Warren in his single days, but hewas to marry another’. 33 So, as it turnsout, was Katie.

The courtship between Alf Dyer andKatie Crome must have been difficult. Theintricate social mechanisms employed toseparate the missionaries from the Abori-gines, also operated to separate male andfemale missionary staff. They did not, forexample, address each other by their firstname, on any occasion. Bishop of Carpent-aria, Gilbert White, cosmopolitan andurbane, endeavored to convince female

staff that they were allowed into malequarters if any of the men required nurs-ing, but without much success. Evenbetween female staff formality was ob-served. In her private journal, Katie unfail-ingly referred to her colleagues as ‘MissHill’ and ‘Miss Tinney’. That Aboriginalpeople associated with the mission werecalled by their ‘first’ names is another clueto the barriers and implied social statusseparating the groups.

Obstacles arose almost as soon as thecouple had decided to spend their livestogether. The bureaucracy of the CMStook over and they had to seek permissionfrom the Board to marry. The Board wasreluctant to give it because they advisedAlf that Katie was too old. The couple werenot allowed any time alone and anotherstaff member was always required to bepresent as chaperon. At about the sametime, Katie went south on furlough. Thecouple corresponded enthusiastically butbecause of the circumstances, the lettersoften took months to reach their destina-tion. Their letters illustrate their love andpassion but at the same time are excellentaccounts of their daily life. Finally theywere together at the same time and place,Roper River mission, and in May 1917 aday was scheduled for the marriage to takeplace. Unfortunately Warren woke up sickand asked Alf and Katie to put it off untilhe felt better. Alf went out to work in thegarden but came in to lunch, where theyhad to eat the wedding breakfast, as thefood would not keep. Just as they wereeating, Warren walked in with a blanketover his head and said he would marrythem. The ceremony took place outside,under a tree. Alf and Katie then rode toMission Gorge and spent a week alone inthe hut for their honeymoon. 34

34


Dick Harris who met them later intheir lives described them as follows:

Rev AJ and Mrs Dyer were a ratherunique couple. Mr Dyer ‘Alf’ … wasa delightful personality and obvi-ously a man of God – 46 years of ageof slight built and medium height –a very close clipped head and faircomplexion… Reckless to a degree,with a ‘try anything once’ attitudetowards his practical work. MrsDyer … or ‘Katie’ … was a remark-able woman of God – trained as aseamstress and in midwifery – wasscrupulous, meticulous and econom-ical … Mrs Dyer was ten yearssenior to her husband, whom sheadored … The Dyers did not enjoyrobust health and the only way theycould keep going was by taking threeor four days complete rest in bed ... 35

Alf Dyer was a kind of holy fool whoappeared to blunder through life often atodds with people but speaking a kind oftruth. At times he was a great advocate ofcorporal punishment for Aboriginal peoplewho transgressed mission or secular law.He used to grimace and make funny facesor jump out and startle people as a joke.In the 1930s in an interview with southernjournalists about a proposal for missionaryinvolvement to investigate some deaths inArnhem Land, possibly forestalling apunitive expedition, he outlined hisstrategy for defusing tension by taking atoy squeaker to make people laugh. 36 Aperson who had known him well de-scribed him to me in unflattering terms,stressing the irritating nature of his person-ality. 37 This was the man of Katie Crome’s

dreams and the face of first CMS mission-ary contact at Groote Eylandt.

What metaphors did Alf Dyer use tomake sense of his worldview? Like Katie,all his actions and beliefs were driven bya passionate conviction in Christianity. Aseccentric a free spirit as Dyer appeared tobe, he was nonetheless subject to the samekinds of stresses of mission life as the oth-ers. Dyer roamed freely through all spacesseemingly free from the liminal boundariesthat constrained his fellows but soughtsolace in the high places. Dyer wrote: ‘AtRoper & Oenpelli I always loved to go tothe Mt [Mountain] top to pray and watchthe sun go down on your problems to singsome hymns, & watch the stars come out& think what a Father you had …’ 38

Connie Bush, who grew up on the CMSmission at Groote Eylandt told me thatwhenever they saw lights at night, someof the children might become afraid, butthe older children would say, ‘Don’t befrightened; it’s just Mr Dyer praying.’ 39

Like the hill at Mission Gorge, climb-ing up offered both solitude and anotherperspective on mission life. About a kilo-metre away from Oenpelli mission is arocky outcrop rising above the plainscalled Arrkuluk which is a sacred site forthe Aboriginal people of the region. Thefocal point of the site is on the top of thehill and it is associated with a goosedreaming. The area around the base of the hill is still used for ceremonial activities. 40 This is the place where Dyerwould climb to pray and gain a new per-spective on things. He wrote:

Argoolook, a hill 600 feet high be-came my choice as it was near thestation and easy to climb and thestation lay at my feet. The diffi-culties seemed so little then and the

35


Universe above so vast and God soAlmighty, who calleth the stars bynames. I put a big cross on the topof the rock and bolted it togetherwith an iron bolt but lightning splitit to pieces. I suppose the powers ofdarkness hate the cross, so I put upanother with a wooden pin in andthat was standing when I left …. 41

George Chaloupka, pre-eminent rockart expert recorded an image near theOenpelli site of: ‘A rock painting of a mis-sionary with a sharp-featured face andupraised arm’. Dr Chaloupka said that thisimage has been identified as that ofDyer. 42 Significantly though, he alsoadds that this portrait ‘heralds … the lastera of contact’ in rock art. 43 For this isthe last period that Aboriginal people inthe area continued to record contemporaryevents and images in rock art. The mission-aries were more successful than they per-haps realised initially.

Attempts to convert Aboriginal peoplein Arnhem Land to Christianity by theCMS took place within an active programof evangelism for much of the twentiethcentury. In the initial years, however, thegeographical, educational, philosophicaland experiential differences between mis-sionary field staff and the Board led to ahighly individualised approach to thework. But in the process the missionariesbecame active agents for a settled villagelifestyle. As the Berndts succinctly put it:

The basic intention was to changethe socio-cultural systems and theindividual lives of the people withwhom they worked. It was notsimply to Christianise them, becauseChristianisation was seen as insep-arable from the trapping of the

overall life-style in which the mis-sionaries themselves lived … 44

In the push to evangelise and institutea village settlement lifestyle, both mission-aries and Aborigines occupied a continu-ally negotiated space, marked by mutualisolation. The repeated binary images usedby the missionaries, both in their officialand personal writing, of light and dark-ness, mission and camp, hills and plains,white and black, God and the devil, civil-isation and nature, reveal an unconsciousrecognition of the disparity and mutualexclusiveness of the two groups. In thewritings of both Katie Crome and Alf Dyer,it can be seen that each group had a com-pletely separate agenda. Perhaps the moststriking image of the encounters is that ofDyer, climbing to the top of Arrkuluk tolook down on the mission from afar. In hisprayers and meditations, he erected thecross with the iron support that was imme-diately struck by lightning. Dyer wascompletely unaware that the space, whichhe saw as God’s alone, was already occu-pied and continues to be occupied by, thespiritual elements of the Aboriginal peoplehe came to minister to. 45

No one could doubt the piety, sincer-ity and industry that Katie Crome and AlfDyer brought to the people they min-istered to. But they were also aware of theimplications of the strong cultural agenda.As John Harris noted: ‘Christian faith wasnot distinguished from Western lifestyleand CMS was, like the Catholic and Meth-odist missionary organisations, engagedin social change …’ 46 Although Dyer sawthe introduction of work for payment asa benefit, he deplored that the wages wereoften spent on gambling or alcohol. 47

Dyer recognised the problem of introduceddisease, but argued that this meant that

36


‘our medical help’ was therefore essen-tial. 48 Without any apparent irony at all,he observed: ‘I hope the Government doessomething to see they bank some of themoney for a home & their old age … Whata difference modern man can make in thelife of a native who never gambled & onlydrank water!’

The introduction of dormitory accom-modation, weakening of the promise wifesystem, use of written and spoken English,village settlement and so on, were power-ful determinants in the longer-term pro-cess to subsume the Arnhem Land Abori-ginal people within an Anglo-economicand social model. These changes, imple-mented throughout the first half of thetwentieth century, span the periodcovered in this paper. Alf and Katie servedin Arnhem Land until the decade of the1930s, when Katie became ill and they hadto travel south to Sydney. After seventeenyears of loving marriage, Katie died ofcancer in 1940. Alf remarried in 1949. Hedied in 1968 as a result of a car acci-dent. 49

Through the writings of individualmissionaries, pictures of real peopleemerge with idiosyncrasies and feelings.What are less clear are the pictures of theindividual Aboriginal people. It is a clichéto say that the two groups were worldsapart, but, in the early period at least, Ithink it is reasonable to assume that themissionaries and the Aborigines remained,at times well loved, but ultimately, aliento each other.

NOTES ON APPROACH

I returned to this topic of a history ofmissionary endeavour in Arnhem Land 50

after research on a number of unrelated

projects. Coming back to topics where youhave done a lot of work can be both famil-iar and off-putting. In my earlier researchI was looking for the big picture. ArnhemLand is a big geographical area and mis-sionary incursion highly significant interms of contact history. Previously I hadbeen looking for issues of commonality,sweeping experiences, policies, legislationand major movements. For this paper Ichose a more micro approach.

Arguably policy for missionary endeav-our in Arnhem Land, particularly in theperiod prior to World War Two, was un-formed and haphazard. 51 The reality wasthat it was difficult to find individuals,with both adequate experience and appro-priate religious conviction, to go to remotelocalities in Arnhem Land charged withthe task of, not only conversion to Christi-an spirituality, but settled agrarian life-style as well. It was intended at RoperRiver station, for example, that the ‘mis-sion should be industrial and agriculturalas well as educational and spiritual’. 52

The missionaries might number five or six,in a larger community of, at times perhapstwo hundred or more. The mechanism forthe administration of the mission, oftenlocated in a southern capital, was admin-istered by people who might never haveeven been to Arnhem Land or have anyexperience of the Aboriginal people wholived there. As Dick Harris noted: ‘OurSociety … appoints men to the key posi-tion of Secretary to Aborigines Departmentwho have no practical experience on themissions.’ 53 The policy makers and thepractitioners, were mostly worlds apart.

The Anglican Church has been at timesdefensive about the role of the missions innorth Australia, seeing them as the targetfor ‘ill informed and unwarranted criti-

37


cism’. 54 I did not want to look at the roleof missions in north Australia as a whole,but rather to look closely at one or two,specifically the writings of Alf Dyer andKatie Crome. I doubt whether it is possibleto then extrapolate this evidence into thatof missionaries elsewhere or in other peri-ods of work. But in the writing, particu-larly in their use of metaphor to describetheir conditions, it is possible to seethrough Alf and Katie, aspects of the mis-sionary worldview at that time.

I chose Alf Dyer and Katie Crome notsimply because of their engaging eccentri-city. These two form a useful study for anumber of reasons. Firstly, they beganwork at the crucial first contact stage ofmissionary endeavour. Later missionarywork would be less individually contem-plative and more controlled in terms oftransmission and persuasion to Christiansettlement and spirituality. The secondreason they are an interesting study is be-cause they served at a number of sitescontrolled by the CMS in Arnhem Land.Another reason they provide a valuableperspective, is because Katie Crome cameto missionary work of her own volitionand not as partner for a male missionaryand their writings represent an opportun-ity to examine their accounts from a cross-gender perspective. In addition, theirviews are well represented. Alf Dyer,particularly, wrote a great deal about histime in the field and whenever apart, theywrote long letters to each other that in-cluded a lot of information about theirdaily life. Finally, they provide evidenceof the individual impact of missionarywork, rather than attempting to generalisethe cultural impact upon Aboriginalpeople as a whole.

ENDNOTES

1 I am most grateful to the following people for as-sistance with the development of this paper: at theChurch Missionary Society in Sydney, Canon DrDavid Claydon, and in Darwin, the Reverend BarryButler; at the Northern Territory Archives Servicethanks to Search Room staff Francoise Barr and KathyFlint; at the Northern Territory Aboriginal AreasProtection Authority, thanks to Registrar BarryRenshaw. Thanks also to my colleagues at the Mu-seum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, PinaGiuliani, George Chaloupka and Peter Spillett. Fi-nally, to Herbert and Valmae Freilich, the FreilichFoundation and the Humanities Research Centre, TheAustralian National University, for sponsoring theconference where this paper was first presented.2 Kathy De La Rue, The Evolution of Darwin, 1869-1911 , Darwin, Charles Darwin University Press,2004, p. 1.3 De La Rue notes that the settlement started in 1869that was to become the modern city of Darwin wasthe fifth attempt by Europeans to settle the northcoast of Australia, The Evolution of Darwin , p. 1.4 See for example J. Woolmington, Early Christianmissions to the Australian Aborigines – Study infailure, PhD thesis, University of New England, 1979.5 Argus, 22 November 1906, p. 8.6 Northern Territory Times , 10 May 1901; 28 June1901.7 When Baldwin Spencer visited the site in 1911, hedid not note much apart from the name, W. BaldwinSpencer, 1928, Wandering in Wild Australia , Lon-don, MacMillan, 2 vols, p. 855.8 R. D. Joynt, Ten Years’ Work at the Roper RiverMission Station Northern Territory Australia , Mel-bourne, Church Missionary Society, VictorianBranch, 1918, pp. 3, 7.9 C. Sharp, ‘Extracts from a letter from Mr. Sharp’,The Aborigine , 3, 1909, p. 10.10 R. D. Joynt, Ten Years’ Work at the Roper RiverMission Station Northern Territory Australia , Mel-bourne, Church Missionary Society, VictorianBranch, 1918, pp. 3, 7.11 R. D. Joynt, Ten Years’ Work at the Roper RiverMission Station Northern Territory Australia , Mel-bourne, Church Missionary Society, VictorianBranch, 1918, pp. 6, 7.12 R. D. Joynt, ‘Extracts from Mr Joynt’s letter,Roper River 27 July 1909’, The Aborigine , 3, 1909,p. 11.

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13 Peter Spillett, Christ Church Darwin, NT: An il-lustrated history from the days of early settlement,Darwin, Christ Church Rectory, n.d. c. 1960, pp.24–5.14 Biographical details on Alf Dyer and Mary Crome,excluding original sources cited separately are fromKeith Cole, Oenpelli Pioneer: A Biography of the Rev-erend Alfred John Dyer Pioneer Missionary Among theAborigines in Arnhem Land and Founder of the OenpelliMission, Melbourne, Church Missionary HistoricalPublications, 1972; and also Keith Cole, ‘Dyer, AlfredJohn’, pp. 84–86 and ‘Crome (later Dyer) MaryCatherine’ p. 69, David Carment, Robyn Maynard,Alan Powell (eds), Northern Territory Dictionary ofBiography, Darwin, Northern Territory UniversityPress, Vol. 1, 96 pp.15 The Roper Station was relocated to higher groundto, what has become known since 1968, Ngukurrfollowing severe floods in 1940 when the communitywas inundated.16 For example, Mary went ‘across to the camp withMr Warren’ to check on the welfare of the peoplethere and noted one baby who was not doing well.This baby was brought into the mission the next day7–8 May 1914. Mary ‘went over to the camp withmedicine’ 25 July 1914. On 9 August 1914, Mary at-tended the ‘camp service’ when Miss Tinney had abad sore throat. Journal of Mary Crome, NorthernTerritory Archives Service (NTAS) NTRS 693/1.17 Crome, op. cit., 23–24 November 1913.18 This was not peculiar to Mary Crome though. ‘Itis probably true to say that most of the early mission-aries did not recognize Aboriginal ritual and mytho-logy as being religious. If they did, it was certainlynot in the same way they categorized Christianity.Nevertheless, they regarded it as a force to bereckoned with …’ Ronald M. Berndt and CatherineH. Berndt, ‘Body and soul: more than an episode!’ inTony Swain and Deborah Bird Rose (eds), AboriginalAustralians and Christian Missions: Ethnographic andHistorical Studies, Bedford Park, Australian Associ-ation for the Study of Regions, 1988, p. 48.19 Crome, op. cit., 8 [December 1913].20 Crome, op. cit., 17–18 January 1914.21 Dick Harris, ‘Rev Canon G. R. Harris CMS Mission-ary in Northern Australia 1929-65’, NTAS NTRS 694,p. 86.22 Crome, op. cit., 1–2 May 1914.23 Crome, op. cit., 4 May 1914.24 Crome, op. cit., 26 July 1914.25 Dyer, Rev. Alfred J., letter Mary Dyer to Alf Dyer,17 March 1923, ms, NTAS NTRS 693.26 Crome, op. cit., 7–18 September 1914.

27 See for example, The Aborigine, 1, 1908, p. 4; TheAborigine, 3, 1909, p. 11; R. D. Joynt, Ten Years’Work at the Roper River Mission Station NorthernTerritory Australia, Melbourne, Church MissionarySociety, Victorian Branch, 1918.28 See for the example, the kind of observations inThe Australian Stone Age Men: A Black People Askfor a Fair Deal in a Fair Country, n.d., anon, p. 9,‘Their Religion. It is a low form. They seem to wor-ship the things God has created … They know andfear the Devil Devil, and evil spirits. They are verysuperstitious; they use the magic bone which issometimes called the death bone … A person maybe sung dead by one of his own tribe’ in Cole, NTASNTRS 694.29 Crome, op. cit., 15 January 1914.30 Alf Dyer, ‘Early days at Oenpelli Mission, EastAlligator River’, NTAS, p. 27, NTRS 693/P1.31 Crome, op. cit., 7 July 1914.32 Crome, op. cit., 17 October 1914.33 John Harris, One Blood, Sutherland, NSW, Al-batross Books, 1994, p. 713.34 Cole, op. cit., pp. 30–1.35 Dick Harris, op. cit., p. 23.36 Writer Andrew McMillan offers an interestingperspective on Dyer’s comments: ‘I can relate to hisuse of a tin squeaker. On a couple of occasions onthe Warumpi Band’s Big name no blankets tour in1985 potential bloodshed was averted when I brokeinto a Janis Joplin-inspired falsetto ‘Oh Lordy, won’tyou buy me a diesoline Toyota; All my friends havegot Land Cruisers; And this old ute she’s got a bustedmotor.’ Laughing at a white loony certainly easedthe tension among guys who were ready to tear eachother apart’. Andrew McMillan, An Intruder’s Guideto East Arnhem Land, Potts Point, Duffy andSnellgrove, 2001, p. 138.37 Between about 1984 and 1994 I undertook re-search on Arnhem Land and events which involvedinterviews with Fred Gray, founder of Umbakumbacommunity on Groote Eylandt but who knew Dyerafter they met in 1934. Fred Gray, a gentle seriousman, found Alf Dyer to be highly eccentric and ex-tremely annoying. This estimation is probably con-firmed by the CMS’s initial hesitation in acceptinghim for missionary work since he was so dedicatedand qualified.38 Dyer, ‘Description of first …’ p. 82.39 Connie Bush was brought up at Groote Eylandt.She was uncompromising in her condemnation ofaspects of the mission administration of the ‘Half-caste’ station at Emerald River. She told me storiesof systematic cruelty and abuse by some staff mem-

39


bers (although not the Warrens or the Dyers whomshe adored), that are supported by other accounts ofthe Groote Eylandt station at the time. Typescript ofinterview with Connie Bush, 21 June 1987, and in-formal conversation with the author; see also BillHarney’s description of first meeting his wife to be.‘As I watched those children and girls playing aboutthe mission, it seemed to me that a terrible thing thatthese people should have been taken away from theirparents … The first time I saw my wife, Linda, sheand other girls were hauling on a rope, dragging ajinker that carried a log of cypress timber for thesawmill.’ W. E. Harney, North of 23o, Sydney, Aus-tralasian Publishing Co, n.d., p. 155. Connie herselfwas not immune from the ideological construct ofthe missions though. In a letter to Mr and Mrs Dyershe, ever the feminist, wrote: ‘We need your prayers,and those of your friends to make these people giveup their evil ways, especially the little girls who aretaken for wives.’ Letter to Mr and Mrs Dyer, fromConstance Turner, Groote Eylandt, 7 December 1938,quoted in ‘The Story of Groote Eylandt’, NTAS NTRS693.40 Barry Renshaw, Registrar, Aboriginal Areas Pro-tection Authority, email to the author, 21 November2001.41 Dyer, ‘Early days ... ’, Dick Harris also reportedthat he ‘found myself, quite often, particularly onSaturday afternoon or Sundays, climbing Argulug,simply “to get away from things” and to spend anhour or so – and sometimes hours – as a quiet time’.Dick Harris, op. cit., p. 28.42 George Chaloupka, pers. comm. 3 December 2001.43 George Chaloupka, Journey in Time, Chatswood,Reed Publishing, 1993, p. 203.44 Berndt and Berndt, op. cit., p. 45.45 It is difficult to understand exactly how mission-aries such as Dyer or Mary Crome viewed the Abori-ginal belief system. There was respect for objectsassociated with ritual, particularly funerary. Dyerwent to some lengths to record Aboriginal creationstories, but they seem to have been accorded the kindof status Europeans would give to Grimm or otherfolk tales. He wrote: ‘The old beliefs of the Abori-gines in Animalism is no match for [the] Glory of Godand His creative acts in creation and Redemption.’Dyer, ‘Early Days ... ’, p. 27.46 John Harris, op. cit., p. 729.47 Alf Dyer, ‘Description of first party to GrooteEylandt’, NTAS, NTRS, 693/P1.48 Dyer, ‘Early days ... ’, no page number.49 Keith Cole, ‘Dyer, after John 1884–1968’, in DavidCarment, Robyn Maynard, Alan Powell (eds),

Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography , Vol. 1,Darwin, NTU Press, 1990, p. 85.50 See for example: Mickey Dewar, ‘Strange bedfel-lows: Europeans and Aborigines in Arnhem Landbefore World War II’, MA (Hons) thesis, Universityof New England, 1989; Mickey Dewar, The BlackWar in Arnhem Land, Darwin, North Australian Re-search Unit Australian National University, 1992.51 This is confirmed by Dick Harris’s account. Hejoined Alf Dyer and Mary Crome at Oenpelli in 1929and provides some of the best accounts of them andtheir lives. He noted, ‘At the time [1929] there wasno clearly defined “policy” for Aboriginal work,either Government or Mission’, Dick Harris, op. cit.,p. 18.52 John Harris, op. cit., p. 701.53 Dick Harris, op. cit., p. 20.54 Keith Cole, A History of Oenpelli, Darwin, Nungal-inya Publications, 1975, p. 18.

40


MUTUAL CONVERSION?

THE METHODIST CHURCH AND THE YOLŊU, WITH PARTICULARREFERENCE TO YIRRKALA

HOWARD MORPHY

INTRODUCTION: BEGINNINGSAND BIASES

Ahistory of the Methodist OverseasMission in Arnhem Land has yet to

be written. The resources for such a taskare immensely rich, including archivalsources and the writings of the missionar-ies themselves. While not possessing itsown historian, as the Anglican missionsdo in the person of Reverend Keith Cole, 1 the Methodist Church produceda number of educated and passionate su-perintendents who wrote detailed accountsof their times and experiences. Yirrkalaalone had at least three, in Wilbur Chaseling, 2 Harold Thornell 3 and Edgar Wells 4 . This paper is very mucha preliminary excursion into the arena; itis not a history or a case study but rathera proposition, supported by evidence fromdifferent sources and periods; an argumentthat comes, perhaps a little too intuitively,out of my own sense of the history ofnorth east Arnhem Land. It is an argumentthat develops in a complementay mannerto other, received, viewpoints that are inthemselves undoubtedly oversimplifiedand open to challenge—the sense that theneighbouring Anglican and Catholic mis-sions were less positive in their view of

Aboriginal religion and culture, and weremore likely than the Methodist Church tointroduce potentially destructive institu-tions such as the dormitory system andthe banning of traditional ceremonialpractices (see Mickey Dewar, this issue).Yet in most respects the Anglican andCatholic Churches have been equallystrong in their advocacy of Aboriginalrights.

The title of my paper, 'mutual conver-sion', exaggerates the case but perhapsonly a little. There were some intolerantMethodists, who viewed Aboriginal prac-tices simply as heathen forms. There weremissionary linguists who refused totranslate Indigenous songs or documentbark paintings — the sanctity of writtenYolŋu had to be preserved for the produc-tion of biblical texts. Religious toleranceapplies more to some times and some indi-viduals than others, but as encountersbetween Aborigines and missionaries go,that between the Yolŋu and the MethodistOverseas Mission was a relatively fortu-nate one. If bigotry can be defined by itsresistance to argument, by its failure tosee the other point of view, by its anti-pathy to choice, then the MethodistChurch in Arnhem Land provides a poorexample. Indeed the case is not so much

41

an illustration of bigotry as of its opposite,which must involve tolerance and respectbut may also include doubt and uncer-tainty.

The paper is very much a preliminaryexercise; it is also partial, perhaps in twosenses. It is partial in that I have not fullyexplored the documentary record. I de-pend too much on published materials,supported by recorded interviews withthe protagonists. I need to do much morework in the archives. My account may alsobe partial in the second sense that I ambiased by my relationship with the mission-aries I have met and by the historical con-text of my own research. I first visitednorth east Arnhem Land in 1973 in thecompany of the Reverend Edgar Wells andhis wife Anne. Edgar had applied to theAustralian Institute of Aboriginal Studiesfor a grant to redocument bark paintingscollected by the founding missionary, theReverend Wilbur Chaseling. The Institutegave him a grant on condition that I, anewly arrived researcher from England,was allowed to accompany him. We spenta week at Yirrkala and a week at Miling-imbi. Yirrkala had been established in 1935and Milingimbi, the first mission in theYolŋu region, in 1926. Edgar Wells hadspent 10 years as superintendent atMilingimbi and was stationed at Yirrkaladuring 1962 and 1963. Wells had workedclosely with the people of Yirrkala to fightthe granting of a lease to mine bauxiteover their lands and played a significantrole in the battle for land rights. I admiredhim for what he had done and we got onvery well. However his return visit wasalso charged with tension. Some peoplehad found Edgar a difficult man. At thetime of the Yirrkala crisis he maintainedstrict control over his European staff,

censoring their correspondence and forbid-ding them to speak with government offi-cials. He believed that the government andthe mission were involved in a conspiracyto grant the mining lease and did not trustanybody. 5 He was probably right aboutthe conspiracy, but the way he handledthe situation alienated him from some ofhis own staff. As a consequence he re-ceived a cool reception from the missionstaff at Yirrkala, in direct contrast to hisreception at Milingimbi and to the warmthwith which he was received by Yolŋu atboth places.

The other source of bias is in Yolŋumemories of the past. I have no direct dataon what Yolŋu thought of the missionariesbefore my fieldwork began in the 1970s.My work in the Roper Valley suggests thatpeople often create a golden age in contrastto the present which over-emphasises theharmonious state of relationships in thepast. 6 In the Roper Valley the period ofthe 1930s to the 1950s was portrayed as aGolden Age sandwiched between thekilling times of the African and Asian ColdStorage Company and the confrontationalrelationship that developed in the 1960s,after equal award wages had been grantedto Aboriginal workers on cattle stations.In the Arnhem Land case there was differ-ent bread in the sandwich. The time priorto the establishment of the mission wasalso a time of violence, involving bothconfrontation with outsiders and inter-clanwarfare, and the 1970s brought the miningtown and almost catastrophic disruptionto Yolŋu life. It is quite likely that thisbiased oral accounts in the missionaries’favour.

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THE DIALOGUE COMMENCES

In this paper I aim to outline the his-tory of interactions between Yolŋu andmissionaries, in particular highlightingdiscourse over religion and cultural values.My primary focus is on Yirrkala, the lastmission to be established in easternArnhem Land. Mission stations had beengradually established along the ArnhemLand coast during the first half of the lastcentury. They spread out from the areasof earliest European settlement towardsthose areas beyond the frontier. TheMethodist Overseas Mission moved fromthe west to east along the north coast, fromGoulburn Island to Milingimbi and ElchoIsland, and the Church of England movednorth from cattle country in the RoperValley to Groote Island. A mission stationor two in the region of Yirrkala and Cale-don Bay were the next ones to be planned.The planning process was given addedimpetus by what has come to be knownas the Caledon Bay killings. 7 In the 1930speople from Caledon Bay and Blue MudBay killed a number of outsiders on theirland, including the crew of a Japanesepearling lugger at Caledon Bay in 1933. Apolice party was sent out to investigate,and this led to the killing of one of theparty, Constable McColl, on Woodah Is-land in the north of Blue Mud Bay. Origin-ally there was pressure from the police tosend in an expeditionary force to takecontrol of the area and ‘teach the blacks alesson’. 8 The Anglican Church led by theReverend Warren of Groote Eylandt, to-gether with the Methodists strongly res-isted the idea and convinced the federalgovernment to follow a very differentcourse of action. 9 The anthropologistDonald Thomson was sent to Arnhem Land

to uncover the concerns of the Yolŋupeople and the Methodist Overseas Mis-sion was given the go-ahead to establisha station at Yirrkala, overruling the claimsof the Church Missionary Society.

It was decided to locate the settlementat Yirrkala, because it had an excellentpermanent water supply and was in asheltered location with apparent potentialfor developing gardens. The foundationmissionary was Wilbur Chaseling, whoarrived with his wife in 1935. The contextof the founding of the mission was signi-ficant: Yolŋu had found the previous fewyears very stressful because of the increasein violent encounters with outsiders, thearrests of clan members and the threatposed by the police. 10 At the same timethere had been an increase in clan warfare,probably exacerbated by the encroach-ment of Europeans in the south and west.Yolŋu today recall that Wonggu and otherclan leaders made a conscious decision tomake peace with outsiders rather thancontinue hostilities, and the missionariespresented themselves as peacemakers.Chaseling was surprised by the speed withwhich Yolŋu moved to settle in the mis-sion. When I interviewed Chaseling in1973 about the early years of Yirrkala atone point he asked rhetorically: 11

Why did they come? For curiosity,medical benefits, and because wewere a new type of people — notpolice, Macassans, pearlers, Japan-ese — a new type of personwithout guns, working for theirbenefit, curing little children suf-fering from yaws — within a fewweeks the scales falling off.

Yolŋu moved to the mission station oftheir own free will and with no suggestion

43

Mutual Conversion?

that they had been conquered or hadceded any rights to outsiders. Equally im-portant was the fact that the governmenthad transferred effective authority to themissionaries, who became a de facto instru-ment of government, administering theregion and introducing a system of locallaw. Their presence solved a major prob-lem for the government; the area was paci-fied with no loss of life and administeredwith little cost to the budget. Yet althoughthey carried out the functions of govern-ment the missionaries presented them-selves as being independent of it. For mostof the subsequent life of the mission themissionaries saw themselves operating asrepresentatives of the Yolŋu people ratherthan of the central government. Indeed inYolŋu discourse missionaries were opposedto government men and, interestingly,when the government sent Bill Grey, apatrol officer, to be their first permanentrepresentative to the region in 1963, themissionaries insisted that he camp in acaravan outside the settlement. Grey wassent as a government representative in re-sponse to the protests by Yolŋu and mis-sionaries over the bauxite mining propos-als. 12

The trajectory of the mission at Yir-rkala was set by the earlier practice estab-lished at Goulburn Island and in particularat Milingimbi under the auspices ofTheodore Webb. Webb showed a deepinterest in Aboriginal culture. He had anumber of motivations for this: he be-lieved that effective missionisation couldonly occur with a background of culturalknowledge; he realised that craft produc-tion provided a potential source of extern-al income; and he realised the need to in-form the Mission’s supporters in thesouthern States about the Yolŋu way of

life, both to gain support and rid them ofmisconceptions. 13 All of these motiva-tions however presupposed a respect for,or at least an understanding of theautonomous nature of, Aboriginal culture.By the time Chaseling was preparing toleave for his vocation, the Methodist Mis-sion was encouraging their senior staff tolearn some anthropology under ProfessorA. P. Elkin at Sydney University.

A number of the missionaries have written books on their life among the Yolŋu: Webb, 14 Chaseling, 15

Thornell 16 and Anne Wells. 17 Thebooks combine lay ethnographic accountsof the Yolŋu way of life and semi-autobio-graphical accounts of mission life, but theyalso contain reflective passages that outlinethe main aims and aspirations of the mis-sionaries. Two themes come acrossstrongly and consistently, a Protestantwork ethic and religious tolerance. MickeyDewar 18 has drawn attention to theformer theme and I will only briefly alludeto it here. There was a strong belief in thedignity of labour, linked to a quasi-evolu-tionary theory that it was necessary to leadYolŋu from the state of hunting and gath-ering through agriculture to a broaderparticipation in the Australian economy.This economic transformation was not seenas being incompatible with respect forAboriginal culture, and indeed the inten-tion was to build on the Indigenous skillsbase. These aims were explicit in Chasel-ing’s and his successor Thornell's policies.In my interview with him Chaselingstated:

I started them painting craft with-in a week or so of arriving. I estab-lished the principle that I wouldgive them nothing free - nothingexcept medicine. If they were to

44


get things they had to work. I sentthings only to museums andcharged them the price I paid plusfreight - I sent tons of stuff down.I realised that we had to start somekind of industry and craft seemedthe most obvious one, even if I hadto burn some of the things pro-duced at first I had to do it. 19

Tolerance and understanding of Abori-ginal culture combined with an agenda ofeconomic development were developed aspolicies at the Yirrkala Synod of 1938.According to Thornell 'It was realised thatsooner or later contact with our cultureand economic way of life was inevit-able’. 20 The policy was to prepare themwithout harming their culture: 'It was im-portant to respect Aboriginal culture in-stead of destroying it, important to betterunderstand the culture, and to learn anduse the Aboriginal language. One othervital point was that there were to be nohand outs. Nothing would be given unlessit was earned.' 21

Chaseling’s and Thornell’s attitudes toYolŋu religious practice were generallypositive. In his book Yulengor publishedin 1957 with a preface by A. P. Elkin,Chaseling wrote:

(It) seemed only reasonable at Yir-rkala to preserve Yulengor[Yolngu] culture. To encourage therevival of old ceremonies, and tostimulate in the people an appreci-ation of their own social organiza-tion which often suffered fromalien contact. It is unjust for anyalien to come amongst primitivepeople for the purpose of upsettingtheir mode of life and convertingthem to thinking as he does.

In my interview with Chaseling hesaid:

I found close parallels between theChristian religion and Yolngu reli-gion. In fact when I first arrived Ifound that there was more for meto learn. I was able to gain insightsinto the significance of religion inits natural context and on the basisof their own beliefs I was able tobegin to introduce the Christiangospel. To lead them one step at atime to the acceptance of theteachings of our Lord. I found itdifficult at first - but they wentaway, talked among themselvesand applied it. 22

Chaseling’s words are echoed in those ofanother missionary, the Fijian Fuata Taito,based at Goulburn Island in the 1940s:‘Some of these customs could be used as astep towards Christianity, instead of ourtelling them it is foolish to follow cus-toms’. 23 In much of the writings ofMethodist missionaries of the time thereis an often unspoken tension between us-ing Indigenous religion as part of the pro-cess of conversion and recognising valuein Aboriginal religious practice.

THE DISCOURSE DEVELOPS

Chaseling gave me an example of thereligious discourse he conducted withYolŋu elders. He drew an analogy betweenone of the sets of ancestral beings of theDhuwa moiety—the Djan’kawu—andChristian cosmology:

You have your Djan’kawu and wehave ours - ours was the God ofthe Old Testament - yours mademistakes and so did ours. Our God

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Mutual Conversion?

sent Christ to show us what thosemistakes were and the Wangarr[Ancestral Beings] sent you thebalanda and the balanda [whitepeople] can tell you the wholetruth. For example our God of theOld Testament talked of an eye foran eye and a tooth for a tooth —just like your Djan’kawu encour-aged you to take revenge — killone of twins, although there wasplenty of food for everyone.Wangarr sent Jesus to teach youand your children that this iswrong - find a greater sense of in-dependence, as I said you knowthe facts - go and work them out. 24

His arguments reflect a liberal Protest-ant theology that is in its own terms op-posed to bigotry, allowing a degree of in-dividual freedom to make decisions on thebasis of knowledge and experience.

This interest went beyond what wasnecessary to convert Yolŋu to Christianity,and had from early on hints of syncretismor perhaps even religious pluralism thathave subsequently come to characteriseYolŋu religious practice. In YulengorChaseling writes appreciatively aboutAboriginal religion, arguing for continuityto be maintained. He argued that in orderto win people's confidence there must bean appreciation of their religion as religionpermeates all aspects of Aboriginal life,‘and determines even his methods of foodgathering and cooking … the simplestactivities are linked to his highest beliefsand noblest aspirations.’ The customs arelinked together in a systematic way andcannot be tampered with without endan-gering the whole structure of life. ‘An ef-

fective approach to the nomad can bemade only on the basis of religion’. 25

While this certainly reflects Chasel-ing’s approach at the time he also acknow-ledged that the passage of time influencedhis attitudes. Writing to Ed Ruhe in 1965about art production during his time atYirrkala he said: ‘I find this whole subjectthe more fascinating with the passing ofyears, much in the same way as I becomemore interested in the developing philo-sophy and theology of these people whomI knew so well in the Yirrkala area.’ 26

The syncretic dimension, but alsoperhaps the retrospective romanticism,comes out clearly in the following passagefrom Thornell reflecting on a culturalperformance he witnessed when he re-turned to Yirrkala in 1979, 30 years afterhe had left:

We were at Yirrkala on 6 Julywhen the town celebrated NationalAborigines day, and Aboriginesof all ages, plus some white onlook-ers, gathered together in a clearingnear the primary school for authen-tic native dancing to the beat ofclap-sticks and the sound of thedrone pipe. I was strongly re-minded of the nightly singingaround the campfire long ago.There isn’t so much ceremonialdancing and singing now, espe-cially among young people. Itwould be a great pity if it were al-lowed to die out, for it is a uniqueform of artistic expression. Amongthe young people of Yirrkala nowthere is a different kind of singing.Most nights they gather around abonfire — to simulate the atmo-sphere of the tribal campfire —but instead of ceremonial singing

46


and dancing the young people singhymns learnt on Church gather-ings. There is an air of spontaneityabout it ... a young man may reada passage from the Bible ... anothermay give an impromptu sermon.Yet there is nothing over emotionalabout it. After all spiritual thingshave been vital to the Aboriginesfrom time beyond thought. Theonly difference is that these youngpeople have chosen Christianity.I see no reason why Christianityand the traditional cultural songs and dances cannot exist togeth-er. 27

And indeed had Thornell's visit to theregion been more prolonged he wouldhave again heard ‘the singing around thecampfire’ and realised that many Yolŋushared his view on the co-existence ofChristianity with Yolŋu religion. Daym-balipu Mununggurr, talking to Ian Dunlopin 1974 expressed the relationship in thefollowing words: ‘This time is a little bitdifferent because there are two ways wesee. One is the Christian way, one is ourlaw, the Aboriginal law. These laws do nothate each other. We like to make a goodlaw, leading to peaceful ways’. 28

This dialogue between Yolŋu religionand Christianity set in motion in the firstyears of missionisation has had a continu-ing impact over time. We do not havedirect evidence of how Yolŋu respondedto Chaseling and the role that they took incarrying the syncretic dialogue forward.We do not know what challenges theremight have been to the positioning ofDjan'kawu as an Old Testament figure.However there are hints in Chaseling'swritings:

Several old men were talking to-gether and invited me to jointhem. One of them said: 'We likethose stories of Jesus that you tellus: He is white man's Junkgowa[Djan'kawu]. Our Junkgowa camefrom the Wangarr and we can seenow that, in the same way, Jesusis the Whiteman's Junkgowa. 29

However, the theological discoursethat we can imagine occurring from thebeginning has remained a strong compon-ent of Yolŋu culture. In 1982 Ian Dunlopfilmed a fellowship meeting of youngYolŋu sitting talking, playing the guitarand drinking kava. Wuyuwa Mununggurrled the discussion with her husband DjokiYunupingu.

She began by posing a question:‘What law does this sacred dillybag hold, compared with the lawof the Bible? What do they bothrepresent, what do you see inthese two?’

Djoki continued: ‘They both haveequal status, both are sacred theyare both telling the same. TheBible tells us sacred stories and thesame with the dilly bags, they tellus about the sacred law.’

Wuyuwa: ‘True.’

Chorus of young people: ‘Yes!’

Wuyuwa: ‘When people dance or[the dilly bag] is brought out forother reasons, we only see theoutside of the dilly bag, but itcarries an "inside" story, it is justthe same. Our law that it carriesand the stories. The sacred dilly

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Mutual Conversion?

bag carries them just like theBible.’ 30

In this dialogue people are referringto the elaborately crafted and feather-decorated bags that are used in ceremoniesand that often contain objects associatedwith the sacred life of particular clans. 31

These baskets are themselves associatedwith stories of the clan’s ancestral heritageand are linked to particular people andplaces. ‘Inside’ refers both to the interiorof the dilly bag and the pages inside theBible and also to the inside level of spiritu-al knowledge which echoes Christianconceptions of inner truth. The discussionhints at the rich metaphorical nature ofYolŋu religious practice and the multiplepossibilities of finding points of connec-tion with Christianity.

The discourse between Yolŋu andChristian missionaries has produced a sig-nificant number of syncretic events, someinitiated by Yolŋu leaders and theologiansothers encouraged by the missionariesthemselves. The two best known manifest-ations of this are probably the Elcho IslandMemorial of 1957 and the Yirrkala ChurchPanels of 1962. Both events involved theinstallation of major icons of Yolŋu religionin a Christian context. The Elcho IslandMemorial was erected outside the churchat Galiwinku (Elcho Island). It compriseda series of wooden sculptures based on theform of sacred objects belonging to thenorthern Yolŋu clans. The Yirrkala ChurchPanels were two masonite panels paintedwith designs from each of the clans repres-ented at Yirrkala. These were placed oneither side of the altar of the new YirrkalaChurch. The events were very differentones, but they had in common the asser-tion that Yolŋu had objects of religiousvalue that were equivalent to the icons of

Christianity and that these icons shouldhave a role in the discourse between cul-tures.

The events that gave rise to the ElchoIsland Memorial were led entirely byYolŋu and had a complex set of motiva-tions. 32 In addition to asserting theequivalent value of Yolŋu religious iconsand outlining Yolŋu political objectives,the Memorial also implied or enacted achange in Yolŋu religious practice—abringing out into the open of forms thathad previously been restricted, and thesharing of those forms on a wider basis. Itwas part of the dialogue with Christianitythat involved a shift from ‘inside’ to ‘out-side’—a modification of elements of Yolŋureligious practice to accommodate chan-ging circumstances. 33 The Memorial alsohad a political dimension; it asserted Yolŋuautonomy and rights, while acknow-ledging that those rights had to be incor-porated in a wider political structure.While most Yirrkala clans refused to parti-cipate in the Elcho Island Memorial, partlythrough concern over the opening out ofpreviously restricted objects, it can non-etheless be seen as contributing to thepossibility of the Yirrkala Church Panels.The Yirrkala Panels also required the ex-hibition of religious art in a public spaceeven if that space was the consecratedspace for another ‘local’ religion. 34

The Yirrkala Church Panels were expli-citly syncretic and in continuity with thedialogue set in place by Chaseling. Accord-ing to Edgar Wells, Narritjin Maymuruproposed the idea of the church panels tohim, but Wells’ own respect for Aboriginalreligion may also have been a factor. Hebelieved that all religions had the capacityto produce mystical insights that couldincrease understanding. This comes out

48


most clearly in a letter he wrote to hislong-term correspondent Ed Ruhe in 1983:

You must know that there are mo-ments of illumination when themind expands under the force ofnew horizons … it is the force ofsuch encounters within the spiritu-al realm … that has kept me withinthe [Christian] group. It is becauseI was able to minister to the Abori-gines in this special way of causinga stretch … of thought processes… that men such as Djawa andNarritjin could expose little cracksof their own mountain ranges …that made areas of understandingpossible. They did not of coursehave to become Christians to re-ceive this illumination — and thisis where some of my companionsin missionary activity part com-pany with me. 35

The Church Panels were also a religiousexpression of a political aim in which boththe Yolŋu and the missionaries concernedwere united—the recognition of Yolŋurights in land. The paintings were a re-sponse to the mineral explorations and toconcerns over the possible granting of amining lease over the bauxite reserves onthe Gove Peninsula. They led directly tothe Yirrkala Bark Petition that was sent tothe Commonwealth parliament in the fol-lowing year. Kim Beazley senior saw thepanels in the Church, and suggested thatthis would be an appropriate way to peti-tion parliament using the symbolic medi-um of Yolŋu religion and law. The GoveLand Rights case can be seen as a logicaloutcome of the dialogue that occurred. 36

MUTUAL DOUBTS

It is likely that from the very begin-ning Yolŋu and missionaries had momentsof doubt, scepticism, and resistance to thedialogue that was developing. Missionariesand Yolŋu clearly differed among them-selves and some missionaries were down-right hostile to Yolŋu religious practice.Chaseling expressed his own uncertainty:he is unsure about this equivalence, in ef-fect, between Wangarr and God but con-cludes that ‘Wangarr is scarcely less vaguein the nomads mind than the “Eternal” ofthe early pages of the bible.’ But he lets itgo since ‘It enables Jesus to be acceptedwithout doing damage to Yolŋu cul-ture’. 37

There were, as Wells hints, missionar-ies who took a very different view fromhis own and who saw ‘heathen’ customsin Aboriginal religious practice. Some ofthe missionaries who followed Wells atMilingimbi were less tolerant of Aboriginalreligious practice than he was.

One of the main contexts of potentialconflict is in mortuary rituals, where bothYolŋu religious practice and Christianitycome together in the disposal of the dead.Yolŋu mortuary rituals extended over alengthy period and involved both a second-ary stage, when the bones of the deceasedwere collected and carried around in abark coffin for several months or evenyears, and a tertiary stage when the boneswere placed in a hollow log coffin. Yolŋumortuary practices offended the sensibilit-ies of some missionaries, contradicted theirpollution beliefs and, because of their ex-tended nature, threatened to interrupt theeconomic life of the settlement. Over timeYolŋu mortuary rituals have evolved toincorporate both religions, with different

49

Mutual Conversion?

spaces or stages in the proceedings beingallocated to each. Christian prayer and theviewing of the body are interspersed withYolŋu ritual performance until the climaxof the ceremony. The body is brought tothe ceremonial ground and placed in thegrave through Yolŋu performance, beforebeing buried in a Christian ritual. Some-times the divisions are less clear cut andsome elements combine Christianity andYolŋu practice in the same event. Not sur-prisingly it is in these events, in which thetwo beliefs systems directly confront eachother, that conflict sometimes occurs.Certainly they generate mixed emotions.

When I visited Milingimbi with EdgarWells, the community leader Djawa led usaway one evening to talk to an old man,Dawarangalili. A central element of Yolŋumortuary rituals was the painting of clandesigns on the dead person’s chest. Wellsand the missionaries who had precededhim were perfectly happy to allow thispractice. However one of the ministerswho followed him had insisted that ifpeople were to have a Christian burial thenthey could not be buried with a paintedchest. Dawarangalili asked Wells to inter-vene and indeed poignantly stated that hehad delayed dying because of his fear ofbeing buried without the painting on hischest.

What Wells himself referred to asfundamentalism increased after the 1970s.At Yirrkala in 1975 the local minister al-most literally threw the Church Panels intothe street, wanting to rid the church ofheathen idols.

The syncretic discourse between Yolŋuand Methodists has involved changes inYolŋu religious practice that are at least asgreat as the concessions made by the mis-sionaries. In north east Arnhem Land there

has been a gradual process of opening outof Indigenous religious practice, a reduc-tion in the role of secrecy, without anysense that the icons of the religion—thepaintings, songs, dances and sacred ob-jects—have lost their power. The panelsplaced on either side of the altar in 1962contained paintings that a few years previ-ously had been used largely in restrictedcontexts, and appeared in public contextsin slightly modified form. Yolŋu and mis-sionaries alike express doubts and anxietyin some of the same contexts—whereChristian and Yolŋu religious practicescome into potential conflict. There isanxiety over the opening out of Yolŋu re-ligious practice, and there are questionsof compatibility in shared contexts. Theadjustments that have been made to theEuropean colonial presence at times seemto have come at too great a cost. A recentcase can be used to exemplify the kindsof issues that arise in the contemporarycontext, though it must be stressed thatYolŋu attitudes to Christianity are verydiverse, reflecting a number of differentreligious orientations within easternArnhem Land that are linked to differentmovements in the wider Church. 38

Recently a Yolŋu person developed aserious eye infection and put it down toexposure to sacred religious objects at aburial ceremony. The person said that thefuneral combined Christian and Yolŋuritual and that they felt uncomfortableabout the Yolŋu ritual inside the church.There was particular concern that a wap-itja, a ceremonial digging stick, was takeninto the church—it made the person feelsick inside. The person felt that Yolŋuritual was for outside and before the finalinternment. The person concerned arguedthat God had given the Yolŋu ancestors a

50


caretaker role but that they were underthe more general spiritual authority ofGod. The person took a middle groundbetween those who see Yolŋu religion asincompatible with Christianity and thosewho see it as autonomous. Yolŋu religionis seen in this case as local representationof God’s power. It was not that the diggingstick was a restricted sacred object. It wasmore a matter of combining Yolŋu religiouspractice and Christianity in the same con-text, under the same roof. The personwould have been quite happy if the eventshad followed one another sequentiallyseparated in time and space: the diggingstick in the camp, the prayers in thechurch. The fact that those boundariesappeared to have been crossed was be-lieved to have made the person spirituallyvulnerable, causing the illness.

CONCLUSION

The dialogue between practitioners ofYolŋu and Christian religion is an ongoingone. It has produced a society in whichreligion is as alive and central to the com-munity as anywhere else in Australia, andmore central than in most places. It is in-teresting that the dialogue has become,over time, less one of race than of religiousbelief. Yolŋu have become Christians yetsimultaneously maintained much of theirown religious practice. Indeed Yolŋu havethemselves taken on the role of missionar-ies both as Christian ministers yet also asadvocates for Yolŋu religion. Yolŋu reli-gion has become part of an outgoing cul-ture of persuasion that combines political,religious and spiritual objectives. Yolŋucontinue to insert their religious valuesthrough cultural performances into Euro-Australian contexts—through participa-

tion in the Olympic opening ceremony,through the Bangara Dance Company andThe National Aboriginal Islander SkillsDevelopment Association (NAISDA) Inc.and art exhibitions such as the SaltwaterPaintings. 39 Yet Yolŋu are equally con-cerned internally with accommodatingChristian dogma and belief within theirlocal framework of religious action. Thelack of dogmatism displayed by theMethodist Church in Northern Australiain the early days, the fact that bigotry (inthe form of intolerance of Yolŋu religiouspractice) arrived relatively late, has cre-ated an environment in which continualadjustments can take place. It has resultedin a society in which religious pluralismis the norm, where Yolŋu religious practicearticulates with different Christian orient-ations. Eastern Arnhem Land remains adeeply religious society in which Yolŋuand Christian religious forms are integ-rated within the same events, though oftensequentially. Yet below the surface, bothcontemporary religious practices and inter-pretations of the missionary past arehighly contested. The contested presentreflects the contradictory history of Yolŋu-European engagement and the difficultiesof the contemporary context of Yolŋulives.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Frances Morphy and PipDeveson for critical comments on this art-icle and Margaret Smith of the Kluge-Ruhearchives at the University of Virginia forfacilitating access to the correspondencebetween Edgar Wells and Ed Ruhe.

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Mutual Conversion?

ENDNOTES

1 See for example Keith Cole, A History of the ChurchMissionary Society of Australia, Melbourne, ChurchMissionary Historical Publications, 1971; and KeithCole, From Mission to Church: The CMS Mission toAborigines of Arnhem Land 1908–1985, Bendigo, KeithCole Publications, 1985.2 Wilbur Chaseling, Yulengor: Nomads of ArnhemLand, Melbourne, Epworth Press, 1957.3 Harold Thornell, A Bridge Over Time: Living inArnhem Land, with Aborigines 1938-1944 as Told toEstelle Thomson, Melbourne, J. M. Dent, 1986.4 Edgar Wells, Reward and Punishment in ArnhemLand 1962-1963, Canberra, Australian Institute ofAboriginal Studies, 1982.5 ibid.6 Howard and Frances Morphy, ‘The myths ofNgalakan history’, Man 19 (3), 1984, pp. 459–78.7 Ted Egan, A Justice All Their Own: The CaledonBay and Woodah Island Killings 1932-1933, Mel-bourne, Melbourne University Press, 1996.8 Victor Charles Hall, Dreamtime Justice, Adelaide,Rigby, 1962.9 Keith Cole, Groote Eylandt Pioneer, Melbourne,Church Missionary Historical Publications, 1971.10 See Ronald Berndt, Arnhem Land: Its History andits People, Melbourne, Cheshire, 1954; and AndrewMcMillan, An Intruder's Guide to East Arnhem Land,Sydney, Duffy & Snellgrove, 2001.11 Interview with Wilbur Chaseling in Sydney 11December 1975, notes in possession of the author.12 Grey himself was strongly supportive of Yolŋurights and subsequently played a significant role infacilitating the outstation movement in easternArnhem Land that was in part a response to the en-croachment of mining operations.13 Theodor Webb, Spears to Spades, Sydney, Depart-ment of Overseas Mission, 1938.14 ibid.15 Chaseling, op. cit.16 Thornell, op. cit.17 Ann Wells, Milingimbi: Ten Years in the CrocodileIslands of Arnhem Land, Sydney, Angus & Robertson,1963.18 Mickey Dewar, The ‘Black War’ in Arnhem Land:Missionaries and the Yolngu 1908-1940, Darwin,Australian National University, North Australia Re-search Unit, 1992.19 Chaseling interview.

20 Thornell, op. cit., p. 184.21 ibid.22 Chaseling, op. cit.23 Fuata A. Taito, The Aborigines of the North / by aRotuman, Sydney, Methodist Overseas Missions ofAustralasia, 1971.24 Morphy interview with Chaseling. This discourseis described in slightly different form in Chaselingop. cit., p. 170–1.25 Quoted and summarised from Chaseling op. cit.,p. 170.26 Wilbur Chaseling to Ed Ruhe, 12 November 1965.Correspondence in the Kluge-Ruhe Centre archives,University of Virginia.27 Thornell op. cit., p. 171.28 Ian Dunlop, (director), This is My Thinking,Sydney, Film Australia, 1995.29 op. cit., p. 170.30 Ian Dunlop, (director), We Believe in it-- We Knowits True, Sydney, Film Australia, 1986.31 For a detailed discussion of Yolŋu religious icono-graphy see Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections:Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge, Chicago,University of Chicago Press, 1991. Chapter 5 dis-cusses the concept of inside and outside knowledge(see also Ian Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy in an Abori-ginal Religion, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994).32 For detailed discussion see Ronald Berndt, AnAdjustment Movement in Arnhem Land, Paris,Mouton, 1962; and Howard Morphy, ‘Now you un-derstand—an analysis of the way Yolŋu have usedsacred knowledge to maintain their autonomy’, inNicolas Peterson and Marcia Langton (eds), Abori-gines, Land and Landrights, Canberra, Australian In-stitute of Aboriginal Studies, 1983, pp. 110–33.33 In Maddock’s apposite phrase it represented anattempt to remodel their society, see Ken Maddock,The Australian Aborigines: A Portrait of their Society,London, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1972.34 For a general account see Ann Wells, This theirDreaming: Legends of the Panels of Aboriginal Art inthe Yirrkala Church, St Lucia, University of Queens-land, 1971. For a discussion of the political contextsee Edgar Wells op. cit.35 Edgar Wells to Ed Ruhe, May 3 1983. Correspond-ence in the Kluge-Ruhe Centre archives, Universityof Virginia.36 For a more detailed analysis see Morphy, op. cit.1983; and Howard Morphy, ‘Art and politics: thebark petition and the Barunga statement’ in SylviaKleinert and Margo Neale (eds), The Oxford Compan-

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ion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Melbourne, OxfordUniversity Press, 2000, pp. 100–102.37 Chaseling op. cit., p. 171.38 For some relevant discussion of contemporaryYolŋu religious practice see Robert Bos, Jesus and thedreaming: Religion and social change in Arnhem Land,unpublished PhD thesis, University of Queensland,St Lucia, 1988; and Fiona Magowan ‘Syncretism orsynchronicity? Remapping the Yolngu feeling ofplace’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol.12, No. 3, 2001, pp. 275–90.39 The Saltwater Paintings were produced in the late1990s in response to encroachments by non-Yolngufishermen into the estuaries and intertidal zones ofYolngu clan lands. The collection is comprised of aset of paintings that map the relationships betweenpeople, ancestral beings and land along the easternArnhem Land coast. The paintings were acquired bythe Australian National Maritime Museum and werepublished in Buku-Larrnggay Mulka (1999) Salt-water: Yirrkala Bark Paintings of Sea Country, Yir-rkala and Sydney: Buku-Larrnggay Mulka in associ-ation with Jenny Isaacs Publishing.

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WAS IT EVER SO?

ANTI-SEMITISM IN AUSTRALIA 1860–1950?

RODNEY GOUTTMAN

In her award-winning book, Reading theHolocaust, Inga Clendinnen insists that

‘Australian anti-Semitism is a pathologyof the periphery’. 1 Though this remainsa popular view, this article will discussthe validity of this assertion for the years1860–1950. It will be argued that while inthis epoch the problem of anti-Semitismin Australia never approached the vir-ulence experienced elsewhere, the fearthat this odious prejudice could break outat any time also had a profound and defin-ing effect on the behaviour of Australia’sJews. Though commentators have men-tioned this phenomenon in passing, theyrarely explain it and merely compare it toscenarios overseas, leaving one to concludethat Australia has always been a safehaven for Jews. 2 To leave the observationthere is to provide few insights into thehistory of anti-Semitism in Australia andits impact on the public persona of Aus-tralian Jewry both on the individual andthe communal levels.

AN ANTIPODEAN LIBERALPOLITY?

Australian historian Tim Rowse haswritten that:

Australian history falls within thatperiod of the rise of European lib-

eralism and the struggle by theemergent working classes to ad-vance that liberalism in a democrat-ic direction … 3

He points out that Australia is one ofthe few nations in the world whose pathalong the way to liberal democracy hasgenerally been linear and relatively non-violent. 4 However, in the period of 1860to 1950 the impact of the Protestant/Cath-olic divide was profoundly socially signi-ficant, the impact of the White AustraliaPolicy culturally indelible, and the clashbetween Labor and Capital of immensepolitical consequence. 5 Then there wasalso the vexed ‘Aboriginal Question’. Froma discrete Jewish perspective, the issuewas whether along her liberalist journeyAustralia had shed any ‘old world’Judeophobia introduced in the process ofEuropeanisation of the land. 6

If one is looking for historicalbookends of the periods 1860’s and 1950’s,at least from the point of view of the east-ern Australian, possibly at one extremitythere is the exhaustion of the Gold Rushand the commencement of a hardening ofAustralian Anglo monoculturalism, and atthe other, the beginning of the end of thathegemony under the effects of post-warreconstruction into a more pluralist visionof the nation. 7

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The Jewish presence in Australiabegan with the initial convict migrations,and free settlement subsequently estab-lished Jewish communal life. 8 ColonialJewry tended to take its religious cuesfrom the ‘mother country’, England, apractice which had greatly declined bythe early 1950s. That said, religious observ-ance before World War Two had becomeincreasingly attenuated. Geographicaldispersion, the tyranny of distance,apathy, and the forces of assimilation allplayed their role.

Australian Jews not only pridedthemselves on their loyalty to Empire,King and Country, but were ever preparedto express it, and no less in wartime. 9 Onone hand, their social views were littledifferent from those of their Gentile fellowcitizens. On the other hand, from a com-munal perspective, their public loyaltywas more intense, the motivation forwhich stemmed from three basic butlinked causes. The first derived from thefact of being a miniscule minority in anocean of others. Jewish history had taughtthem not to take the pacific nature of theirAustralian environment for granted.Second, was from gratitude for being ableto live in a state of freedom denied manyof their brethren elsewhere. Finally, as aprophylaxis against any current underly-ing anti-Semitism.

Until World War Two Australian Jew-ry was predominantly Anglo in customand motivation. Non-Anglo, or ‘foreign’Jews who arrived in Australia were re-quired to assimilate immediately. DuringWorld War Two and certainly after, these‘foreign’ Jews commenced a successfulchallenge to the Anglo dominance incommunal affairs. Indeed, three seminalevents contributed to this communal

change of mind—the formation of the Ex-ecutive Council of Australian Jewry whichgave Jews a national voice, 10 the Holo-caust, and the establishment of the Stateof Israel in 1948. In combination, theyhelped to forge a more assertive attitudein dealing with political authorities inmatters of self interest. This was dramatic-ally displayed in the years 1949–52, whenthe Jewish community emerged from thecloset to publicly oppose the policy of theRobert Menzies led Liberal-Country PartyCoalition Government to permit massGerman migration to Australia. 11

MODELLING ANTI-SEMITISM

Though anti-Jewish hatred dates backto Biblical times, the actual term ‘anti-Semitism’ was devised by the German anti-Jewish provocateur, Wilhem Marr in 1879to describe the violent anti-Jewish hostil-ities in his country. It very soon becamethe singular term to cover all aspects ofanti-Jewish hatred.

Herbert A. Strauss has said that threemodels of enquiry used in the social sci-ences can be applied to researching theproblem of anti-Semitism. The first is thecultural-anthropological approach, whichcan be used to probe the degree to whichcultural stereotypes persist among variousstrata of a particular social structure. Thenthere is psychologically oriented research,to help discover what motivates hatred ofJewish people. Finally, building on theprevious two, is an exploration of the his-torical circumstances which have led towider social and political expressions ofthis prejudice. 12 Simon N. Herman re-minds us that often a missing element inthe study of anti-Semitism is its effectupon Jewish attitudes and behaviour both

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towards the Gentiles among whom theylive and within their own community. 13

Further, Todd M. Endelman also notes thatwhen examining the problem of anti-Semitism in a particular place, frequentlyabsent is a discussion of its influence on‘the Jews themselves – their occupations,religious practices, social habits, and intel-lectual and cultural predilections’. 14

The denigration of Judaism and thepersecution of Jews over centuries ofWestern Christendom has been well docu-mented. 15 Even after the European En-lightenment took hold, and when thepolitical and social hegemony of Christian-ity was replaced by secularism, much anti-Semitism was decanted into Left and Rightpolitical and cultural versions. The emin-ent historian J. L. Talmon recalls thatwhen Jews were emancipated into Gentilesociety allegedly on an equal basis, the‘Jewish Problem’ became even more diffi-cult and complex, since Jews were thenexcoriated by both the Left and the Right:

… We are thus faced with a strik-ing paradox: to the Conservativesthe Jews are the symbol, benefi-ciary, finally the maker of thecapitalist revolution, which wasin their eyes a kind of preparationfor the Socialist revolution; to theSocialists - the embodiment andpillar of that capitalism, which the revolution was rising to des-troy. 16

In various ways Jews were stereotyped asuncouth, immoral, insufferable, incapableof ethical behavior, and as a group, adanger to civil society. Ronald B. Sobelhas argued that anti-Semitism is resilientbecause it is a 'disease and a virus embed-ded in the bloodstream of Western civilisa-

tion'. 17 By that he means it is not manifestat every moment, but Jews have remainedthe ever present ‘outsider’, to be used asa scapegoat for any perceived fundamentalsocial, cultural, and even political wrongor difficulty. These observations are per-tinent if only because ‘Western Civiliza-tion’ is the very construct to which Aus-tralia has always claimed cultural allegi-ance.

THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE

John Levi has shown that anti-Jewishstereotypes arrived in Australia with theconvicts, and were often garnished by themainstream colonial press, 18 therebysetting a media precedent which persistedthroughout the period in question, 19 andeven to the present day. Negative culturalconnotations of the word ‘Jew’ encouragedmany Jews to avoid it as a descriptive termfor themselves, and ‘Hebrew Congrega-tions’ became the preferred name for theirfaith collectives. 20 Even in the liberallyfounded Province of South Australiawhich was characterised by inter-faith co-operation, 21 Israel Getzler has stressedthat Jews still had to campaign assiduouslyto win approval for the social and politicalrights accorded them. 22

When free settlement sparked Jewishcommunal life, later to be strengthened bythe immigrations of the Gold Rush, it camewith a level of wariness towards the Gen-tile. In part this was undoubtedly affectedby its ‘Exilic’ condition as verified byhistorical experience, and in part by thefact of being a small and nervous minority.From the beginning of Jewish communallife there was an anxious looking over theshoulder to assure that nothing be done

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Was It Ever So?

which might upset their fellow citizenslest the fires of anti-Semitism be ignited.

Some Jewish scribes have argued thatthe esteem in which men such as GeneralSir John Monash and Sir Isaac Isaacs weregenerally held was a great social prophy-lactic against anti-Semitism in Australia.Indeed, another person of similar standing,Sir Zelman Cowen, tells the story—thetruth of which he cannot verify—that in1931 John Scullin, the Labor Prime Minis-ter, presented the British authorities withonly the above two names as candidatesfor the post of Governor General of Aus-tralia. 23 However, there is little evidenceto suggest these gentlemen’s fine reputa-tion actually diminished the degree of so-cial and cultural anti-Semitism even intheir lifetime, let alone after. Monashhimself suffered its sting before reachingthe apex of his military career on theWestern Front in World War One. 24 Jewswere excluded from certain clubs, organ-isations, and stock exchanges. No doubt,this situation was one reason behindIsaacs’s strong opposition to politicalZionism. 25

That Jews have scaled the heights ofmany of the nation’s elites even in thepresence of cultural or social anti-Semit-ism, is not an unknown phenomenon inthe West. Their very success has been acause of jealousy that has fanned Jewishconspiracy theory. On the other handthere is the propensity of Jewishspokespeople during and since the timeunder examination, to proclaim how muchJews have contributed to all facets ofAustralian society. Though this claim canbe empirically proved, the need to give itsuch a loud voice was, and still is, as muchdirected at Jews themselves as at Gentiles.It constitutes the raw evidence of worthy

citizenship that would protect againstcurrent and future anti-Jewish stereotyp-ing.

As previously mentioned, there wasalways present a concern that Jews shouldsay or do nothing in their business deal-ings, public life, or congregationally thatmight offend non-Jews, thus putting theirsocial standing in jeopardy. Such concernwas evident when, in 1921, the AdelaideHebrew Congregation refused to bury abaptised Jew in the hallowed local Jewishcemetery, 26 and in Melbourne duringWorld War Two when there was a com-munal controversy whether Jewish ex-servicemen should be buried in separateallotments or alongside their non-Jewishcomrades. 27 In both cases there was aworry that misunderstandings might stirthe anti-Semitic pot.

Anecdotes abound about Jewish exclu-sion from employment in particular profes-sional offices, government departments,clubs, and large retail stores like DavidJones in Sydney. There is no way to ascer-tain whether this was a prevailing attitude,as those likely to infringe in this way wereunlikely to openly advertise their preju-dices. On the other hand, the lack of proofdoes not mean it did not happen, and thatwhen it did, it was not common know-ledge. Anti-Semitism was indeed part ofthe mix of reasons for the great oppositionin the early 1940s to the appointment ofthe late eminent legal academic, ProfessorJulius Stone, to the Law School of SydneyUniversity. 28 However, victimisation inthe area of employment on the basis of re-ligion was never a Jewish monopoly, andcompared to the bitter Protestant/Catholic divide, possibly paled into insignific-ance. 29

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Hilary Rubinstein 30 and SuzanneRutland 31 have provided lists of agentsof anti-Semitism—individuals, organisa-tions, and media, both fringe and main-stream, in the period under discussion.Unhappily, individuals include such cul-tural luminaries as Marcus Clarke, ArthurAdams, Henry Lawson, P.R. ‘Inky’Stephensen, and the Lindsay brothers.

Leftwing versions of old Christiananti-Jewish stereotypes entered thefledgling Australian labor movement,particularly strongly in the 1890s, underthe influence of a transplanted British so-cialism and American populist and radicalliterature. 32 Labor politician and activist,Frank Anstey, took up these themes in hiscaricature of the Jew as the arch bloodsuck-ing capitalist in his two tracts, The King-dom of Shylock published in 1917, andMoney Power published in 1923. 33 Anti-Jewish animus also became standard inthe early 1930s rhetoric of Jack T. Lang,when Labor Premier of New South Wales,and later as maverick federal politician inthe 1940s. 34

Xenophobic nationalists and racists onthe nationalist and racialist Right also hadtheir versions of the evil Jew. Such viewswere regularly featured in The Bulletinwith its emblematic fat capitalist John BullCohen, Smith’s Weekly, and The Truth.In1934, the imported Social Credit Move-ment began in Australia its main publica-tion, The New Times which circulated ex-cerpts from the notorious anti-Jewish fake,The Politics of the Elders of Zion. 35 Thisorganisation spawned the AustralianLeague of Rights, whose local guru andleader Eric Butler published his own ver-sion of that heinous polemic in Melbournein 1946. 36 In the later half of the 1930’sthere was a spread of pro-Nazi propa-

ganda, while in 1940, 37 just after theoutbreak of World War Two, the smallAustralia First Party was formed with adecidedly anti-Jewish plank. 38

Jewish insecurity was no better dis-played than in the patriotic rhetoric ofJewish religious and lay leaders duringboth world wars. Their preaching on fidel-ity to King, Country, and Empire, on someoccasions was overreaching. 39 Theysought to urge the maximum possiblenumber of Jews into uniform. Performanceto the highest level of bravery was deman-ded—if only to disprove current anti-Jewish stereotypes. Jewish support for thenational war effort had to be total todemonstrate their worthiness as citizens.Not to do so, it was feared, would arouselatent anti-Semitism. 40 There were a fewJewish recruits in World War One whodenied their religious affiliation becausethey feared anti-Semitism in the ranks.During World War Two anti-Semitic liter-ature circulated at military bases in Victor-ia. 41

Nothing, however, was felt likely toarouse anti-Jewish feelings more than theprospect of mass Jewish immigration toAustralia. And this, in turn, arousedanxieties within Australia’s small and edgyJewish communities. The first incident ofnote occurred in 1891, when the mere ru-mour of the possibility that a large numberof Jews fleeing the pogroms of the RussianEmpire might seek refuge in Australia wasenough to set alarm bells ringing. 42 Inthe aftermath of the Gold Rush, colonialxenophobia was fired by a vision of hordesof non-assimilable foreigners from thenorth swamping Australia and undermin-ing its British way of life. With Federation,this xenophobia became entrenched in theWhite Australia Policy. That selfsame 1891

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Was It Ever So?

rumour sent a shiver down the back of anervous, miniscule, and fragile Anglo-Australian Jewry. It was feared that suchen masse immigration might well cause agross anti-Semitic reaction that wouldprove detrimental to local Jewry. Anyconcerns for their desperate brethren wereweakened by this fear. Australian policywas to reject any proposal to create en-claves of ‘foreigners’ anywhere in the na-tion, and this no less for Jews. For ex-ample, Labor Prime Minister, John Curtin,in 1944 when the evils of Nazism werealready well-known, refused to accept aplan to settle large numbers of refugees inthe Kimberley region of Western Australiadespite the fact that the Premier of thestate and other non-Jewish leaders suppor-ted the scheme. 43 Following the death ofCurtin, the acting Prime Minister, FrankForde, stated that this decision was takenon the recommendation of a bureaucraticcommittee on immigration that ‘opposedsegregated settlements of Alien communit-ies’. 44

Indeed, the question of Australia tak-ing large numbers of refugees became mostpoignant in the 1930s, when the Nazi jug-gernaut with its vicious anti-Jewish pro-gram began to roll and thousands of dis-tressed Jews applied to enter Australia.Paul Bartrop has detailed official attitudes,particularly the all-important bureaucraticresponse to the entrée of these ‘foreign’Jews, and the reactions of the Jewishcommunity. He maps the negative outlookwithin the Ministry of the Interior—thedepartment that had carriage of immigra-tion—which on occasions bordered onanti-Semitism. 45 The fact was that as agroup, only the Jews were singled out inthe application forms to enter Australia.The so-called ‘Jewish clauses’ 46 —Forms

Nos.40 and 47—were a useful bureaucratictool to determine which Jews were fromEurope’s east and west. If Jewish immig-rants were to come, those from the latterwere preferred because they were con-sidered able to assimilate much morequickly. When these clauses were finallyrevoked only in 1953, bureaucrats werebeside themselves as to how they wouldnow be able to prevent those Jews theysaw as unacceptable from arriving tosettle. 47 It must be remembered that inJuly 1938, at the Evian Conference inFrance dealing with the burgeoning num-ber of refugees from Nazism, the Australi-an representative’s rationale for his coun-try’s refusal to accept any of them was thatAustralia did not have a racial problemand didn’t want to introduce one. 48 Itwas a policy soon to be slightly eased un-der pressure from Great Britain and theUnited States of America, when permissionwas reluctantly given for 15,000 to enter,with some 8,000 actually doing so justbefore the outbreak of World War Two.Only some 5,000 of them were Jews. 49

Anglo Australian Jewry’s apprehen-sion that the presence of these Jewishémigrés might arouse anti-Semitism led toits demand that they quickly lose theiroutward signs of difference. English, notforeign tongues were to be used in public,and social and religious behaviour was notto attract the attention of the Gentile pop-ulation. They were continually beratednot to provide ammunition for those dis-posed towards anti-Semitism. 50

On the back of the Great Depressionit was not difficult to mount an argumentagainst the influx of ‘foreign’ Jews,whatever their reason for coming. DavidMossenson speaks of anti-Semitism as be-ing mild in Western Australia, and yet

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causing much angst in its tiny Jewishcommunity during an influx of ‘foreign’Jews from 1937 to 1940, and during thepost-World War Two years from 1947 to1957. 51 Freda Searle recalls the street andschoolyard anti-Semitism of the 1930s inthe Melbourne suburb of Carlton where‘foreign’ Jews tended to settle. 52 Suchsentiments still circulated there duringWorld War Two. 53 The usual Jewish re-sponse was one of forbearance, one thathad an extensive longevity. In 1871, theReverend Rintel castigated his fellowMelbourne Jews for their unwillingnessto challenge the anti-Semitism evident intheir day. 54 John Levi recounts that aJewish communal leader in 1907 was ap-palled by the sight of Jewish boys playingmarbles in public on Sunday because itmight upset their Christian neighbours. 55

Once World War Two broke out, Anglo-Jewish leaders felt unnecessarily com-pelled to advise their ‘foreign’ brethren tofully back the war effort as if they, whohad already tasted Hitler’s lash, did notunderstand where their duty lay.

Even with World War Two over andthe Holocaust stamped on the world’spsyche, barriers were still placed in thepath of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs)restricting the numbers who could seekrefuge in Australia. That said, it is still afact that Australia took in more per headof population than any other countryother than Israel. Only a few years afterthe war, a poll was taken of local attitudesto people from other lands. It revealed thatGermans against whom Australians had sorecently fought were far more preferableto Jews who were rated only one levelabove the bottom category, ‘blacks’. 56

Andrew Markus has written that it seemsthat the revelation of near genocide of

European Jewry had done nothing or verylittle to soften the attitude of the generalcommunity towards them. 57 A Jewishquota of 25% was applied to ships com-mandeered by the International RefugeeOrganisation to bring DPs from camps inwar-torn Europe to Australia. 58

Some members of Australia’s fledglingdiplomatic corps also attempted to slowdown, even to prevent, Jewish DP immig-ration. The anti-Semitic Australian ConsulGeneral in Shanghai , O.W.C. Fuhrman,specifically denied Jewish DP entry per-mits to Australia. 59 It is somewhat ironicthat this gentleman was selected as Aus-tralia’s first diplomatic emissary to the newJewish State of Israel in 1950, and fromthere carried on his Judeophobia that in-cluded his desire to prevent DP emigrationfrom Israel on grounds that the migrantsmight be communist agents. 60 As well, adispatch from the Australian Mission inDelhi caused the Department of Immigra-tion to deny entry to Australia of ‘Jews ofMiddle East Origin’ on the basis that theywere likely to be ‘colored’. 61 Doubtless,the fact that the Jews of Palestine wereproving increasingly troublesome to theBritish administration there exacerbatedthe hostile feelings of some acute Anglo-phile Australians towards Jews. It cer-tainly upset the prominent Catholic polit-ical journalist and radio commentator.D.G.M. Jackson, a traditional Christiananti-Semite, who feared that Jewish suc-cess would usurp Christian influence inthe Holy Land. 62

Support of political Zionism, the ideo-logy which sought an autonomous Jewishhomeland in Palestine, also caused divi-sions within the Australian Jewish corpus.Spiritual Zionism, the longing for the Zionand Jerusalem, had always played a central

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Was It Ever So?

role in Jewish religious liturgy. Anglo-Je-wry, however, had no interest in beatinga path to the harsh environs of the physic-al Zion. Political Zionism, however, diddraw support from among the ‘foreign’Jews. Anglo-Jews feared political Zionismmight have their national allegiance toAustralia questioned, and that they wouldbe pinned with the white feather of treas-on—dual loyalty. 63 In the wake of theHolocaust this schism mended.

Even at the time when the full extentof the Holocaust was being revealed to theworld, there were those Jews who fearedthat any social or cultural creation of adiscrete Jewish nature might possibly in-cite anti-Semitism. The decision duringWorld War Two to create a Jewish RedCross group created controversy in thecommunity for this reason. 64 In 1945, aneditorial in the Australian Jewish Newswarned against the formation of a Jewishday school in Melbourne:

… There is anti-Semitism in Aus-tralia, and quite a lot. But it ispartly imported merchandise,which goes together with Fascism,partly home made. But we can beassured that we will juststrengthen these tendencies bybringing up our children in a“foreign” way which is so suspectin the average Australian. 65

Even the formation in Melbourne ofMount Scopus College which opened in1949, caused the ageing and indomitablelong-serving leader of Anglo-Jewry in thatcity, Rabbi Jacob Danglow of the St KildaSynagogue, much heartache lest it mightprovide a pretext for some premier privateschools to bar Jewish enrolment. 66

CONCLUSION

To date there has been no full-blownhistorical analysis of anti-Semitism inAustralia which combines both qualitativeand quantitative aspects. That social andcultural anti-Semitism existed in the peri-od 1860–1950 is a fact. The question iswhether it was of a nature meriting realconcern. Anti-Semitism can be real, ima-gined or believed potential. These differ-ent aspects of the same problem have af-fected both individual and communalJewish responses. The mere tabulation ofanti-Semitic incidents alone tells us littleabout their emotional impact on Jewishlives. Relying on empirical data alone tellsus little about how the ordinary Jew copedwith anti-Semitism.

Whether as a result of actual incidentsor the fear of its occurrence, anti-Semitismstamped Anglo-Australian Jewry in atleast two connected ways. It affected theirsocial behaviour and communal practice.And it also influenced how they relatedto ‘foreign’ Jews who settled in theirmidst. It was asserted that nothing shouldbe seen, said, or done, that might incurthe displeasure of the Gentile communityto such a degree that it might arouse anti-Semitism and therefore put the socialstanding of Anglo-Australian Jewry inperil.

Jews have long had to wear the oftheard criticism of being over-sensitive tothe possibility of anti-Semitism. They areaccused of often seeing dangers that arenot there. However, their Exilic historyhas taught them the fundamental lessonthat their domicile in places consideredsafe for extensive periods of time cannotbe guaranteed or taken for granted. Nodoubt, this ‘wariness gene’ also affected

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Anglo-Australian Jewry. Not that anti-Semitism in Australia between 1860 and1950 even approached the levels reachedin Europe, England, and the United Statesof America. Nonetheless, communally,Anglo-Australian Jewry was ever lookingover its shoulder to see ‘what the Goyim(Gentiles) might think’.

During this period, Australian Jewrywas a miniscule and nationally scatteredminority, never reaching a size that poseda threat to anyone. On the other hand,despite the fact that Australia did progressdown the liberal democratic path relat-ively peacefully, any anti-Semitism, realor imagined, placed Jews on edge. Itforced advocacy in their interest to beconducted privately through personalcontacts. This remained basically so until1949 when the private path failed andwith the Holocaust in mind, and somewhatbuoyed by the establishment of the Stateof Israel, a more assertive Australian Jewrythrew off the shackles of the past to pub-licly contest the perceived threat of massGerman immigration.

ENDNOTES

1 I. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, Melbourne,Text Publishing, 1998, p. 6.2 S. Encel, ‘Anti-semitism and prejudice in Australia’,Without Prejudice, No. 1, September 1990, p. 40.3 T. Rowse, Australian Liberalism and NationalCharacter, Melbourne, Kibble Books, 1978, p. 8.4 ibid., p. 10.5 F. G. Clarke, Australia – A Concise Social andPolitical History, Sydney, Harcourt, Brace, Janovich,1989, pp. 136–49.6 For Jewish demography, C. A. Price, Jewish Settlersin Australia, Australian National University, SocialScience Monograph, No. 23, 1964, Appendix 1.7 S. Castle, et al., Mistaken Identity- Multiculturalismand the Demise of Nationalism in Australia , Sydney,Pluto Press, 1990, pp. 43–56.

8 Jewish settlement in the colonial era, J. S. Levi,and G. F. J. Bergman, Australian Genesis –JewishConvicts and Settlers 1788–1850, Adelaide, Rigby,1974.9 The Hebrew Standard, August 18, 1915, Editorial,‘Englishman First – Jews After’.10 The ECAJ formed 1944 but really didn’t becomefunctionally national until four years later.11 R. M. Gouttman, ‘I am Just a No-Where Man’,Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal (hereafterAJHSJ), Vol. 6 (I) 2001, pp. 24–32.12 H. A. Strauss, ‘Antisemitism as a political tool’,in Y. Bauer, (ed.) Present-Day Antisemitism, VidalSassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-semitism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jer-usalem 1988, pp. 125–45.13 S. N. Herman, ‘Reaction of Jews to antisemitism:a framework for a social psychological analysis’, in Y.Bauer, ibid. , pp. 283–96.14 T. M. Endelman, ‘Comparative perspectives onmodern anti-semitism in the West’, in D. Berger, (ed.)History of Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism,The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1986,p. 109.15 R. S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred,London, Thames Mandarin, 1992.16 J. L. Talmon, Israel Among the Nations, London,Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970, p. 13.17 R. B. Sobel, ‘Antisemitism in the Christian world:a Jewish perspective’, in M. Z. Rosensaft, and Y.Bauer, (eds) Antisemitism: Threat to Western Civiliz-ation, The Vidal Sassoon International Center for theStudy of Antisemitism, The Hebrew University,Jerusalem, 1988, pp. 23–26.18 Levi and Bergman, op. cit. , pp. 183–84.19 H. Rubinstein, The Chosen - The Jews in Australi-an, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1987, pp. 66–74.20 Levi and Bergman, op. cit., pp. 184–85.21 H. Munz, Jews in South Australia, 1836–1936, p.33, produced for the Adelaide Hebrew Congregationin 1936.22 I. Getzler, Neither Toleration Nor Favour – TheAustralian Chapter of Jewish Emancipation, Mel-bourne, Melbourne University Press, 1970, pp.11–13.23 This was conveyed during a talk given by SirZelman Cowen about his growing up in St Kilda tothe Australia Jewish Historical Society in 2001.24 G. Serle, John Monash – A Biography, Melbourne,Melbourne University Press, 1990, pp. 204, 325.

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25 M. Gordon, Sir Isaac Isaacs –A Life of Service,Melbourne, Heinemann, 1963, pp. 196–203.26 Archives of the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation,21 June 1921.27 Australian Jewish News, 29 January 1943, p. 2.28 L. Star, Julius Stone – An Intellectual Life, Mel-bourne, Sydney, Oxford University Press, SydneyUniversity Press, 1992, pp. 59–60.29 M. Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop –Australia’s Secret Army Intrigue of 1931, Melbourne,McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1988.30 H. Rubinstein, Jews in Australia – A ThematicHistory, Vol. 1, 1788–1945, Sydney, William Heine-mann Australia, 1991.31 S. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora –Two centuriesof Jewish settlement in Australia, Sydney, Sydney,Collins Australia, 1988.32 R. M. Gouttman, ‘The Communist Party of Aus-tralia and the “Jewish problem”: 1933–53’ , Menorah,Australian Journal of Jewish Studies (hereafter AJJS),Vol. 2 (2) December 1988, p. 69.33 P. Love, ‘The kingdom of Shylock: a case study ofAustralian labour anti-semitism’ , AJHSJ, Vol. 12 (1)1993, pp. 54–62.34 S. D. Rutland, op. cit., pp. 197, 230.35 H. Rubinstein, op. cit, pp. 178–79; AustralianJewish Herald, 28 October 1937, p. 8.36 R. M. Gouttman, ‘The protocols and the printer’,AJHSJ, Vol. 6 (1) November 1990, pp. 155–59. But-ler’s commentary The International Jew- The TruthAbout ‘The Protocols of Zion’. A general history ofthe League, A. A. Campbell, The Australian Leagueof Rights – A Study in Political Extremism and Subver-sion, Collingwood, Vic., Outback Press, 1978.37 R. Kohn, Lutherans and the Jews in South Aus-tralia: 1933-45, AJJS, Vol. 9 (1&2) 1995, pp. 45–61;Australian Jewish Herald, 5 May 1938, p. 3 and 17November 1938, p. 1; Australian Jewish News, 6 May1938, p. 6.38 The Publicist, 1 May 1940, plank “For Aryanismagainst Semitism”; General history, B. Muirden, ThePuzzled Patriots: The Story of the Australia FirstMovement, Melbourne, University Press, 1984.39 The Hebrew Standard, 18 April 1915, Editorial“Englishman First – Jews After”.40 Such themes were redolent in the editorials of theJewish communal press during both wars. They wereso evident in the various contributions to M. Adler(ed.) British Book of Honour, London, Caxton Publish-ing House, 1922 that celebrated the bravery of themany Jews in the forces of the British Empire, includ-ing Australians, during World War One.

41 Australian Jewish Herald, 3 September 1942, Ed-itorial p. 2.42 H. Rubinstein, op. cit., pp. 79–80.43 S. Rutland, op. cit., p. 183.44 Australian Jewish News, 15 December 1944, p. 2.45 P. Bartrop, Australia and the Holocaust 1933–45,Kew, Vic., Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1994,pp. 79–106.46 ibid., The ‘Jewish Race’ clause in Australian immig-ration forms , AJHSJ, Vol. 10 (1) November 1990,pp. 69–78.47 R. Gouttman, ‘A Jew and coloured too! –immigra-tion of “Jews of Middle East origin” to Australia1949–58’, Immigrants & Minorities, Vol. 12(1)March1993, pp. 85–86.48 P. Bartrop, op. cit., pp. 61–74; M. Blakeney,Australia and the Jewish Refugees 1933–1948, Sydney,Croom Helm Australia, 1985, pp. 126–34.49 P. Bartrop, ibid., pp. 76–77. M. Blakeney, ibid.,pp. 141–47.50 H. Cohen, ‘The Australian Jew and War’, Australi-an Jewish Herald, 29 September 1939, p. 9.51 51 D. Mossenson, Hebrew, Israelite, Jew: Historyof the Jews of Western Australia, Perth, UniversityPress of Western Australia, 1990, pp. 78, 141, 151.52 F. Searle, Memory’s Wings and Apron Strings,Melbourne, Makor, 2000, p. 47.53 Australian Jewish Herald, 24 March 1942, p. 4.54 H. Rubinstein, op. cit. , p. 77.55 J. S. Levi, Rabbi Jacob Danglow-The UncrownedMonarch of Australian Jews, Melbourne, MelbourneUniversity Press, 1995, p. 40.56 G. C. Bolton, ‘1939–51’ in F. Crowley, A Historyof Australia, Melbourne, Melbourne, WilliamHeinemann, 1974, p. 482.57 A. Markus, ‘Jewish immigration to Australia 1938-49’, Journal of Australian Studies, No. 13, Nov. 1983,p. 26.58 Rutland, op. cit., p. 241.59 R. M. Gouttman, ‘Two faces of Fuhrman’, Men-orah, AJJS, Vol. 4 (1&2) 1990, pp. 66–77.60 ibid., ‘A communist threat or an excuse for anti-semitism’, Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol.6, 2002, pp. 80–87.61 ibid., ‘A Jew and coloured too!’ op. cit., pp. 75–91.62 ibid., ‘First principles: H. V. Evatt and the Jewishhomeland’, in W. D. Rubinstein, (ed.) Jews in the SixthContinent, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1987, pp. 291–93.

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63 For a study of Zionism in Australian, A. D. Crown,‘Demography, politics and love of Zion: The AustralianJewish community and the Yishuv, 1850–1948’, in W.D. Rubinstein, (ed.) Jews in the Sixth Continent,Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1987.64 Australian Jewish News, 20 September 1939, p. 3letter from Julia Rapke. The Jewish unit in questionwas the Judean Red Cross.65 ibid., 23 March 1945, p. 2.66 R. A. B. Benjamin, A Full House, Melbourne,Makor, 2000, p. 73. For background, S. Rutland, op.cit ., pp. 346–49.

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Was It Ever So?

A ‘SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENT’ NO MORE

THE INTENSIFICATION OF RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY IN EASTERNAUSTRALIA, 1865–1885

MALCOLM CAMPBELL

On Saint Patrick’s Day 1859 the Yasssolicitor George C. Allman addressed

a banquet of the town’s most prominentmen and women. In his address, Allman,the son of a Protestant Irish settler, CaptainFrancis Allman, praised his town as a‘successful experiment’, a place wherepeople ‘of all opinions, grades and reli-gions may meet and remember that theybelong to a common country’. His senti-ments were echoed by the ReverendPatrick Bermingham, one of the town’stwo Roman Catholic priests, who describedthe evening’s celebration as one ‘calculatedto make the inhabitants of the southerndistricts appreciate the sterling goodqualities of each other without referenceto race or creed’. 1

The experience of Yass in the 1850swas not unique. At this time, across muchof southeastern Australia, the formationand ‘working out’ of new communities,and the interdependence of those whosettled in them, produced striking levelsof religious tolerance and inter-denomina-tional cooperation. As Henry Haygarthobserved in his account of life in the Aus-tralian Bush:

Few places can show so strange amixture, and yet so complete a‘fusion’, of the heterogeneous ma-

terials of its society, as the ‘Bush’of Australia. It is curious to seemen differing so entirely in birth,education, and habits, and in theirwhole moral and intellectualnature, thrown into such closecontact, united by common in-terests, engaged under circum-stances of perfect equality in thesame pursuits, and mutually de-pendent on each other for all thegood offices of civility and neigh-bourhood. 2

Mary Durack made a similar point inher celebrated book Kings in Grass Castleswhen she wrote that her descendants ‘hadalmost as many friends in the Scottish,English and Jewish sections of the com-munity as among their own. Only the oc-casional visit of a Church dignitary, suchas the pioneer Archbishop Polding, calledfor a more or less exclusive Irish gather-ing’. 3

In the quarter of a century after 1860,however, a good deal of the amity and re-sponsiveness that characterised inter-de-nominational relations in mid-nineteenthcentury colonial Australia diminished. Inparticular, controversies over educationand the course and effect of Irish national-ist politics promoted a highly visible fis-

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sion along religious lines, producing whatthe historian Mark Lyons described as a‘consolidation of sectarian subculture’ inAustralian life. 4 In this paper, I wish toexplore the intensification of religiousbigotry in eastern Australia, addressingthe questions why did religious bigotrytake root so strongly in Australia at thisparticular time, and in what ways did thenew sectarian hostility depart from previ-ous patterns of inter-group relations?

i

Michael Hogan asserted in his bookThe Sectarian Strand ‘[t]he great sectarianpolitical issue of the nineteenth centurywas undoubtedly that of education’. 5 Inthe Australian colonies, the educationquestion came to the forefront from the1850s, as the inadequacies of the existingdenominational system (state funding tochurches to provide schools) became moreand more apparent. Inadequate funding,poor facilities, the presence of large num-bers of untrained teachers and low levelsof pupil attendance prompted reformersto advocate a shift from the denomination-al system to one that was (in their terms)secular, compulsory, and free. As one ad-vocate of reform asserted, ‘this is with usnot a question of sentiment but of politicalwisdom and prudence … [S]uch educationas is thought amply sufficient for theworking classes in old countries, wheremen rarely change their social position,will not do for Australia’. 6 Commencingin South Australia, successive colonialgovernments moved to diminish fundingto denominational schools and exertgreater state control over the provisionand organisation of education. In NewSouth Wales, Henry Parkes introduced his

Public Schools Act in 1866, arguing thatreform was urgently required to improvethe availability and quality of education.He also proposed (perhaps somewhatdisingenuously) that his reforms wouldhelp alleviate ‘jealousies and uncharitablefeelings among the different sections ofsociety’. 7 Instead, Parkes’s bill provokednew levels of sectarian controversy.

Australia’s Roman Catholic bishopssteadfastly denounced the mounting at-tacks on denominational education. Attheir 1862 Provincial Council the bishopscriticised as ‘persecuting sectarianism’ thetide towards state-controlled education.The pressure of their opposition increasedthrough the 1860s as the character of theRoman Catholic Church in Australia wasrecast. English Benedictine control gradu-ally weakened as a succession of Irishbishops was appointed: James Quinn toBrisbane in 1859, his brother Matthew toBathurst in 1866, Daniel Murphy toHobart in 1866, William Lanigan in Goul-burn in 1867, and the Quinns’ cousin,Timothy O’Mahony, to Armidale in 1869.The arrival of these men, ardent support-ers of Cardinal Paul Cullen, and deeplyinfluenced by the transformation of theIrish Church following the 1850 Synod ofThurles, ensured not only impressiveprograms of church construction and par-ish formation but strident opposition topublic schooling. 8 Their presence fannedthe sectarian embers in colonial life:Patrick O’Farrell observed, ‘the new bish-ops were, from their arrival, notably—and censoriously—interested in colonialpolitics, and disposed towards the adop-tion of a belligerent Catholic sectarian-ism’. 9

In 1869 the Provincial Council of theAustralian Catholic bishops reaffirmed its

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determination to oppose the introductionof secular education and to insist on theteaching of Roman Catholic doctrine inCatholic-run schools. Though Protestantleaders in the colonies were themselves farfrom acquiescent towards the principle ofstate-funded secular education, the un-wavering Catholic position was easily andquickly represented by its opponents asone of exclusiveness and intransigence—asa demonstration of that Church’s overrid-ing commitment to Roman rather thanAustralian precepts. The issue came to ahead most visibly in Victoria in 1872,when in a bitter election the governmentof the former Young Irelander, now mod-erate colonial Irishman, Charles GavanDuffy, was defeated. The new Victoriangovernment, emboldened with its successat the poll, moved to abolish state aid todenominational schools. The educationcontroversy in Victoria foreshadowedconflicts that would occur across colonialAustralia, though with varying degrees ofintensity and bitterness. But, the generalsituation was clear: the worlds of Aus-tralia’s Catholic and Protestant populationswere becoming more separate and insularones. 10

ii

The bitter controversy over educationin the 1860s coincided with increasingconcerns throughout the British empire atthe course of Irish affairs. In 1866 militantIrish nationalists in the United Stateslaunched two abortive invasions ofCanada. The following year Fenianslaunched an unsuccessful rising on Irishsoil. The nationalist organisation’s plansin Britain, including an attempt to seizearms from Chester Castle, were foiled.

However, though Fenianism’s failures in1866–7 far outweighed its successes, themovement made its mark and attractedinternational attention in a series of dra-matic events. The rescue of the move-ment’s leader, Colonel Thomas Kelly, froma prison van in Manchester, the trial andexecution of the men who staged the res-cue, and the bombing of Clerkenwellprison in London instilled across the Brit-ish empire an unprecedented fear of Irishinsurgency.

Fenianism’s impact was felt even indistant Australia. Through the latter halfof 1867 the Australasian colonies watchedwith apprehension the rising tide of viol-ence in the British Isles. It was hardlysurprising, then, that the British govern-ment’s decision to dispatch a contingentof Fenian prisoners to Western Australiaaroused considerable alarm. Colonial com-plaints against the perpetuation of convicttransportation in general, and of the threatposed by the Fenians in particular, provedineffectual. In January 1868 sixty-twoFenian prisoners and 217 other convictsarrived in Western Australia aboard theHougoumont. The rebels’ presence incitedconsiderable concern, especially amongthe population of the western colony. Butisolation was not the only factor thataroused disquiet. The arrival of the Fenianprisoners was given particular poignancyby the coterminous visit to Australia ofPrince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh,first member of the British Royal familyto tour the Australian colonies. 11

The prince arrived in South Australiaon 31 October 1867 where he received aneffusive welcome from the local popula-tion. His party subsequently moved on toMelbourne, in tone the most Irish of Aus-tralian cities in the nineteenth century.

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A ‘Successful Experiment’ No More

Melbourne’s Irish Catholic populationshowed a measure of defiance to the royalvisit, rallying outside the city’s ProtestantHall where a provocative illumination re-calling the Battle of the Boyne had beenerected. Shots were fired from the hall to-wards the protestors, and a Catholic youthwas killed. A brawl ensued, and an Orange-man was arrested. Though this incidentpossessed no definite Fenian overtones, itprovided a stark indication of sectariantensions then on the increase throughoutthe Australian colonies and a chillingforetaste of the violence that would soonengulf the tour. 12

From Victoria the prince travellednorth to New South Wales where, as else-where in Australia, he was greeted witheffusive displays of affection. The SydneyMorning Herald attempted to explain thecolonial rapture when it wrote on 21January 1868, ‘there is in the colonies alarge reservoir of loyalty long pent up.[The] colonies have had few opportunitiesto exhibit their love [and these] demonstra-tions in honour of Prince Alfred are itsoverflow’. 13 Sydney’s Roman Catholicnewspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, likewisewholeheartedly endorsed the royal visit,and made no attempt to disguise its reliefthat the prince’s arrival in the city hadproved incident-free. Its editorial com-ment, though, revealed a scarcely con-cealed nervousness about the days ahead,an air of fearful anticipation engenderedat least in part by the shadow of Fenian-ism:

So far, at all events, we may congratu-late ourselves that the royal visit has beenmarked by no incident distressing to any-body. All things being taken into considera-tion our freedom from accident has beenmost remarkable. No offensive display was

made by any body of men. The utmostgood humour prevailed. Indeed, the policereport shows that the city was morepeaceable than ordinary … of one thingwe are quite sure, that there is not a manof any creed or nationality on earth whodoes not wish the Duke of Edinburgh apleasant stay here and a safe voyage home. 14

But the tour did not remain accidentfree for long. The prince agreed to attenda picnic to raise funds for a new sailors’home. On 11 March, while attending theevent in the harbour-side suburb ofClontarf, an Irishman named Henry JamesO’Farrell shot Alfred in the back. The as-sassin was wrestled to the ground, arres-ted, and saved from the vengefulcrowd. 15 But even before the culprit hadbeen publicly identified, all attention fo-cussed on the assassin’s nationality andhis political motives.

As news of the assassination attemptspread, the Freeman’s Journal feared theworst. Its weekly edition, forced to pressbefore the gunman’s identity could beconfirmed, admitted ‘the prayer whichwas fervently uttered by thousands of ourcountrymen on their learning of the sadaffair was “Pray, God, that he is not anIrishman”’. Should the culprit indeedprove to be Irish, the newspaper avowed,‘then Irishmen must bow their heads insorrow, and confess that the greatest re-proach which has ever been cast on them,the deepest shame that has ever beencoupled with the name of our people, hasbeen attached to us here in the countrywhere we have been so free and prosper-ous’. 16 Too late for the newspaper’s edit-or, but soon enough for the colony’s IrishCatholic population, the awful truth wasknown: the culprit was indeed an Irish

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Catholic and a Fenian connection wasstrongly suspected.

Despite O’Farrell’s cry at the time ofthe shooting—‘I’m a Fenian—God SaveIreland’—historians discount the possibil-ity that the assassin was truly a Fenian.He was, in fact, an unbalanced young man,recently cast out from a seminary. 17 Butthe prospect that he had Fenian connec-tions, coupled with the recent arrival ofthe prisoners on Australian soil, incited awave of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic hysteriathe like of which had not been seen in theAustralian colonies before. Local politi-cians, most notably Henry Parkes, in-flamed passions with allegations of conspir-acy with the result that the cloak of suspi-cion fell heavily upon the Irish Catholicpopulation. Sleuths scoured the coun-tryside, bounty hunters seeking paymentin return for uncovering evidence ofthe diabolical Australian Fenian connec-tion. 18 The colonial parliament, mortifiedat the attempt on the life of the monarch’sson, enacted a treason felony bill. The NewSouth Wales premier, Cork-born Sir JamesMartin, declared in parliament that shouldFenianism be found in the colony, ‘itwould be met with a vigour and determin-ation which it had not encountered in themother country’. Membership of the LoyalOrange Order in the colony doubled bythe end of 1868 as outraged and fearfulProtestants enlisted their support in de-fence of queen and country. Across theland, sectarian feelings escalated to levelsscarcely imaginable a decade before. 19

Roman Catholics responded to thissectarian upsurge in two ways. Mostheeded the advice of the Freeman’s Journ-al, to ‘obey the law of the land and pa-tiently wait till the good sense of thepeople returns’. 20 Underpinning this

counsel was a confident belief in the gen-erally benign circumstances of colonial lifeand recognition of the presence offreedoms and liberties far exceeding thoseexperienced in Ireland. Firm in those con-victions, Irish Catholics cast their oppon-ents as bigots, men and women out oftouch with the true tenor of Australianlife. As Melbourne’s Advocate remarkedwelcoming the New Year in 1869, thosewho perpetuated sectarian division in theAustralian colonies were ‘out of date andout of place’. ‘The wretched days [of] idi-otic nervous no-popery are now passedfor ever’, it asserted all too prematurely,before prophesying better times ahead forIreland. ‘For the first time in history’,wrote the Advocate, ‘those who have aninfluence on English opinion seem to thinkthat the wishes of Irishmen should countfor something in the government of theirnative land’. 21 In line with that optimism,most Irish Catholics initially eschewedopen conflict with the Protestant majority.

However, a minority of Irish Catholicsreacted to the sectarian taunts with agreater measure of defiance—or, at least,a show of fight. Most famously, drunkengold diggers in country New South Wales,worse for wear after the excitement of theSt Patrick’s Day races, yelled at localtownspeople ‘We’re bloody Fenians! ComeOn! We’d soon kill a man as look at him!’Others joined in too, if less dramatically,more ambiguously, to assert and defendtheir own stake in Australian society. AGoulburn resident, Bartholomew Toomey,was brought before the magistrate’s courtafter declaring that the shooting servedthe prince right for ‘he had no business inthe country’. Influenced by such incid-ents, the New South Wales governor, LordBelmore, reported to the parliamentary

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under-secretary for the colonies, ‘rumoursof a spirit of Fenianism [are] abroad, partic-ularly in the country districts’. 22 Butconcerns also existed about the likelihoodof a radical nationalist presence in thetowns and cities. W. A. Duncan, a promin-ent Scots-born member of Sydney’s Cath-olic community, spoke publicly to denythe presence of organised Fenian groups,but admitted that ‘there were a few hot-headed young men who could not keepquiet … hot-headed youths who talkedvery foolishly’. Where once such expres-sions of bravado would have attractedlittle note, now they were sufficient tosound the alarm that violent Irish nation-alist activity would surface in Australia,and served to intensify the fires of sectari-an tension throughout the colonies. 23

Events across the Tasman Sea in NewZealand added further to the commotion.In 1867 a new arrival on the South Island’sWest Coast, John Manning, founded anewspaper, the New Zealand Celt. Man-ning’s journal was provocative and uncom-promising, and soon found a strong follow-ing among the large number of Irish immig-rants on the region’s goldfields. The pop-ulation of single Irish men present on theWest Coast proved especially receptive tothe Celt’s enthusiastic promotion of Irishnational consciousness. In line with theaffirmation of that new and assertive Irishidentity, on 8 March 1868 the Irish inHokitika staged a mock funeral for theManchester martyrs. Led by a RomanCatholic priest, Father William Larkin, afuneral procession wound its way to thelocal cemetery where a Celtic cross waserected. This overt display by Irish goldminers caused consternation among localloyalists, and when news of the attemptedassassination of Prince Alfred reached New

Zealand soon after, hostility was furtheraroused. Soon after, when Father Larkinmade a provocative speech in which heexpressed sympathy with Fenianism, localauthorities reacted. Manning and fiveothers were arrested. Rumours of Fenianactivism in the West Coast mining com-munity abounded, and the colony’s Anglo-Irish governor, Sir George Bowen, dis-patched troops to reinforce local volun-teers. All Australasia then seemed vulner-able to the tentacles of radical Irish nation-alism. 24

In both New Zealand and Australia,the Fenian threat was grossly inflated—infact, as best one can tell, invented. Butisolation, remoteness, and colonial fragilitybred fear and paroxysm. By the late 1860s,Irish Catholics in Australia confrontedmore strident opposition and there existedfor all groups a more hostile sectarian en-vironment than had been present for sev-eral decades. In 1869, with the assassina-tion attempt of the previous year still freshin the colonial mind, renewed attacks weremade on the level of Irish immigration toAustralia. In a debate in the New SouthWales parliament on administrativechanges to the assisted immigration pro-gram, opponents of the Irish decried thethreat posed to the colony by the twinevils of Romanism and Irish pauperism.Henry Parkes, who had exploited theO’Farrell affair to inflame sectarian pas-sions, now advocated greater restrictionon Irish entry to Australia, and quotedCharles Wentworth Dilke’s observationson the allegedly deleterious effect theCatholic Irish were having upon Americanlife to support the case for immigrationrestriction.

through drink, through gambling,and other vices of homeless,

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thriftless men, they are soon re-duced to beggary; and moral asthey are by nature, the Irish arenevertheless supplying Americawith that which she had neverpossessed before—a criminal andpauper class. 25

Though conditions in Australia and theUnited States were different in numerousways, by 1870 the image of Australia’s Ir-ish was increasingly influenced by local(Australian) interpretations of the Irishexperience in North America, not just bynegative stereotypes of the Irish at home.And though the reaction of Australian Ir-ish Catholics was in degree nothing so de-fiant or abrasive as that evinced by theirAmerican counterparts, they would exhib-it a decidedly sharper, brusquer exteriorto their opponents through the 1870s.

iii

Historians have debated the questionwhich group was most responsible for theworsening climate of sectarianism in Aus-tralia in the late 1860s and 1870s. In hisdetailed study of developments in NewSouth Wales, Mark Lyons identified theattitudes and desires of Australia’s IrishCatholic population as the paramountcause of worsening relations: ‘the real im-pediment to Catholic assimilation camefrom the Catholics themselves’. On Lyons’sreading of events, the greater politicisationand heightened national consciousnesspresent among Irish immigrants of the‘“forties” generation’, in conjunction withmilitant Catholic intransigence on matterssuch as religious education, terminatedthe more amicable inter-group relationsthat had characterised colonial life in thepreceding decades. However, others have

strenuously contested Lyons’s analysis.Michael Hogan, in a more wide-rangingstudy of sectarianism in Australia, arguedwith justification that Lyons’s evidencewas equally open to interpretation asdemonstrating Protestant culpability forthe deterioration in relations, and that theroots of sectarianism in Australia could beidentified much sooner than the 1860s.This is of course true, but neither analysisestablishes persuasively the specific forcesthat caused the flame of sectarian hatredto burn so bright in Australia at this time.

Other analysis has focussed on the roleof specific issues and events in triggeringchange. Here the education question andthe assassination attempt are identified asprimary causes of an upsurge in religiousbigotry. Yet, notwithstanding the import-ance of education and Irish affairs, thesecausal factors do not in themselves explainadequately the intensity of the sectarianescalation at this time.

Comparison with the eastern UnitedStates suggests a much more complicatedpicture, and provides important insightsinto the forces that drove Australian tem-pers to such fevered pitch. During thesecond quarter of the nineteenth centuryprofound changes affected major Americancities such as New York and Philadelphiaas early industrialisation displaced the ar-tisan system, urban concentrations expan-ded to new levels, and immigrationreached new peaks. Together these devel-opments engendered deep feelings of insec-urity among the native-born population,especially those who Dale Knobel de-scribed as ‘middling folk who wanted toget ahead and feared falling behind’. Un-surprisingly, in the midst of their unease,many of these Americans were attractedto fraternal organisations. The agendas of

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many of these associations correspondedclosely with evangelical Protestant con-cerns including liquor licensing, Sabbathclosing and public education. In the 1840s,public education in particular emerged asa key site in American Nativists’ struggleagainst what they understood to be thedeleterious effects of mass immigration.Controversies arose in both New York andPhiladelphia where Roman CatholicChurch leaders demanded the right to havetheir preferred Douay bible used in publicschools in place of the King James version.To Nativists, this Catholic demand forseparate religious instruction providedconfirmation of the group’s suspect loyaltyand isolation from Republican ideals, con-tested though these were. In Philadelphia,violent rioting broke out in 1844, its imme-diate triggers the issue of bible reading.However, as David Montgomery and oth-ers have shown, the roots of the crisis laymuch deeper, in the conjunction of eco-nomic change, class insecurity andfraternal ideology. 26

Though aspects of the Australian sceneundoubtedly differed from the UnitedStates, important similarities can be sug-gested between the two sectarian up-surges. In eastern Australia, the 1870smarked the beginning of a wave of majormanufacturing expansion. Though statist-ical data for the decade are limited andimprecise, two major studies point to avirtual doubling in the numbers of Aus-tralians employed in manufacturingbetween 1870 and 1880. Growth was par-ticularly strong in the number of personsengaged in the production of metals(468%), textiles (374%) and clothing(505%). 27 With this expansion in manu-facturing employment came an increase inthe proportion of the population resident

in the largest urban centres. Whereas in1871, 46 per cent of the population of NewSouth Wales were resident in urban areas,by 1881, 58 per cent of the colony’s popu-lation lived in the major city or towns.Most of that increase occurred in the cap-ital city, Sydney, where the populationincreased by nearly 300 per cent between1861 and 1881 though the population ofthe colony had increased by only 114 percent during the same period. In Victoriathe proportion of the colonial populationresident in urban areas had increased quitesubstantially in 1860s, and the populationof Melbourne continued to increase in the1870s though some decline occurred in thesize of smaller urban centres. The popula-tion of smaller Australian cities also rosesubstantially: Adelaide, for example,doubled in size between 1861 and1881. 28

In addition to economic change andearly urban concentration, the more fever-ish sectarian atmosphere in Australia inthe 1870s also coincided with significantgrowth in political movements espousingevangelical demands, a conjunction thatoccurred in the United States during itsearlier period of sectarian animus. Doctrin-al differences were subsumed as new,politically active, pan-Protestant organisa-tions emerged. The Protestant PoliticalAssociation, formed in 1872, provided aforum for Protestant mobilisation againstthe extent of Roman Catholic influence oncolonial life. Social and fraternal organisa-tions also experienced strong growth.Membership of the Orange Order, whichhad risen sharply in the immediate wakeof the 1868 assassination attempt, in-creased at an extraordinary rate throughthe 1870s. According to one study, itsmembership in New South Wales rose

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from fewer than 3,000 in 1869 to as manyas 19,000 members in 1876, while thenumber of affiliated lodges rose from 28to 130. By the late 1870s, Lyons estimated,as many as 15 per cent of Protestant malesaged over sixteen years were members. 29

The expansion in the membership of theOrange Order was accompanied by a di-minution in its Irish orientation. Gradu-ally, the movement expanded to becomeone more reflective of Australian Protest-antism at large than of its specific Irishantecedents. For its momentum it drewheavily on evangelical religion and its as-sociated reform campaigns, such as temper-ance, rather than matters Irish. Thoughthe Orange Order encompassed diversedenominations and social backgrounds,its cornerstone membership in 1870 wasclear enough: lower middle-class and re-spectable working-class men of ambition,frustrated in their yearnings, and ofteninsecure in disposition. Protestant fratern-ity offered such men security, ritual,prestige, connections, and the hope of so-cial mobility. Some were fortunate to se-cure that upward movement too, if thegradual elevation in social status amongthe movement’s leadership by the end ofthe 1870s is an accurate guide. 30

The mobilisation of Australia’s Protest-ant population was matched by a newlevel of discipline and vigour among Aus-tralian Catholics, a phenomenon directlyattributable to the arrival of Ireland’s‘Devotional Revolution’ on Australianshores. However, as Patrick O’Farrell ar-gued persuasively, the Australian scenelent a particular urgency and purpose tothe introduction of that model of religiousreinvigoration. In colonial Australia, no-torious for its apathy and indifference toreligious matters, a strong institutional

framework—particularly one instilledwith heavy Irish practice, tone and rhetor-ic—offered the best hope for the RomanCatholic Church to consolidate and strengthen its position. 31 The new Irishbishops came to Australia determined toraise the level of devotion and to instilnew vigour into the practice of AustralianCatholicism. To this end, they were readyand willing to attack or confront their op-ponents. 32 In the more heated, confront-ational environment, cooler voices weredrowned out. In November 1872 a newnewspaper, the Irishman, was founded inMelbourne. Opposed to the maintenanceof sectarian predilections and stronglyresistant to party allegiances, the newspa-per ceased publication within four months.Its blandness and neutrality appear tohave won little support in these conten-tious years. 33

iv

By the early 1880s, it might be judgedthat George Allman’s ‘successful experi-ment’ was at an end. In 1881 the essayistA. M. Topp argued in the Melbourne Re-view that Ireland’s population was funda-mentally different than that of other re-gions in the British Isles. Whereas theWelsh and Scots merged naturally withthe English, he maintained, the Irish wereirreconcilably set apart:

It is only with regard to them thatthe question of race becomes im-portant. Only as to them can anydoubt arise concerning the loyaltyand benefit to the empire of anyof the races that have acquired theEnglish tongue and are allowedthe rights and privileges conferred

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on its people by the institutions ofthe English people. 34

To Topp, the prevalence of RomanCatholicism in Ireland was an evil andmenacing by-product of Irish racial inferi-ority, a subordinate status that threatenedto undermine the future of the whole ofthe empire in just the way it had been‘sapping the vitals of the great republic’.

Topp’s explicit linkage of race and re-ligion is demonstrative of the extent towhich sectarian divisions were imprintedin Australian life by the early 1880s. Whenthe Irish Parliamentary Party MP JohnRedmond and his brother William visitedthe Australian colonies in 1883 as delegatesfor the Irish National League they en-countered an immensely hostile environ-ment. Arrayed against the Irish delegateswas a press that, in John Redmond’s view,exceeded England’s in its hostility to andignorance of Irish affairs. The SydneyMorning Herald conducted a prolongedand bitter campaign against the Irish rep-resentatives, describing their rhetoric asinflammatory and out of place. ‘If MrRedmond does not succeed in provokingdisorder in Sydney’, it wrote in one edit-orial, ‘it will be due not to the want of in-flammable material thrown down, but tothe orderliness and self-restraint of thepopulation’. Unsurprisingly, the protest-ant press was particularly vociferous inits opposition, the Protestant Standard de-scribing the delegates’ mission as an at-tempt to ‘white wash that blood-stainedLeague’. ‘He and his emissaries’, it com-plained vituperatively, ‘have stirred upstrife in the United States; brought to thesurface a body of people ready with dy-namite to blow up and destroy publicbuildings, careless of life, prompted bymalice, ready to supply arms for rebellion

and money for assassination; and then MrRedmond crosses the sea to sow like abom-inable seed here’. 35 In reply to suchcharges, John Redmond strenuouslydenied that he was out to inflame sectarianor nationalist passions. Writing inSydney’s Freeman’s Journal he declaredthat he ‘viewed with thankfulness andpride the Irishmen of these colonies livingin amity with their brethren of other na-tionalities, occupying the position of re-spected peaceable and loyal citizens of agreat and free country’. 36 At least in theinitial months of the tour, however, hisenergetic protestations did little to con-vince his critics to temper their attacksand bigotry remained rife. 37

Yet, weighed against this pessimisticassessment of the situation, at least threecounterpoints should be raised. First, des-pite the rise in religious bigotry in theperiod 1865–1885 and its real and harmfulconsequences for peoples of all faiths, theAustralian scene remained a mild onecompared to other locations. Hilary Careywas correct when she wrote recently,‘Australians lived in a sectarian environ-ment in the nineteenth century [however,]the sectarian tensions of colonial Australiaremained a pale imitation of rival tensionsin northern England, Ireland and Scotlandor in other settler societies, including theUnited States’. 38 Second, at the end ofthe period in question some signs of atempering of the sectarian strains werebecoming evident. During the 1880s a fairdeal of the heat generated by the questionof Ireland’s future dissipated, particularlyfollowing William Gladstone’s acceptanceof the principle of Home Rule. In succeed-ing years, an increasing number of Aus-tralians would acknowledge merit in Irishclaims to Home Rule, at least so long as

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those demands were couched in termssimilar to the Australian colonies’ ownconstitutional arrangements. And thirdly,as Andrew Markus and others haveshown, the 1880s witnessed a sharp intens-ification of anti-Chinese sentiment in theAustralian colonies and this facilitatedfurther the positioning of Irish Catholicsas privileged White insiders. 39

From the mid 1880s, therefore, theneutralising of Ireland as an immediatepolitical issue and the pathway to WhiteAustralian nationhood went some way toalleviating the intensity of overt religiousbigotry in Australia. But the power ofbigotry in the late nineteenth century wasat best dormant, never extinct. The educa-tion question had not been resolved, andit would remain for most of the next cen-tury a divisive issue in Australian life.And, when during World War One thecontentious issue of Ireland’s future againcame to the fore, religious bigotry re-turned with full force to divide the nationand its people.

ENDNOTES

1 Yass Courier, 19 March 1859. See also MalcolmCampbell, The Kingdom of the Ryans: the Irish inSouthwest New South Wales 1816–1890, Sydney,UNSW Press, 1997, pp. 84–6.2 Henry Haygarth, Recollections of Bush Life in Aus-tralia During a Residence of Eight Years in the Interior,London, Murray, 1861, p. 22; see also Donald Caris-brooke, ‘Immigrants in the Push’, Push from the Bush,5, Armidale, University of New England, December1979.3 Mary Durack, Kings in Grass Castles, London,Constable, 1959, p. 45. The colonial setting also con-tributed to this cordiality. Homi Bhaba insightfullyobserved in an interview that dwelt on his Parseeancestry that the colonial context could prompt ‘anethic of cultural tolerance, of the survival of variouscultures’, that contrasted markedly with the rigidityand intolerance of the metropolitan center: HomiBhaba ‘Between Identities’ in R. Benmayor and A.

Skotries (eds) Migration and Identity, Oxford, NewYork, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 188.4 Mark Lyons, Aspects of Sectarianism in New SouthWales Circa 1865 to 1880 , PhD thesis, AustralianNational University, 1972, p. 275.5 Michael Hogan, The Sectarian Strand: Religion inAustralian History, Ringwood, Vic., Penguin Books,1987, p. 101.6 James Rutledge, quoted in Alan Barcan, Two Cen-turies of Education in New South Wales, Kensington,NSW, NSW University Press, 1988, p. 75.7 Quoted in Barcan, Two Centuries of Education, p.107.8 Patrick O’Farrell, The Catholic Church and Com-munity: An Australian History, Kensington, NSW,NSW University Press, 1992, pp. 127–29; FrancesO’Donoghue, The Bishop of Botany Bay: The Life ofJohn Bede Polding, Australia’s First Catholic Archbish-op, London, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1982.9 Patrick O’Farrell, Catholic Church, p. 151.10 ibid., pp. 160–70; Hogan, Sectarian Strand, pp.100–27; Ronald Fogarty, Catholic Education in Aus-tralia, 1806–1950, 2 vols, Melbourne, MelbourneUniversity Press, 1959, Vol. I, pp. 208–55; CharlesGavan Duffy, My Life in Two Hemispheres, 2 vols,London, Unwin, 1898, Vol. II, pp. 321–46; J. S.Gregory, Church and State: Changing GovernmentPolicies Towards Religion in Australia, North Mel-bourne, Cassell Australia, 1973.11 Keith Amos, The Fenians in Australia, 1865–1880,Kensington, NSW: New South Wales UniversityPress, 1987, pp. 78–99; Patrick O’Farrell, The Irishin Australia, Kensington, NSW: New South WalesUniversity Press, 1993, pp. 208–10; T. J. Kiernan,The Irish Exiles in Australia, Dublin: Clonmore &Reynolds Ltd, 1954, pp. 152–67; G. C. Bolton, ‘TheFenians are coming, the Fenians are coming!’, Studiesin Western Australian History, IV, December 1981,pp. 62–7.12 Lyons, Aspects of Sectarianism, pp. 74–85; Hogan,Sectarian Strand, p. 104; O’Farrell, Irish in Australia,pp. 102–3.13 Sydney Morning Herald, 21, 22 January 1868.14 Freeman’s Journal, 25 January 1868 (italics mine).15 Sydney Morning Herald, 13 March 1868; Lyons,Aspects of Sectarianism, pp. 89–100; Amos, Fenians,pp. 52–3; Robert Travers, The Phantom Fenians ofNew South Wales, Kenthurst, NSW, Kangaroo Press,1986, pp. 19–26.16 Freeman’s Journal, 14 March 1868 (country edi-tion).

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17 Amos, Fenians, pp. 45–77; O’Farrell, Irish inAustralia, pp. 210–11; C. M. H. Clark, A History ofAustralia vol. 4: The Earth Abideth Forever,1851–1888, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press,1978, p. 255.18 Amos, Fenians, pp. 45–77; Travers, PhantomFenians, pp. 63–79; Lyons, Aspects of Sectarianism,pp. 89–176.19 Sydney Morning Herald, 14 March 1868.20 Freeman’s Journal, 21 March 1850.21 Advocate, 2 January 1869.22 Lyons, Aspects of Sectarianism, pp. 85, 119–30;O’Farrell, Irish in Australia, pp. 210–11; Amos,Fenians in Australia, pp. 68–77.23 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 March 1868.24 Richard Davis, Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics,1868–1922, Dunedin, University of Otago Press, 1974,pp. 11–24; David McGill, The Lion and the Wolfhound:The Irish Rebellion on the New Zealand Goldfields,Wellington, NZ, Grantham House, 1990; PatrickO’Farrell, ‘How Irish was New Zealand’, Irish StudiesReview, 9, Winter 1994–5, pp. 25–30.25 Henry Parkes, Irish Immigration: Speech De-livered in the Legislative Assembly on the SecondReading of ‘A Bill to Authorise and Regulate AssistedImmigration’, Sydney, 1869, p. 11; on attempts toreduce the Irish component within the assisted im-migrant stream, see Pauline Hamilton, ‘No Irish NeedApply’: Prejudice as a Factor in the Development ofImmigration Policy in New South Wales and Victoria,1840–1870, PhD thesis, University of New SouthWales, 1979, p. 423; Lyons, Aspects of Sectarianism,pp. 261–62.26 Dale T. Knobel, America for the Americans: TheNativist Movement in the United States, New York,Twayne Publishers, 1996, pp. 49–72; David Mont-gomery, ‘The shuttle and the cross: weavers and ar-tisans in the Kensington riots of 1844’, Journal ofSocial History, 5, 1972, pp. 411–46; Michael Feldberg,The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of EthnicConflict, Wesport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 1975.27 Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: HistoricalStatistics, Broadway, NSW, Fairfax, Syme & WeldonAssociates, 1987, pp. 286–89, tables Manf. 1–12,13–22; N. G. Butlin, Investment in Australian Econom-ic Development, 1861–1900, Canberra: Dept. of Eco-nomic History, Research School of Social Sciences,Australian National University, 1972, pp. 16–23.28 Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics,pp. 23, 40–41.29 Lyons, Aspects of Sectarianism, pp. 275–78;Hogan, Sectarian Strand, pp. 97–100; Hilary Carey,

Believing in Australia: A Cultural History of Religions,St Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp. 82–95.30 Lyons, Aspects of Sectarianism, pp. 278–300,422–29; O’Farrell, Irish in Australia, pp. 101–5.31 O’Farrell, Catholic Church, pp. 194–225; HughJackson, Churches and People in Australia and NewZealand, Wellington, NZ, Port Nicholson Press, 1987,pp. 22–47.32 Hogan, Sectarian Strand, pp. 101–2.33 The Irishman, Melbourne, 28 November 1872; 30January 1873; 20 February 1873; 27 February 1873.34 A. M. Topp, ‘English institutions and the Irishrace’, Melbourne Review, VI, January 1881, pp. 9–10.35 Protestant Standard, 24 February 1883. See alsothe Victorian Banner, 24 March 1883 describing theRedmond visit: ‘It began with a rant; it has gone onto a riot; it may end in rebellion, and in the vigournecessary to restrain rebellion’.36 Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 1883; Free-man’s Journal, 3 March 1883.37 The Bulletin, 1 March 1883.38 Carey, Believing in Australia, p. 94.39 See Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations,Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1994, pp. 79–84; MalcolmCampbell, ‘Ireland’s furthest shores: Irish immigrantsettlement in nineteenth century California andeastern Australia’, Pacific Historical Review, 71 (1),February 2002, pp. 59–90.

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A ‘REGION OF INDECENCY ANDPRURIENCY’

RELIGIOUS CONFLICT, FEMALE COMMUNITIES AND HEALTH CAREIN COLONIAL NEW SOUTH WALES

JUDITH GODDEN

The focus of this paper is on the reli-gious conflict that nearly destroyed

the attempt to introduce reformed nursing,as advocated by Florence Nightingale, intothe colony of New South Wales. Religiousconflict, arising from belief and bigotryand enflamed by images of medieval mar-tyrs, had a major impact on the social andpolitical life of the colony. Such conflictpeaked in New South Wales during the1860s-80s and especially in 1868, the yearthe Nightingale nurses arrived. Reformingnursing was far from the seemingly innoc-uous act it might appear. Nightingalenursing had a major impact on the healthcare system and challenged accepted no-tions of women’s work. The influence ofthese founding years reverberates inmodern nursing. Reforming nursing alsoexacerbated major anxieties about wo-men’s communities. These anxieties wererevealed in a somewhat farcical publicbrawl in 1870 between the advocates andopponents of reformed nursing, Catholics,High Church Anglicans and EvangelicalProtestants.

INTRODUCTION

On 5 March 1868, six nurses landedin Sydney. All had been trained at theNightingale School of Nursing, St Thomas’Hospital, London, the training school setup by the Nightingale Fund to reform ci-vilian nursing. The Nightingale Fund hadbeen created during the Crimean War inappreciation of Florence Nightingale whoheaded the teams of nurses sent to succorthe soldiers.

The New South Wales Governmentpaid the six nurses’ passages and guaran-teed their salaries for three years. LucyOsburn, as the newly appointed Lady Su-perintendent of the Sydney Infirmary andDispensary (now Sydney Hospital), wasin charge of the nurses. They had beenselected by the Nightingale Fund and ap-proved by Florence Nightingale herself toreform nursing at the Sydney Infirmaryand to train nurses so that they wouldspread Nightingale nursing throughoutthe colony. 1 Their arrival was a signific-ant event in the history of Australianhealth care. Effective nursing with an em-phasis on hygiene and cleanliness was,and is, essential to health care. 2 Themedical practitioners at Sydney Infirmary

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were particularly aware of the importanceof nursing to their increasingly effectivemedical practice, arising from advancessuch as the use of anaesthetics in surgery.For years they petitioned the hospitalboard to employ trained nurses. 3 The ar-rival of Lucy Osburn as Lady Superintend-ent was also a major milestone in women’swork. Nightingale style nursing was amajor new avenue of work for upperworking-class and lower middle-class wo-men. Lucy Osburn’s role as Lady Superin-tendent was also innovative; a public as-sertion of the right of upper middle-classwomen to retain their high status as‘ladies’ while also being paid a salary.

The introduction of Nightingale nurs-ing to the colony of New South Wales wasalso, as argued below, a significant eventin Australian religious history. Nursingmay sound innocuous but it was to signi-ficantly add to the religious tensions ofthe colony in the late nineteenth century.To the nineteenth century mind, moralityarose from religious beliefs. As Nightingalenurses claimed to embody physical andmoral purity 4 inevitably they were as-sumed to be acting from religious motives.Suspicious colonials were soon asking,which religion?

COLONIAL BEGINNINGS

Colonial Secretary Henry Parkes wasamong those who warmly welcomed Os-burn and her nurses on their arrival inSydney on the 5 March 1868. Parkes hadwritten the letter to Florence Nightingaleasking for nurses to come to Sydney. 5 Hehad recently borne the brunt of churchopposition to his 1866 Public Schools Actand had been especially vilified as an en-emy of Irish Catholics. 6 He may have

hoped that the introduction of Nightingalenurses would reinforce, without contro-versy, an image of statesmanlike concernfor social welfare. If so, his political judg-ment erred.

At first, Osburn and her nurses werea political triumph. Osburn was befriendedby the colonial elite but the real publicrelations coup occurred a week after thenurses’ arrival. At a dusty, overcrowdedpicnic in his honour, Australia’s firstBritish royal visitor, Prince Alfred, Dukeof Edinburgh, was shot in an assassinationattempt. He was taken to GovernmentHouse where the royal naval surgeon ex-tracted the bullet, and two of Osburn’snurses successfully nursed him back tohealth. The influential surgeon AlfredRoberts, who had attached a detailedmemo in support of Parkes’s proposal inthat first letter to Florence Nightingale,was therefore denied a role in the drama.He somewhat sourly wrote to Nightingaleabout the resultant publicity for thenurses: ‘our Sisters nursed him [thePrince], he was pleased and therefore ourSisters are fashionable folk’. 7 Even theirreverent newspaper, the Sydney Punch ,which was later to vehemently opposeOsburn, extended a public welcome toOsburn and her five nurses, hailing themas ‘fair sisters of charity’. 8 Such phraseo-logy should have served as a warning.

The public relations honeymoon lastedlittle more than a year. Soon Osburn wasthe focus of enormous opposition. A rangeof difficulties, including badly built, ver-min-infested hospital buildings, chronicill health, social isolation and loneliness,exacerbated her position. By the end ofher first three-year term, Osburn hadaroused a sadly impressive number of op-ponents. She had alienated all but one of

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the five nurses who had come out fromBritain with her. She had aroused theenmity of Alfred Roberts, a major problemas he was a dominating force in Sydneymedical circles and also corresponded withFlorence Nightingale. Many members ofthe Infirmary’s Board also regarded herwith hostility. Finally, Osburn had theadded problem of the withdrawal of sup-port by Florence Nightingale and membersof her circle. It is one of history’s ironiesthat while historians have agreed that Os-burn succeeded in founding Nightingalenursing in Sydney during her sixteen anda half year term, Nightingale did not thinkso. 9 The religious conflict examined be-low was just one aspect of the conflict overnursing at Sydney Infirmary.

ODIUM THEOLOGICUM

Religious conflict was just one of theissues, but it was a crucial and very publicissue. Florence Nightingale was deeplyreligious and very aware of the problemsof religious conflict—of odium theologic-um . 10 Nightingale was particularly con-cerned that her nurses should not becaught up in Protestant fears about thegains made by a resurgent British Catholi-cism since the repeal of the Penal Code inIreland and the 1829 Catholic Emancipa-tion Act in England. 11 Fear of Catholicismmeant that the number of Catholics admit-ted to the Nightingale School of Nursingwas deliberately limited, with the resultthat the Nightingale Lady Superintend-ents, Matrons and Sisters, in London andin Sydney under Osburn, were all Protest-ants. In the early 1890s, Angelique LucillePringle was forced to resign as Matron ofthe Nightingale Training School and StThomas’ Hospital. Florence Nightingale

considered her as one of the best of herMatrons, the ‘best and ablest woman Iknow’ and called her ‘Pearl’ for her out-standing qualities. Such qualities were ir-relevant when Pringle converted to Cath-olicism; there was no question that herconversion meant she had to resign. 12

The potential for conflict betweenProtestants and Catholics intensified fromthe 1850s in Britain and Australia. Fromthis decade the Catholic Church hardenedits doctrinal line on a number of issues andbenefited from a number of high profileconverts including Cardinal Manning.Manning had been a member of the HighChurch wing of the Church of England,that part of the church that had most incommon with Catholicism. With the ex-ample of Manning and others, there wasgood reason why Evangelicals feared HighChurch practices as leading to conversionto Catholicism. There was also good reasonwhy many of Nightingale’s nursing Super-intendents and Matrons belonged to theHigh Church wing of the Church of Eng-land.

The attraction of Nightingale nursingfor High Church women lies in the originsof nursing and its transformation in thenineteenth century. In the first half of thenineteenth century, there were broadlytwo different categories of nurses. The firstcategory, and majority of nurses, wereworking-class men and women whonursed members of their own sex andlearnt nursing through experience. Thewomen amongst these nurses were, in partunfairly, permanently stigmatised byCharles Dickens in his 1844 novel, MartinChuzzlewit , especially with his characterSairey Gamp. Gamp was working class,coarse and unfeeling, unskilled and proneto drink. The second category of nurses

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A ‘Region of Indecency and Pruriency’

were members of religious orders. Fromthe 1840s, these included a number ofChurch of England Sisterhoods, inspiredpartly by the example of Pastor Fliednerin Germany and his revival of the orderof Deaconesses. 13 The primary inspirationfor nursing sisterhoods, however, camefrom the much admired Catholic Sisters ofCharity. A common cry of the day, includ-ing the Times in its reports which led toFlorence Nightingale being sent out to theCrimean War, was: where are the Protest-ant Sisters of Charity? 14

By the end of the century, there wasa third category of nurse, the Nightingalenurse. In many ways they were the Prot-estant answer to the fame of the Sisters ofCharity. These nurses were inspired byFlorence Nightingale’s role as the Lady ofLamp in the Crimean War during 1854-6.From 1860 they were trained at theNightingale Fund financed School ofNursing, St Thomas’ Hospital, London.Nightingale nursing essentially referredto orderly, disciplined, trained, femalecontrolled nursing care which emphasisedhygiene and moral, as well as physical,cleanliness. What made Nightingale nurs-ing different, and so widely acceptable ina Protestant society, was that it offered aunique synthesis of the two previous typesof nurse. Nightingale nursing was initiallycarried out by much the same type of wo-men who had been stigmatised as Gampsbut they were now under the control ofSisters who were ideally middle class and‘ladies’, inspired by a vocation, not to reli-gious life, but to nursing. 15 Religion wasexplicitly used to inspire this sense of vo-cation. Henry Bonham Carter, Nightin-gale’s trusted cousin and Secretary to theNightingale Fund, for example, advisedNightingale in 1871 that the Probationers

at the Nightingale School of Nursingneeded more bible classes ‘to keep themabove the mere scramble for a remunerat-ive place’. 16

Demanding the same dedication asprofessed sisters, Nightingale nursing in-evitably shared many of the features ofthe religious Sisterhoods. This tendencywas reinforced as Nightingale nursing su-perintendents, like Osburn, did theirmidwifery training at Kings’ College Hos-pital, under the nursing control of StJohn’s House, a Church of England Sister-hood. 17 It was due to this arrangementthat the Protestant Standard was able torepeat the accusation that Mary Jones,Superior of St John’s House, was themodel for Lucy Osburn’s nursing style andnot Florence Nightingale. 18 Features incommon to both groups included the titleof Sister and living in tightly controlledcommunities. Both wore uniforms which,for nursing sisters,increasingly includedthe veil. Nightingale nursing and many ofthe sisterhoods, at least at this time, alsohad two recruitment streams—one forworking-class women, the other for edu-cated, middle-class women. For example,middle-class, educated women entered theSisters of Charity as choir sisters; lesseducated working-class women becamelay sisters. Similarly, middle-class, edu-cated women entered the NightingaleNursing School as Lady or Special Proba-tioners (students) and became Sisters; inSydney under Osburn they were calledSister Probationers. Less educated work-ing-class women entered as Nurse Pro-bationers and became, and stayed, Nurses. 19

The most significant feature in com-mon between Nightingale nurses andmembers of religious sisterhoods such as

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the Catholic Sisters of Charity and theAnglican Sisters of St John’s House, wasthat they were communities of womenwith a woman in charge. Nightingale in-sisted that the most important aspect ofher reforms was that nurses were underthe leadership of ‘one female head’. 20

Nightingale nursing involved women wholived in and also resulted in a lowering ofthe age of nurses. Nurses who learnt fromexperience tended to be older and oftenwidows. The Nightingale nurses, however,needed to be trained and so were younger.Ideally, the Nightingale nurse wasbetween twenty-five to thirty-five yearsold; in practice both in England and inSydney, the majority were in their earlytwenties. 21 The idea of a female-con-trolled community, including young girls,led to all sorts of horrors in nineteenth-century minds, not excluding CatholicArchbishops (as the Sisters of Charity inSydney discovered). 22 The feminisationof religion was occurring but women wereseen as more child-like, emotional, illogicaland more easily influenced than men. Acommunity of women, including youngwomen, without male headship, was seenas inevitably leading away from rationalityand true belief. For Evangelical Protestantsthe fear was that such potentially emotion-ally unstable communities were vulnerableto the ever-waiting enemy: Rome.

Lucy Osburn was one of the Nightin-gale nursing leaders who strongly identi-fied with the High Church wing of theChurch of England. It is highly likely thatNightingale, during one of her meetingswith Osburn before she left for Sydney,advised her to avoid religious conflict bybeing discreet about her High Church be-liefs. In early 1868, as Osburn’s ship wasnearing Sydney, Florence Nightingale

wrote to another new nursing Superintend-ent that ‘Any expression of High Churchviews or exhibition of High Church prac-tices would be injurious to the success ofthe Nursing’. 23 If Nightingale did not,by some unlikely chance, give a similarwarning to Lucy Osburn before she leftLondon, she was soon to do so in writing.As early as December 1868, nine monthsafter Osburn arrived in Sydney, Nightin-gale’s key adviser Henry Bonham Carter,knew enough to write to Nightingale thathe feared Osburn was ‘bent upon Sister-hood notions’. He had heard that shecalled herself ‘the Lady Superior’, follow-ing Mary Jones the Head of the St John’sHouse Sisters, and had changed the nurses’uniform to be more like that of a religioussister. He advised that ‘This is likely to doharm at Sydney where there is a good dealof party spirit R[oman].C[atholic]. & Prot-estant. Could you give her a hint to avoidthis & keep the nursing as “secular” aspossible in outward appearance.’ 24

Nightingale’s letter has not survived, butone of Osburn’s letters at this time makesit clear she was replying to these con-cerns. 25

With hindsight, there was little chancethat religious controversy could have beenavoided. As Malcolm Campbell hasdemonstrated, religious bigotry intensifiedin eastern Australia during 1865–85. Thisbigotry was fuelled by the arrival inJanuary 1868 of sixty-two Fenian (militantIrish nationalist) prisoners in WesternAustralia. Henry Parkes intensified publichysteria by claiming the would-be assassinof Prince Alfred as part of a Fenian conspir-acy. 26 Of all years, 1868 was the worstpossible time to introduce a nursing sys-tem that could be confused with a Catholicsisterhood. In addition, the only other

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trained nurses in the colony were Sistersof Charity who had established St Vin-cent’s Hospital in Sydney in 1857. As Os-burn reported, there was the common be-lief in Sydney that Florence Nightingalewas Catholic so it was logical to believethat she had instituted her system ofnursing along Catholic lines. 27 The largeand cumbersome Board of Sydney Infirm-ary could only make the conflict worse,as it did with most issues it dealt with. Aswith the majority of large Sydney charitiesat the time, the Infirmary Board was re-puted to be militantly Evangelical but togain government subsidies needed itsgoverning body to be ‘unsectarian’. 28

The Board therefore represented the rangeof major religions in Sydney. It includedFather Dwyer, a Catholic Priest whoclashed with Henry Parkes over the treat-ment of Prince Alfred’s would-be assassin,and at least one Jewish member, JosephRaphael. Raphael was rigidly conscientiousin all his duties, a meticulous and highlyskilled craftsman responsible for makingLucy Osburn’s beautiful cedar office fur-niture that is still in the Nightingale Wingof Sydney Hospital today. He was alsodescribed, by one of his many opponents, as ‘the foulest-mouthed man in Sydney’. 29 The Board was not a harmo-nious mix.

Nevertheless, Osburn did not takeNightingale’s advice. She highlighted anysimilarity with Sisterhoods by wearing, asindicated in contemporary photographs,a large cross around her neck. 30 Shewrote in terms of taking her ‘vows’ whenshe entered nursing at St Thomas’ Hospitaland, in her own words, was prejudiced infavour of religious sisterhoods. 31 Hermanagement style also made her vulner-able to accusations that she ran nursing

like a convent. Osburn had little conceptof personal privacy or of other’s rightsand, for example, was severely criticisedby Nightingale for opening the mail of oneof the English Sisters. Osburn not onlyopened the Sister’s letter, but she repliedto it herself and did not tell the Sister shehad done so for some time. 32

THE 1870 INQUIRY

Under such circumstances, it is notsurprising that in 1870, just two and a halfyears after Osburn and the nurses arrivedin Sydney, religious tensions resulted ina public inquiry. 33 The inquiry was nota small matter. Osburn was correct injudging it had the potential to destroy herwork and result in her dismissal. Govern-ment-supported charities such as theSydney Infirmary needed to demonstratethat they were unsectarian. If the chargesagainst Osburn were proven, the govern-ment could be effectively accused of sup-porting sectarian practices. The inquirywas chaired by the highly respected cler-gyman, Alfred Stephen, and reported ex-tensively in the papers. It took evidencefor six weeks and investigated eighteenallegations made over almost one year bythe Evangelical newspaper, the ProtestantStandard . The allegations focused on fa-vouritism by Lucy Osburn towards thehiring and treatment of Catholic staff andof alleged anti-Protestant activities, mostnotably an order to burn some Bibles. 34

The Protestant Standard’s call for an in-quiry was given greater resonance by be-ing in the name of ‘religious freedom’. 35

The seriousness of the inquiry and themutual suspicion and fear fuelled by reli-gious conflict is well illustrated in a letterfrom Lucy Osburn to Florence Nightingale,

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written on 7 September 1870. 36 LucyOsburn wrote that she initially dismissedthe matter as yet another attempt attrouble-making by her staff: ‘Blundell [oneof the English Sisters] & the [Infirmary]Chaplain had written the statements [forthe Protestant Standard] I knew’. She madeclear her disdain for the press: ‘I lookedupon the papers much in the same light asone looks upon mosquitoes on a hot dayannoying but beneath notice’. She was tolearn, however, that some mosquitoescarry a deadly bite. So too could those sheconsidered beneath her. She had grownup in a world with people sharply delin-eated by status and class. Her world hadtaught her that as a Christian she wasabove a Jew; as an English daughter of awine merchant, she was above publicansand colonial merchants; as a liberal shewas above a radical; and as a ‘lady’ belong-ing to the Church of England, she wasabove vulgar dissenters. Then her fate,and the fate of nursing at Sydney Infirm-ary and all it involved, was in the handsof those very people. Her prejudices wereclear in her descriptions, without namingthem, of the inquiry members. JosephRaphael dismissed as ‘A violent loudspoken Jew’; another simply categorisedas ‘a retired publican’ and William Alder-son, the protectionist and wealthy employ-er, dismissed as ‘a leather merchant good-natured [sic] & ignorant & always on theside of the people against the authorit-ies’. 37 Then there was the man Osburnconsidered ‘worst of all a sour-faced big-oted, harsh cruel-looking Presbyterianminister who appeared all the time as if hew[oul]d. like to flay me before burningme’, Robert Lewers. 38 Osburn believedthat Lewers had been deliberately electedSecretary to the Infirmary Board ‘by the

Orange clubs … to persecute me’. 39 Os-burn did not view all the nine membersof the inquiry as enemies, some shethought were indifferent and a few ‘mostsincere friends’. 40

In her letter to Nightingale about theinquiry, Osburn ‘tried to laugh at thething as an absurd farce but as I saw allmy work of 3 years destroyed by it mylaughing was often near to crying’. 41 Shehad previously faced dismissal whenmembers of the Nightingale Fund heardthat she had written an indiscreet, gossipyletter about her conversations alone withthe convalescent and handsome youngPrince Alfred. Now for the second time intwo years she faced disgrace, partlythrough her own actions. 42

Although the inquiry was so serious,Osburn found it hard not to be contemptu-ous of the proceedings when, as she wrote,‘I was called in myself … the first thing Iwas treated to, [was] a fight between theChairman & the Jew’. 43 She tried to ex-plain why she had ordered Bibles to beburnt. The Chaplain had told her aboutold papers and books which he had foundin one of the underground rooms of theNightingale Wing, and that he had hadthe intact ones cleaned. He suggested thatthe rest, including portions of Bibles, beput in a box and ‘must be destroyed asthey were full of vermin’. 44 The justific-ation for, and the effectiveness of, the newNightingale nurses were their moral purityand physical cleanliness. As the embodi-ment of the new, cleaner Nightingalenurse, Osburn fought a never-ending fightagainst vermin in the badly built, decay-ing old building that housed the patients.She had slept in the building her firstnight in Sydney, when as she wrote, she‘never closed my eyes’, the bugs were in

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such numbers ‘that I dare[d] not’. 45 Shehad described the paper on her bedroomwall moving with the numbers of bugsscuttling behind it. The only vermin-freebuilding on the site was the freestandingNightingale Wing, completed some monthsafter she arrived, and home to her and thefemale staff. Her statement to Nightingalewas surely a major understatement: ‘I washorrified at the thought of bugs in the newhouse’. 46

She knew the religious politics of theday; her father had published a bookabout his fear of insidious Catholic influ-ences. 47 It is improbable that as a childshe had not learnt about Protestant mar-tyrs who died in agony for printing anddistributing bibles. It is equally likely thatshe knew that burning as opposed toburying books had a historic, symbolichorror. Most of those who gave evidenceat the inquiry, including the Yardmanasked to burn the material, the Chaplainand the Superintendent of the hospital allrevealed their horror at burning ratherthan burying religious texts. 48 Yet, asshe wrote, ‘I told the yardman to burn therest although the Chaplain had said tornspoilt portions of the Bible were amongthem’. She added that these portions were‘so full of bugs’ but she must have knownthat was besides the point. 49 Why burnand not bury? She could only respond bycomplaining that her order to the yardman‘has now been magnified into a systematic& determined burning of Bibles on mypart’. 50 Lucy Osburn had acted impuls-ively and thoughtlessly, as she would toomany times, underestimating the reactionof others and the virulence of religiousfears and suspicion.

In her letter to Nightingale she wasdetermined to rise above the nuisance, the

mosquito bites of the press, the inquiryand the sectarian turmoil she had created,so her final comments stressed the farcicalaspect of the inquiry. When they werehearing her evidence, she wrote, a disputeoccurred between Father M. Dwyer andthe Reverend Lewers: ‘something turnedup wh[ich]. set the R[oman]. Cath[olic].priest on to the Presbyterian minister &the bickering fighting sparring & tempershown were quite amusing, that aboutended the séance nobody c[oul]d. calmdown after the excitement to ask anything– so away I went’. 51

Away she went but the cause of re-formed nursing, and thus effective healthcare and a redefined occupation for wo-men, was irrevocably tarnished with sec-tarian suspicion. Eventually the inquiryvindicated her: ‘there has been no sectari-an predilections manifested by the LadySuperintendent to affect the interests ofthe Institution’. 52 The Protestant Stand-ard consequently rejected the process asreflecting the ‘very essence of Popery’. 53

The issues therefore lingered on and werepartly resurrected in the 1873–4 Commis-sion into Public Charities whose first re-port was on the Sydney Infirmary, andwhich again vindicated Osburn. 54 Theissue again died down but simmered be-neath the surface.

The sectarian passions evidenced dur-ing the inquiry are revealed by the stereo-typical images that each side evoked. Os-burn tried to keep her letter to Nightingalelight but still her opponents appeared toher as in a nightmare of religious bigotry,with medieval images of flaying andburning. 55 In general, especially whenwriting to the august Florence Nightingale,Osburn’s supporters were more moderatebut still blamed evangelical nastiness.

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Judge William Windeyer, who was a lessthan impartial chair of the 1873–4 Commis-sion into Public Charities which inquiredinto Osburn’s role at the Sydney Infirm-ary, informed Nightingale that Osburn’sopponents were a ‘clique of ignorant fan-atics’. 56 Henry Bonham Carter quicklypassed on the opinion of his wife’s cousin,Elizabeth [Macarthur-] Onslow, who wrotethat Osburn’s problems came from ‘ill natured attacks of the evangelical party’. 57

The Freeman’s Journal , a Catholic pa-per, drew upon images of wronged, de-fenceless womanhood:

The victim is a lady – unmarried- and as far as we know withoutany other kind of protection fromruffianism than her sweet life andvirtues afford. She can invoke nomarital or fraternal horsewhip tovindicate … has no support savethat of a good generous publicsympathy with a brave gentle life- and that feeling of scorn of libel-ers of women. As Catholics we canadmire virtue wherever it is to befound, and as men we abominatethe people who slander women. 58

One can almost hear the backgroundviolins and imagine the reporter’s regretthat Osburn was not also a poor Irishmother. Such writing, while typical of theFreeman’s Journal, did Osburn few fa-vours in her attempts to establish a publicrole for employed, middle-class women.

Neither Osburn nor her supporters,however, could match her opponents forhyperbole. Religious conflict, althoughplayed out in a remote Australian colonyin 1870, relied on emotional images drawnlargely from medieval Europe. The Protest-

ant Standard and Sydney Punch lead thereligious charge against Lucy Osburn.There were a number of stock phrasesused when describing Osburn and hernurses. The nurses’ home was the ‘Night-ingale nunnery’; Osburn was the ‘ladyAbbess’; her policies were that of ‘HighChurchism and semi Popery’ and thenursing students were referred to as‘novitiates’. 59 Osburn was criticised as‘aping the dress style and manners’ of ahead of a convent. 60 A nurse in uniformwas described as being ‘in all the splend-our of the Gamp nunnery livery’ and thenurses as living in a ‘Misses Gamp nun-nery’. 61 The latter phrases were wonder-fully economical insults inferring that thenurses were actually like Charles Dickens’sstereotype of the pre-Nightingale nurse,Sairey Gamp, but dressed as nuns. TheSydney Punch claimed that the Nightingalewing had twenty rooms and was solely forfour British nurses’ accommodation. 62 Inreality there were six British nurses andthe Nightingale wing accommodated allthe other female staff as well as Osburnand her team. There was particular stresson the youthfulness of the nursing stu-dents with the Sydney Punch recommend-ing that the Infirmary should ‘return eachsilly would-be Nightingale to her mother,with a birch rod as a present’. 63 The fol-lowing year it described Sydney Infirm-ary: ‘a seminary of empty-headed girls …so called “probationers” … accepts asnovitiates hysterical chits of eighteen, andinducts them under the specious film ofmaudlin sentimentality into a region inwhich indecency and pruriency may satean unhealthy appetite’. 64 When theabove was written, Osburn’s Nurses’ Re-gister indicates that only one probationerentered when she was eighteen years old,

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and the entry age of the rest ranged fromnineteen to thirty-eight years old. 65

The opposition to Osburn was not justposed in terms of individual abuse but alsoof national pride and the defense of tradi-tional Protestant values. The issue quicklytranscended parochial issues such asnursing, patient care or women’s work.Osburn’s opponents, especially the Scot-tish Haldane Turriff, one of the Nightin-gale-trained Sisters who had accompaniedOsburn to Sydney, defined themselves asstout-hearted defenders of Protestant inde-pendence against convent discipline andCatholic submission. The Scottish themewas picked up in the colonial parliamentby another Scot, David Buchanan, afirebrand whose invective matched thatof Joseph Raphael. Buchanan was reportedas claiming, in one of his famed tirades,that the issue was religious liberty, thesame issue that had caused the ‘wholecovenanting war in Scotland’. He warned‘when Scotland rose up’, other nations hadbetter beware.Osburn was guilty, he ac-cused, of ‘vulgar, insolent tyranny … fouland gross tyranny’. 66

How easy it was to exploit religiousemotions was revealed by the actions ofanother of the Nightingale-trained BritishSisters, the English Annie Miller, who ac-cused Osburn of not allowing her to attendher Congregational church. Annie Miller’scomplaint too became an issue of religiousliberty and was raised in the colonial par-liament and in the press. 67 Miller’s casewas finally discredited at the 1870 inquiryby her own minister and by the claim thatit was she, not Osburn, who had placed acrucifix in one of the hospital’s publicrooms. 68 The extent to which religiousissues were management issues is also re-vealed by Osburn’s insistence that all the

Sisters and Nurses attend church servicein the Infirmary’s Boardroom on Sundaymornings rather than go to their ownchurches. Osburn was reported as statingthe reason was that if they did go tochurch on Sunday mornings she wouldnot know ‘when I should see their facesagain’. 69

Nightingale nursing with its emphasison cleanliness, working from a vocation,and creating a female community, was anew concept in the colony. Religion com-plicated almost every attempt of Osburnto establish a stable foundation for the newnursing. How difficult any one issue couldbe is illustrated by the problems Osburnencountered over what to call her staff andherself. At both the 1870 inquiry and the1873 Public Commission, there were objec-tions to the ‘Head Nurses’, as the objectorscalled them, being called ‘Sisters’. Al-though the title Sister was traditionallyused in a number of English hospitals,many people in Sydney assumed it meantmembership of a religious order. Osburnmade it worse by using the Sisters’ Chris-tian names, for example, Sister Mary orSister Annie, a practice that reminded hercritics of convents. Then there was thevexed problem of Osburn’s title. Nightin-gale fussed over trivial details regardingOsburn’s coming to Australia and, for ex-ample, spent an enormous amount of en-ergy deciding what books to present toeach nurse, but she left important detailsto chance. 70 One of these details was Os-burn’s title—Nightingale referred to bothMatron and Lady Superintendent. WhenOsburn arrived in Sydney, she discoveredpractical objections to both titles. 71 Soshe unwisely adopted the title common toheads of religious sisterhoods, that of‘Lady Superior’. Osburn’s title became a

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matter of political bickering so that in 1870a question and answer in the LegislativeAssembly referred to her as ‘the HeadNurse’, ‘the Superintending Nurse’, and‘the Lady Superintendent’. 72 Osburn’scritics, such as the Protestant Standard ,alleged that she also insisted on beingcalled ‘Your Ladyship’. This was deniedand was probably a corruption of the habitof some on her staff to refer to her as ‘theLady’. 73 Eventually the virulence of op-position, and presumably Nightingale’swarning, caused Osburn to abandon thetitle Lady Superior. She claimed indiffer-ence and that she then called herself byno title other than ‘the nurse from Eng-land’. 74 Osburn’s successors, less able todemand such high status, were called‘Matron’.

The impact of religious conflict on theattempt to reform the health care systemof the colony by provided trained nursing,however, went far beyond short-termsquabbles about titles. Two longer-terminfluences were on recruitment and man-agement style. The controversy, and thebelief that Osburn favoured Catholics, notsurprisingly appears to have adverselyaffected recruitment especially of thosestalwarts of Sydney philanthropy, Evan-gelical women. 75 No members ofSydney’s leading Evangelical families putthemselves forward to be trained by LucyOsburn as a Sister. This lack of such com-mitted, energetic women was a major lossfor modern nursing’s foundation years.

The issue of management style is morecomplex and needs to be shorn of theemotionalism and bigotry that motivatedOsburn’s opponents. It was with somejustice that the Protestant Standard de-scribed Osburn as one who ‘loves conventstyle, convent look, convent discipline

and convent subserviency’. 76 The sub-sequent management style of ‘Nightingale’nursing in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies was quite unusual in terms oflabour relations. It was a style that leaveshistorians so uncomfortable that evengeneral surveys of women’s and labourhistory can ignore nurses, one of thelargest categories of women workers. 77

Nursing’s management style owed muchto domestic service but was justified bythe need for a vocation. It was a highlypersonal style which could lead both tothe warm memories many nurses have ofthe Nurses’ Homes and to the endemicbullying which is a major problem incontemporary Australian nursing. 78 Oneexample of just how different nursing wasto other forms of work is revealed whenwe read that it was the duty of the nightnurses at the end of their shift at Wollon-gong Hospital in the 1930s to report to theMatron while she was still in bed—‘thelast nurse had to prepare her bath’. 79

Similarly, the anxiety expressed even inthe 1960s that Nurses’ Homes resulted in‘a convent-like existence’ can be too easilydismissed as mere homophobia or Protest-ant angst. 80 It may also have been an as-pect of the enduring legacy of Nightingale-style nursing, and the religious prejudicesof its founder in the Australian colonies,Lucy Osburn.

CONCLUSION

Religious belief and its ugly reverseside, bigotry, strongly influenced all as-pects of social policies in New SouthWales, especially during the 1860s to1880s. Nursing reform was an essentialpart of the modernisation of health care inthe colony. Nurses’ claim to be motivated

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by a vocation and to embody cleanlinessassociated it, in the popular mind, withreligion and sectarian convictions. Os-burn’s religious beliefs, and the resultantcontroversy, adversely affected recruit-ment and was almost the undoing of re-formed nursing in Sydney. There is sub-stance to the claims that her managementstyle was based on the convent and sister-hoods. It was, for both better and worse,a style that indelibly shaped Australiannursing, health care and women’s work.

If nursing was strongly affected byreligious controversy, then the reversewas also true. The religious controversysurrounding nursing preoccupied boththe press and parliament for at least a year;it was the subject of the 1870 inquiry, ex-plored in this paper, as well as a focus ofthe Commission into Public Charities in1873. They resonated with fears aboutcommunities of women and medieval im-ages of persecution. The nursing contro-versy is an important reminder how reli-gious conflict had a pervasive impact onattempts to improve social welfare in thecolony of New South Wales.

ENDNOTES

1 Florence Nightingale (hereafter Nightingale) toHenry Parkes, 24 October 1866, CorrespondenceFlorence Nightingale and the Colonial Government,Australian Joint Copying Project, Mitchell Library,Sydney. See also, The Sydney Mail , 22 February 1868.2 Carol Helmstadter, ‘Old nurses and new’, NursingHistory Review, 1, 1993, pp. 43–70.3 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes &Proceedings , Vol. IV, 1866, Correspondence respect-ing David Gibson, p. 3.4 Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender,Embodiment and Victorian Medicine , New York andLondon, St Martin’s Press and Macmillan, 1998.5 Henry Parkes to Nightingale, 21 July 1866, BLADDMSS 47757.

6 P. Davis, ‘Henry Parkes’ in C. Turney (ed.) Pioneersof Australian Education, Sydney University Press,1969, pp. 173–74.7 Alfred Roberts to Nightingale, 19 April 1868, BLADDMSS 47757.8 Sydney Punch , 14 March 1868.9 Judith Godden, ‘“A lamentable failure?” Thefounding of Nightingale nursing in Australia, 1868-84’, Australian Historical Studies , Vol. 32, No. 117,2001, pp. 276–91.10 Monica Baly, Florence Nightingale and the NursingLegacy, 2nd ed., Philadelphia, BainBridgeBooks, 1998,p. 31.11 Sioban Nelson, Say Little, Do Much . Nurses, Nuns,and Hospitals in the Nineteenth Century , Philadelphia,University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, p. 57.12 Baly, op. cit. pp. 181–82.13 Carol Helmstadter, ‘Robert Bentley Todd, SaintJohn’s House, and the origins of the modern trainednurse’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol 67,1993, pp. 282–319.14 See, for example, Nelson, op. cit., ch. 4.15 Nelson, loc. cit.16 Henry Bonham Carter to Nightingale, 24 June1871, BL ADDMSS 47716.17 Lucy Osburn (hereafter Osburn) to Nightingale,30 October 1867,BL ADDMSS47757.18 Protestant Standard , 9 July 1870.19 Osburn, Nurses’ Register, Vol. 1, Sydney Hospital.My thanks to Sydney Hospital for permission to usethis Register.20 For example, Nightingale to Henry Bonham Carter,26 July 1867, BL ADDMSS 47714.21 Commission into Public Charities, New SouthWales Legislative Assembly, Votes & Proceedings, Vol.VI, 1873–4, Appendix A, Regulations as to theTraining of Hospital Nurses under the NightingaleFund; Christopher Maggs, ‘Nurse recruitment to fourprovincial hospitals’in C. Davies, Rewriting NursingHistory, London & Sydney, Croom Helm, 1980, pp.18–40; Judith Godden, ‘The Nightingale nursingprobationers, Sydney Infirmary 1868-84’, AustralianSociety of the History of Medicine Conference, Ad-elaide, April2001.22 Nelson, op. cit., pp. 80–9.23 Nightingale to Florence Lees, 20–23 February1868, BL ADDMSS 47756.24 Henry Bonham Carter to Nightingale, 9 December1868, BL ADDMSS 47716.

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25 Osburn to Nightingale, 26 February 1869, BLADDMSS 47757.26 Malcolm Campbell, ‘A “successful experiment”no more? The intensification of religious bigotry ineastern Australia, 1865-1885’, Freilich FoundationConference, The Australian National University,December 2001. My thanks to Malcolm for providingme with a copy of this paper.27 Osburn to Nightingale, 8 October 1869, BLADDMSS 47757.28 Michael Horsburgh, Government subsidy of vol-untary social welfare organisations, Master of SocialWork, University of New South Wales, 1975.29 M. Lyons, ‘Raphael, Joseph George’, AustralianDictionary of Biography , Vol. 6, section (eds), G. Serleand R. Ward, Melbourne University Press, 1976, p.8.30 See, for example, Freda MacDonnell, Miss Night-ingale’s Young Ladies, Sydney, Angus & Robertson,1970, cover photograph.31 Osburn to Nightingale, 24 December 1885, BLMSSADD 47757.32 Osburn to Nightingale, n.d. [November 1869], BLADDMSS 47757.33 Report of the Subcommittee to Inquire into theAllegations of the Protestant Standard’, New SouthWales Legislative Assembly, Votes & Proceedings, Vol.II, 1870.34 Protestant Standard , 9 July 1870; see also TheFreeman’s Journal , 24 September 1870.35 Protestant Standard , 9 July 1870.36 Osburn to Nightingale, 7 September 1870, BLADDMSS 47757.37 G. Walsh, ‘Alderson, William’, in AustralianDictionary of Biography , Vol. 3, (eds), N. Nairn, G.Serle and R. Ward, Melbourne University Press,1969.38 Thanks to Malcolm Prentis for additional inform-ation about Lewers.39 Osburn to Nightingale, 12 May 1873, BL ADDMSS47757.40 Osburn to Nightingale, 7 September 1870, BLADDMSS 47757.41 Osburn, loc. cit.42 MacDonnell, op. cit., pp. 32–6.43 Osburn to Nightingale, 7 September 1870, BLADDMSS 47757.44 Osburn to Nightingale, loc. cit.

45 Osburn to Nightingale, 14 July 1868, BL ADDMSS47757.46 Osburn to Nightingale, 7 September 1870, op. cit.47 William Osburn Jun., Hidden Works of Darkness:Or the Doings of the Jesuits, London, The ProtestantAssociation, 1845.48 Report of the Subcommittee, op. cit., pp. 7, 9, 18.49 Osburn to Nightingale, 7 September 1870, op. cit.50 Osburn, loc. cit.51 Osburn to Nightingale, loc. cit.52 Report of the Subcommittee, op. cit., p. 6.53 Protestant Standard , 17 September 1870. See alsoProtestant Standard , 24 September 1870.54 Commission into Public Charities, op. cit.55 Osburn to Nightingale, 7 September 1870, op. cit.56 William Windeyer to Nightingale, 11 July 1873,BL MS 47757.57 Elizabeth Onslow cited in Henry Bonham Carterto Nightingale, [c. February 1872] BL ADDMSS47717.58 The Freeman’s Journal , 23 July 1870.59 Sydney Punch , 29 January 1870; ProtestantStandard , 11 June 1870 and 9 July 1870; SydneyPunch , 29 January 1870.60 Protestant Standard , 11 June 1870.61 Sydney Punch , 14 September 1868; Sydney Punch, 4 September 1869.62 Sydney Punch , 11 September 1869.63 Sydney Punch , 13 November 1869.64 Sydney Punch , 14 March 1870.65 Osburn, Nurses’ Register, op. cit.66 Evening News , 21 September 1870.67 Evening News, loc. cit.68 Evening News , loc. cit.69 Report of the Subcommittee, op. cit, evidence byRev. Mr Graham, p. 15.70 Nightingale to Henry Bonham Carter, 19 October1867, BL ADDMSS 47715.71 Osburn to Nightingale, 26 February 1869, BLADDMSS 47757.72 New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes &Proceedings , 8 September 1870, p. 95.73 Report of the Subcommittee, op. cit, p. 6.74 Osburn to Nightingale, 26 February 1869, op. cit.

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75 Judith Godden, Philanthropy and the woman’ssphere, PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 1983.76 Protestant Standard , 9 July 1870.77 For example, Charles Fox and Marilyn Lake (eds),Australians at Work, Ringwood, Victoria, McPheeGribble, 1990. Beverley Kingston, My Wife, MyDaughter and Poor Mary Ann, Sydney, Thomas Nel-son, 1975, is still one of the exceptions.78 D. Serghis, ‘Study depicts widespread workplacebullying’, Australian Nursing Journal, Vol. 5, No. 10,1998,p. 9.79 Josephine Castle, Nursing at The WollongongHospital, The University of Wollongong, 1984, p.49.80 Hospitals Association Journal , November 1963,p. 3.

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RELIGION MATTERS

THE EXPERIENCE OF SYRIAN/LEBANESE CHRISTIANS IN AUSTRALIAFROM THE 1880S TO 1947

ANNE MONSOUR

Neither invited nor welcomed, peoplefrom the Middle East began arriving

in Australia in noticeable numbers in the1890s. Most were from modern Leban-on. 1 The dramatic increase in the numberof Syrian/Lebanese arriving in Australiacoincided with a period of economic de-cline, drought and high unemployment. 2

In these circumstances, non-Europeanswere increasingly perceived as a threat,and anti-Chinese legislation was extendedto all Asiatic and coloured persons. 3 Thisbroadening of legislative discriminationincluded Syrian/Lebanese, who, based onthe location of their homeland, were offi-cially classified as Asian. However, even-tually, Syrian/Lebanese were treated dif-ferently to other Asians, and, by 1920,were granted access to citizenship. Al-though this change in status appears to bean act of tolerance, a close study of docu-mentary sources suggests quite the oppos-ite. Indeed, the evidence shows that Syri-an/Lebanese were judged to be suitablecandidates for citizenship because due totheir physical appearance and religionthey were considered more likely thanother Asians to be assimilated. 4 Hence,the experience of Syrian/Lebanese immig-rants in Australia illustrates the fundament-

al importance of race and religion in de-termining acceptability.

According to Samir Khalaf, there is‘virtual consensus’ that in the 1890s therewas a ‘sharp and sudden’ increase inemigration from Syria and Lebanon. 5 Thearrival of increasing numbers of Syrian/Le-banese in Australia in the last decade ofthe nineteenth century was part of thismass emigration from the Syria/Lebanonregion, and these newcomers were soonrecognised as a distinct, non-Europeangroup within Australian society. In 1892,for example, the article ‘Syrians in theSouth: a Colony at Redfern’, appeared inthe Illustrated Sydney News. 6 Syrianswere described as ‘Eastern immigrants’who entertained visitors in their homes‘with Arabic hospitality’. 7 Patronisinglytolerant in tone, the article clearly differ-entiated between these immigrants, ‘fromthe Eastern land, where life is more naturaland less constrained by conventionalitiesthan in the Western World’, and ‘theirEuropean neighbors’, ‘our own people’. 8

References to Syrians as an identifiablegroup were appearing in Queenslandnewspapers by the late 1890s. In 1897, forexample, newspaper reports regarding aset of Customs prosecution cases clearlyidentified the defendants as Syrians. 9 In

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February 1897, the Bundaberg Mail, refer-ring to the issue of customs fraud, cited‘the nest of invoice-salting Syrians inStanley Street’, while an article in theWorker described Stanley Street, SouthBrisbane as ‘Syrian town in verity’. 10 Theassertion in the Brisbane Courier in 1901that the violent death of a Syrian/Lebanesehawker was the result of ‘bad bloodamongst the Syrian community’ is furtherevidence of a discernible Syrian/Lebanesepresence. 11

As well as providing evidence Syri-an/Lebanese were identified as a specificminority group, early newspaper reportsmake it clear these immigrants were non-European and non-white. In May 1897,for example, the Worker agitated againsta perceived ‘influx of coloured labour’, acategory which clearly included Syrian/Le-banese:

Will the white people of Queens-land suffer themselves to be oustedby Javanese, Syrians, Chinese orJapanese, and go down before theblack, brown, and yellow in-vaders? 12

An observation in the Brisbane Courierduring February 1902, that the policecourt had been ‘crowded with Syrians aswell as Europeans’ shows Syrian/Lebanesewere considered to be distinct fromEuropeans. 13 By describing Syrian/Le-banese as ‘swarthy-skinned hawkers’, theBundaberg Mail intimated they were notwhite. 14 Similarly, the Worker describedthem as yellow-skinned aliens whose devi-ant behaviour was keeping the SouthBrisbane magistrate in a job at great ex-pense to the ‘white taxpayer’. 15 Morespecifically, the Worker accused Syrian/Le-

banese traders of eroding the livelihoodof white traders:

Does it look like keeping Australiafor the white man? We regard itas but another phase of “commer-cial morality” which not only per-mits wholesale firms to createwhite slaves, but carries the prin-ciple of sweating to an extentwhich allows the Syrians to growfat on the life’s blood of the whiteretailer. 16

As most early newspaper referencesto Syrian/Lebanese occurred in a negativecontext, they tended to reinforce a percep-tion that they were indeed, undesirableimmigrants.

According to the Illustrated SydneyNews in 1892, Syrians in Sydney weresometimes incorrectly called Assyriansand, to their detriment, were also ‘fre-quently credited with the nationality ofAfghans, Indians, Greeks, Italians, andother peoples’. 17 This observation, madein the early days of Syrian/Lebanese settle-ment, illustrates an ongoing ambivalenceregarding the identity of these immigrants.In 1906, for example, the Bulletin de-scribed Syrians as one of the three ‘non-fusible Asiatic races’, but argued that,unlike the Chinese, whose ‘ways’ were‘familiar to everyone’, and the Indians,‘known to all by sight at least’, Syrians,who were ‘less distinctive in personal ap-pearance and unmarked by peculiar dress’,were less easily identified. 18 This diffi-culty was ostensibly accentuated by thefact that, in further contrast to the Chineseand Indians, these Asiatics were Christianand white, and by migrated in familygroups had indicated they were permanentsettlers. 19 Unwittingly, the Bulletin’s

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overtly hostile portrayal of Syrian/Le-banese immigrants actually isolated thedistinguishing characteristics, appearance,religion, and migration in family groups,which eventually led to them being offi-cially treated more leniently than otherAsians. 20

As the percentages in Table 1 illus-trate, from its inception, Syrian/Lebaneseimmigration did indeed include a signific-ant proportion of women. In the most ac-cessible official documents, women arefrequently invisible and therefore, it ismore difficult to quantify women thanmen. Married women, for example, didnot apply separately for naturalisationbecause their citizenship status was determ-ined by that of their husband. 21 There-fore, it is likely that the number of womenis underestimated. However, in each dec-ade being studied, with the exception ofthe 1940s, at least a quarter of the Syri-an/Lebanese immigrants arriving inQueensland were women. This is an import-ant finding because it demonstrates that asignificant proportion of these immigrantsarrived in family groups. Significantly,this migration in family groups and thebirth of at least eighty-six Syrian/LebaneseQueenslanders between 1887 and 1899,indicate the intention of the early immig-rants was to be settlers not sojourners. 22

The presence of women in the earliest daysof migration was also important because,at a time when inter-racial marriage wasfeared, it meant Syrian/Lebanese men,unlike their Chinese and Indian counter-parts were not seen as a threat to whitewomen. 23

Table 1: Percentage of male and femaleSyrian/Lebanese immigrants arrivingin Queensland

% FEMALE% MALEYEAR

19811880–1889

28.571.51890–1899

32681900–1909

34661910–1919

29711920–1929

44.555.51930–1939

12.587.51940–1949

Official records provide irrefutableevidence that skin colour was quiteovertly a primary consideration in thetreatment of non-Europeans. When report-ing on an applicant for naturalisation, thepolice were routinely required to ascertainwhether the applicant was coloured. Al-though in the majority of cases Syrian/Le-banese were reported to be white or notcoloured, as the following examples show,some were perceived to be coloured or, atthe least, not entirely white. George wasconsidered to be ‘a coloured man, but nota full-blooded foreigner’; while Lutoof wasdescribed as a coloured man, probably ofSyrian parentage. 24 Another applicantwas reported to be ‘a coloured man, usu-ally termed a Syrian’. 25 Fred was de-scribed as being of sallow complexion;Salim as being the ordinary colour of theSyrian, but notwhat would be termed acoloured man; and Richard as swarthy incomplexion ‘but not darker than manynatives of Europe or some individuals ofthe British race’. 26 In another case, it wasnoted that although the applicant was notcoloured, he was very dark complexionedand swarthy like most southernEuropeans. 27 While these examplesdemonstrate skin colour was definitely aconsideration in the processing of natural-isation applications, they also indicate

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Religion Matters

significant confusion about whether Syri-an/Lebanese were actually white or col-oured. Apparently, Syrian/Lebanese didnot fit easily into designated categoriesand this made their racial identity problem-atic.

While acknowledging the paucity ofavailable statistics, it is generally agreedthat, regardless of their destination, themajority of emigrants from Syria/Lebanonbefore 1950 were Christian. 28 KemalKarpat, whose work differs from otherstudies because it is based on Ottomandocumentary sources, challenges thisview. According to Karpat, Turkish re-cords suggest the number of Ottoman, andspecifically Syrian emigrants, was higherthan has previously been estimated; andso too was the proportion of Muslims. 29

Karpat argues the proportion of Muslimswas probably fifteen to twenty per centof the total. 30 As early as 1892, for ex-ample, the Ottoman legation in Washing-ton noted there were ‘considerable num-bers’ of Muslims among the Syrian immig-rants. 31 In the case of Muslim immig-rants, the general lack of reliable statisticsis aggravated by the fact that the Muslimsthemselves often concealed their religiousaffiliation for two main reasons: the banon Muslim emigration from Ottoman territ-ories; and the perceived hostility toMuslims in their new countries:

… the report mentions the factthat in many cases Muslims pre-ferred to pass as Christians – par-ticularly as Armenians … - in thehope of gaining easier acceptancein the U.S. and of avoiding troublewith the Ottoman government. 32

While Karpat’s work demonstrateshow documentary research can challenge

commonly held views, with the exceptionof four people who were Druzes, the Syri-an/Lebanese immigrants arriving inQueensland from the 1880s to 1947 wereMaronite, Melkite and Orthodox Christi-ans. 33

Religion has played a significant rolein the history of Lebanon. Over an exten-ded period, the mountains of Lebanon be-came home for a number of religious groups seeking refuge from persecu-tion. 34 In the seventh century, for ex-ample, the Maronites, a schismatic Christi-an sect from Syria found sanctuary in themountains of Lebanon. 35 Later, in theeleventh century, the Druzes, an offshootof Shi’ism, also sought refuge in thesemountains. 36 In the Lebanon region,geographical features and theological dis-putes combined to create a multi-religiousyet religiously segregated society. Forcenturies, both the Christians and theMuslims have been divided into numerousand often hostile sects. 37 The Muslimsare divided into three major sects: theSunnis, the Shiites and the Druzes. TheChristians include the Maronites, theGreek Orthodox, the Greek Catholics orMelkites, the Syrian Catholics, the SyrianOrthodox, the Chaldeons, the Orthodoxand Catholic Armenians and the Protest-ants. Although the population of Lebanonis often simplistically characterised as be-ing divided between Christians andMuslims, the reality is obviously morecomplex.

Under Ottoman rule, non-Muslimswere organised in millets, religiousminority communities with internalautonomy. 38 The millet system created‘separate and distinct civil societies predic-ated on sect (rite) and religion’, and in ef-fect, this organised a church into a nation-

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ality. 39 Under this system, politicalstructures and social organisation wereinseparable from the religious group.Writing about Syrians in America in 1924,Philip Hitti argued a Syrian was born tohis religion in the same way that anAmerican was born to his nationality. 40

Consequently, for the Syrian/Lebanese,Church took the place of State. 41 In theirstudy of Syrian/Lebanese in the UnitedStates, Philip and Joseph Kayal concludethat Christian, Arabic-speaking Americansbecame ‘Americans of Syrian and eventu-ally, Lebanese ancestry’ because theyneeded ‘to have a relevant identity inwestern terms’. 42 Similarly, in the Aus-tralian context, the acceptance of the termSyrian was merely a political expedienceadopted when, as immigrants, a collectiveidentity became necessary. In the sameway, in Lebanon, these people are mostlikely to have identified themselves accord-ing to their religious sect (Melkite, Maron-ite or Orthodox) rather than as Christians.Consequently, the Syrian/Christian iden-tity, constructed in the context of theemigration process, was merely a practicallabel. It was not how these immigrantsusually identified or thought of them-selves, and certainly did not signify theexistence of a cohesive group.

If any of the early Syrian/Lebaneseimmigrants were in fact Muslim, this hasnot been evident in the sources on whichthis study is based. Early newspaper re-ports, for example, clearly identify Syri-an/Lebanese immigrants as Christian. 43

Politicians and bureaucrats also identifiedSyrians as being mainly Christian. In 1909,for example, Egerton Batchelor, the Minis-ter for External Affairs, noted that the re-ligion of a Syrian was ‘very often the sameas ours’. 44 Similarly, the Chief Clerk of

the Department of External Affairs ob-served that Syrians ‘all belong to theChristian faith’. 45 According to AtleeHunt, the Secretary of the Department ofExternal Affairs, Syrians were ‘practicallyall Christians being adherents either of theGreek Church or of a Church affiliatedwith the Roman Catholic’. 46 Nevertheless,some Ottoman immigrants were obviouslyMuslim. In 1922, for example, Mohammed,‘a Turk, born in Stamboul’, was grantednaturalisation. 47 As he had been an Aus-tralian resident for twenty-seven years,Mohammed had obviously arrived in the1890s. 48 However, in 1922, a memor-andum regarding Turkish residents inAustralia included the following observa-tion:

The number of Turks of Ottomancharacteristics in Australia is neg-ligible. There are no prominentmembers of the race and the truerepresentatives of the Crescent –Mohammedan in religion andTurkish in national viewpoints –probably number not more thanthe fingers of one hand. 49

This observation is supported by spe-cific figures which demonstrate that themajority of Turkish subjects in Australiawere Syrian/Lebanese. In Victoria in 1922,for example, while the total number ofpeople regarded as Turkish subjects was160: 119 of these were Syrians; 3 wereArmenians; 35 were Palestinian Jews; andonly 3 were Ottoman Turks. 50

By the 1920s, the official perceptionof Syrian/Lebanese immigrants had shif-ted. Rather than being considered as un-desirable aliens, they were now thoughtto be acceptable candidates for citizenship.The documentary evidence provides a

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Religion Matters

clear indication as to why politicians andbureaucrats became increasingly sympath-etic towards the Syrian/Lebanese; andwhy, although officially Asian, they wereeventually exempted from some of the le-gislative disqualification applied to non-Europeans. Although understood to betechnically correct, the classification ofSyrian/Lebanese as Asiatic was clearlyproblematic, and was, evidently, con-sidered by some politicians and bureau-crats to be inaccurate. According to AtleeHunt, since the Immigration RestrictionAct had come into force in 1902, thequestion of how to deal with Syrians hadcaused the Department considerable diffi-culty. 51 While there was ‘unanimity re-specting the black, brown and yellowraces’, Hunt pointed to a ‘considerable di-vergence in decisions relating to the admis-sion of Syrians’. 52 In regards to the imple-mentation of the Immigration RestrictionAct, these doubts were important becauseSyrians were consequently granted specialexception in their favour and, as a result,were the only Asians in Australia to addto their numbers by both natural increaseand immigration. 53

During the Naturalization Bill debatein 1903, Senator Playford (South Australia)argued against the amendment precluding‘all aboriginal natives of Asia, Africa, orthe Pacific Islands, except New Zealand’from applying for naturalisation, specific-ally because the term Asia included ‘Syri-ans and others’ whom he considered to be‘as white as we are’. 54 Playford did notdisagree with the principle of excludingnon-Europeans from naturalisation, butwith the inflexibility of the clause thatwould not allow for people like the Syri-an/Lebanese to be treated as exceptions tothe rule:

… there were a few Syrians wholived in South Australia a consider-able time, and who, as employersof labour were recognized as goodcitizens. They were quite as whiteas many of us are, and as I mayremind honorable senators, theywere of the same race as the greatfounder of Christianity. 55

Playford’s view that Syrians shouldbe considered white and were worthy ofdifferential treatment was not shared byothers. According to Senator Higgs(Queensland), Syrian/Lebanese were ‘notdesirable citizens’ and their inclusion ascitizens would be contrary to the populardesire ‘to preserve Australia for the whiteraces’. 56 Higgs was supported by SenatorPearce (Western Australia), who describedSyrian/Lebanese as ‘parasites’ who com-peted unfairly with local, Europeantraders. 57 The majority feeling in theSenate in 1903 was obviously that, as non-Europeans, Syrian/Lebanese were undesir-able and should be disqualified from nat-uralisation. However, Senator Playford’sperception of Syrian/Lebanese as beingdistinct from other Asians raised theproblematic issue of their exact racialidentity. His advocacy indicated doubtsabout the application of the geographicdefinition in the case of Syrian/Lebaneseand foreshadowed an opinion whichwould eventually become ImmigrationDepartment policy.

It is apparent that by 1909, the Minis-ter for External Affairs, Egerton Batchelor,had decided Syrians should be permittednaturalisation. 58 A letter from Batchelorto the Chief Secretary of the AustralianNatives’ Association provides an accountof his personal views and also an outlineof the debate regarding the status of Syri-

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an/Lebanese residents. 59 In particular,Batchelor isolated race and religion as thekey factors in favour of Syrian/Lebanesebeing accepted as citizens. Specifically, hebelieved there was nothing to fear ‘fromthe inclusion’ as citizens ‘of Syrians – menof a race not far removed from our stock,and whose religion is often the same asours’. 60 Furthermore, Batchelor ques-tioned the use of the geographic definitionto determine whether a Syrian wasEuropean or Asiatic:

Is there any logic in saying thatmen belonging to a family residentin one of the suburbs of Con-stantinople on the south shore ofthe Bosporous, are not eligible forAustralian citizenship, while theirbrothers who happen to be bornin the city itself are fully qualified.The distinction imposed by ourlaw is merely geographical. It isnot racial nor religious. It has noscientific or rational basiswhatever. 61

Batchelor’s views clearly influencedlater deliberations regarding the status ofSyrian/Lebanese as both their appearanceand their religion were consistently raisedas favourable characteristics. 62

In 1914, for example, the Chief Clerkof the Department of External Affairsnoted:

The Department has from time totime granted authority to certainresident Syrians to bring theirwives or other female relatives toAustralia and some of those whohave been brought to the Depart-ment subsequently were as fair-skinned as any woman to be metin our cities. So far as Syrian men

are concerned, they are dark, butnot more so than the Italians,Spaniards and Greeks, and if itwere not for the fact that the Syri-ans disclose their race on going onboard ship on route to Australia,they would easily pass musterwith nationals of the countries justmentioned. 63

In addition to being similar in appear-ance to southern Europeans, according tothe Chief Clerk, ‘all’ these Syrians werealso Christian. 64 Atlee Hunt, the Secret-ary of the Department, held similar views.In a 1914 memorandum to the Minister,Hunt argued that Syrian/Lebanese weremore European than Asiatic in appearance:

They are of swarthy appearance,with dark hair and in most casessallow complexions, but approxim-ate far more closely to theEuropean types than to those ofIndia or parts of Asia further East.As far as general appearance goesthey can not be distinguished fromthe people of Southern Spain, Italyor Greece and in fact are consider-ably lighter in complexion thanthe Turks. 65

Additionally, he noted that the Syri-an/Lebanese immigrants were ‘practicallyall Christians’, belonging either to an Or-thodox or Catholic Church. 66 When Huntrecommended changing naturalisationlaws by dropping the racial disqualifica-tion in favour of ministerial discretion,Syrians were evidently the primary targetof the proposed change:

The point has come up most con-spicuously in the case of Syrianswho are ineligible; though Turks

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born in Europe are eligible. ManySyrians who we have been obligedto refuse are people of high charac-ter and substantial property. 67

Archival sources support the view thatSyrian/Lebanese immigrants knew theirphysical appearance and Christian affili-ations were favourable attributes in theirbid for equitable treatment. Race and reli-gion were repeatedly referred to by theimmigrants and others advocating on theirbehalf. In 1903, Joseph was refused natur-alisation because he was a single, Asiaticmale. 68 In a letter to the Home Secretary,Joseph disputed the correctness of thisclassification:

Although I am termed an AsiaticAlien, I would respectfully pointout that I am of the Christian Reli-gion, the same as the rest of thepeople of Australia. 69

Similarly, Alf, who was able to readand write English, French and Arabic, in-formed Atlee Hunt that he was ‘not anaboriginal native of Syria but a whit[e]man of good English education’. 70 Anoth-er Syrian/Lebanese immigrant, excludedfrom naturalisation because of his birth-place, responded with the following:

Sir, the External Department saysthat I am not eligible to become asubject of the King in the ‘Common-wealth’ of Australia on account ofbeing born in Syria[.] I am aChristian and I think I am eligibleto become a subject of the King … 71

Advocating on behalf of a Syrian/Le-banese client, solicitors described him as‘a sober steady man’, who, like his father

before him, was a Roman Catholic. 72

Marie’s comments to Atlee Hunt in 1914,suggest she thought business success andbeing Christian would contribute posit-ively to her family’s acceptance as citizens:

My husband has been in businessin Adelaide for over 20 years. MayI add we are all born Roman Cath-olics. 73

In correspondence with the Depart-ment of External Affairs in 1904, Richard,who claimed to be a direct descendant ofa European Crusader, alleged that modernSyrians were considered to be white orCaucasian and that at no time in historyhad they been considered coloured. 74 Inanother case, an applicant’s solictor arguedthat Syrians were not aboriginal nativesof Asia but were a civilised Christian raceand descendants of the European Cru-saders. 75 Whether legitimate or not, theprofessed links with European Crusaderswere evidently intended to imply Syri-an/Lebanese were more European thanAsian.

In his decade long bid for citizenship(1910-1920), Michael’s arguments echoedthose of other Syrian/Lebanese and theprofessionals and politicians advocatingon their behalf. 76 Although he had spentalmost all his life in Queensland, Michaelhad been born in Zahle, Lebanon andtherefore, as an aboriginal native of Asia,was ineligible for naturalisation. 77 Hiscase for naturalisation became even moreunlikely when, as a Turkish subject, hebecame an enemy alien. 78 In correspond-ence with the Department, Michael ques-tioned the validity of being classified ‘anaboriginal native of Asia’, citing an ex-ample from the United States in which, heclaimed, it had been proven ‘beyond a

100


shadow of a doubt’ that Syrians were notAsiatic. 79 In common with others, hethought his success in business and statusas a sole proprietor and employer wouldadd to the suitability of his candid-ature. 80

After 1914, in response to his status asan enemy alien, Michael emphasised thedistinction between Christian Syrians andMuslim Turks. In July 1918, for example,the first point he made in relation to hisapplication for naturalisation was that hewas ‘a Christian born at Zahley, nearDamascus, Palestine’. 81 In a later letter,Michael repeatedly referred to his Christi-an faith and his antipathy to Turkish rule. 82 Not only were his parents‘Christians of Lebanon (Palestine)’, but:

Our sympathies have always beenBritish and never Turkish: other-wise my parents would not havefled from the continued persecu-tion of the Turks to this fair coun-try, which I have learnt to callhome. 83

Furthermore:

The atrocities committed by theTurks on our people just beforethe British occupation should con-vince you of the hatred existingbetween them. When have we,during the five centuries of Turk-ish oppression, sympathised withTurkey? Their continued mas-sacres should be sufficient an-swer. 84

Advocating on Michael’s behalf in1916, the District Grand Secretary(Queensland Branch) of the Freemasons,noted that:

His parents fled from Palestine toescape from Turkish persecutionthey being Christians. They werenaturalized here, became subjectsof the British Crown, and are wellknown to be loyal. 85

In his communications with the Depart-ment, Michael made deliberate referenceto the depth and authenticity of hisChristian roots. He consistently describedhis country of origin as ‘Lebanon,Palestine’, not Lebanon, Syria. Further-more, his claim that his parents fled from‘Lebanon, Palestine’ when he was `childin arms’, has biblical overtones; as doesthe following:

It surely does not follow that aperson born in a stable ceases tobe a human being. 86

As Michael’s case illustrates, duringWorld War One, religious affiliation be-came increasingly important for Syrian/Le-banese as religion was used to distinguishbetween the predominately Christian Syr-ian/Lebanese and Turks, who were gener-ally European but more likely to beMuslim. As enemy aliens, Syrians wererequired to register at their local policestation and then to report at designatedintervals during the war. 87 However, inJanuary 1915, the Commonwealth Govern-ment recognised that Turkish subjects whowere Greek, Armenian or Syrian werelikely to be opposed to the Turkish re-gime. 88 That the government understoodthe position of Syrian/Lebanese is con-firmed by Atlee Hunt’s comments in 1916:

Syrians are technically Turks andour enemies, though they are re-cognized, at any rate those fromthe Mount Lebanon region, as

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having no sympathy with Turkeyand in consequence have receivedspecial concessions in the way ofreporting carrying on business etc. 89

As a consequence of this understand-ing, District Commandants were given thediscretion to exempt Turkish subjects whowere Christian and ‘well-known to be op-posed to the Turkish regime’ from certainrequirements applying to enemy aliens. 90

In 1918, for example, Michael, a Syrian/Le-banese resident of Melbourne, was grantedexemption from reporting every week tothe police because he had:

… satisfied this Section that he,although a subject of Turkey, is aSyrian opposed to Turkish rule,and he is a Christian. 91

In 1920, the Nationality Act removedthe racial disqualification from the natur-alisation laws. 92 However, in the after-math of the War and in the absence of theracial disqualification, religion remainedan important indicator of acceptability. In1921, for example, when Michael appliedfor naturalisation, it was requested that,in addition to the routine enquiries, thepolice also ascertain whether he was ‘ofthe Christian or Mohammedan faith.’ 93

When Assaf applied for citizenship, asimilar request was made:

Confirmation as to place of birthis specifically desired As this manis a Syrian, his religion, Mo-hamedan or otherwise, should beshown on the report. 94

As, after 1920, the police consistentlyreported the religion of an applicant fornaturalisation, it appears that the specific

request articulated in the two previousexamples, became generalised. Althoughthere was no specific question about reli-gion on the standardised form, as an applic-ant’s religion was invariably included in`General Remarks’, it would seem thatthose responsible for completing the formshad been instructed to include this inform-ation.

Indeed, sometimes an applicant’s reli-gion is the only comment recorded in thissection. The only ‘General Remark’ aboutJohn, for example, was that he was ‘of theRoman Catholic Faith’. 95 Similarly, So-lomon was described as a Roman Catholic,and it was noted that all his family hadbeen baptised in the Roman CatholicChurch. 96 In another example, Josephwas described as ‘well educated’ and as ‘aloyal and well respected citizen’ who ‘be-longs to and regularly attends a ChristianChurch’. 97 As well as being Christian,Michael was also described as a ‘good’ and‘loyal citizen’. 98 That it had become ne-cessary to report the religion of an applic-ant is particularly supported by examplesin which the report had obviously beencompleted and the applicant’s religion hasbeen added later, sometimes by a differentperson. 99 The specified inclusion of anapplicant’s religion is further supportedby examples in which the question is actu-ally added to the form. 100 Indeed, onsome applications the question: ‘What isapplicant’s religion?’, is added to the formas question ‘2a’. 101

As well as demonstrating the role ofreligion in determining acceptability, thefollowing example illustrates the improvedstatus of Syrian/Lebanese after 1920. In1922, not realising it was no longer critical,and obviously wanting to be recognisedas European rather than Asian, George

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applied for naturalisation as a Turkish na-tional. 102 Handwritten notes and variouscomments throughout the file indicateGeorge’s claim to be Turkish was ques-tioned on the basis of his name and reli-gion:

This man though he calls himselfa Turk is, I think, really a Syrian,according to his name + religion.No Turk is a Roman Catholic…

…(2) Does the surname(M…) sug-gest Syrian origin?… (2) M…ismore suggestive of Syria thanTurkey

…Mr Fawaz says M… is a Syrianname. 103

The changed status of Syrian/Lebaneseafter the passing of the Nationality Act isclearly evident from the following re-marks:

The fact of his being a RomanCatholic would lead one to believethat he is of Syrian descent, and,as such, could be accepted fornaturalization. 104

Furthermore, it is quite obvious why,despite falsely claiming Turkish national-ity, George’s application was successful:

I recommend that, as M… hasmarried an English woman, is ofgood character, a Christian – incontradistinction to Turks, whoare Mohammedans, and do notmarry outside the Mussulman[sic]community – and may fairly beassumed to be of Syrian extraction,the application is approved. 105

Despite their Eastern origins, Syri-an/Lebanese immigrants in Australia were,

in contrast to other Asians, eventuallyconsidered suitable candidates for citizen-ship. While, at an official level, they hadgained qualified acceptance, to achievethis, Syrian/Lebanese immigrants deniedtheir Eastern characteristics and insistedthat they were, in fact, white andEuropean. Furthermore, as being ‘Christi-an’ was obviously essential in their bid fornaturalisation, they de-emphasised theirEastern Rites (Maronite, Melkite and Or-thodox) and, contrary to their usual prac-tice, described themselves simply asChristians. Hence, while the eventual ac-ceptance of Syrian/Lebanese has the ap-pearance of tolerance, viewed in the widercontext, it was really a victory for preju-dice and bigotry. Evidently, because oftheir appearance and religion, it was de-cided Syrian/Lebanese were more likelythan other Asians to become totally assim-ilated. Using this evidence, it can be as-sumed that, if these first Middle Easternimmigrants had been predominatelyMuslim, the outcome regarding their ac-ceptance as citizens would have been quitedifferent.

ENDNOTES

1 Before the political re-definition of the Middle Eastafter World War One, the term Syrian, quite accur-ately, included all immigrants from the modern na-tions of Jordan, Palestine (Israel), Lebanon and Syria.As this study focuses on the immigrants who camefrom the area now known as Lebanon, they will bereferred to as Syrian/Lebanese.2 F. G. Clarke, Australia: A Concise Political and So-cial History, Sydney, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1992, pp. 158–68.3 C. Y. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement inAustralia, Sydney, Sydney University Press, 1975,p. 27.4 A. T. Yarwood, Asian Migration to Australia: TheBackground to Exclusion 1896 – 1923, Melbourne,Melbourne University Press, 1964, pp. 141–50.

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5 S. Khalaf, ‘The background and causes of Le-banese/Syrian immigration’, in Eric J. Hooglund (ed.),Crossing the Waters: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants tothe United States before 1940, Washington D.C.,Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987, p. 18.6 Illustrated Sydney News, 19 November 1892, p. 4.7 ibid.8 ibid.9 The story was covered in the Brisbane Courier,Queenslander, Capricornian, and Bundaberg Mail.10 Bundaberg Mail, 10 February 1897; Worker, Feb-ruary 1897, p. 2.11 Brisbane Courier, ‘Man killed at Mount Cotton: aSyrian affray’, 28 October 1901, p. 2.12 Worker, 15 May 1897, p. 2; Worker, 22 May 1897.13 Brisbane Courier, 6 February 1902, p. 6.14 Bundaberg Mail, 26 May 1897.15 Worker, 29 May 1897, p. 2.16 Worker, 20 February 1897, p. 2.17 Illustrated Sydney News, 19 November 1892, p. 4.18 Bulletin, 18 January 1906.19 ibid.20 Yarwood, op. cit., pp. 141–50.21 Aliens Act of 1867, (31 Vic. No. 28), Queensland.22 Queensland Births 1885–1889, Register General’sOffice, Brisbane, 1989.23 Yarwood, op. cit., p. 144.24 Chief Secretary’s Office, Brisbane to Departmentof External Affairs, 10 June 1909, A1/1, 09/13029,National Archives of Australia (NAA) (ACT); ChiefSecretary’s Office, Brisbane to Department of ExternalAffairs, 16 February 1915, A1/1, 15/665, NAA (ACT).25 Chief Secretary’s Office, Brisbane to Departmentof External Affairs, 31 August 1911, A1, 30/2416,NAA (ACT).26 Chief Secretary’s Office, Brisbane to Departmentof External Affairs, 12 October 1909, A1/1, 21/3816,NAA (ACT); Chief Secretary's Office, Brisbane toDepartment of External Affairs, 27 January 1908,A659, 43/1/6000, NAA (ACT); Postmaster, ChartersTowers to Department of External Affairs, 27December 1905, A1/1, 05/8109, NAA (ACT).27 Chief Secretary’s Office, Brisbane to Departmentof External Affairs, 20 October 1914, A1/1, 21/11220,NAA (ACT).28 This claim is made in almost every study of Syri-an/Lebanese immigrants.

29 K. H. Karpat, ‘The Ottoman emigration to America1860-1914’, International Journal of Middle EastStudies 17, 1985, p. 193.30 ibid., p. 183.31 ibid., p. 182.32 ibid., pp. 182–83.33 In K. S. Salibi, The Modern History of Lebanon,Delmar, New York, Caravan Books, 1997, p. xviii,Salibi describes the Druzes as the ‘followers of theFatimid Caliph al Hakim (996-1021) who proclaimedhis own divinity in the early eleventh century, devi-ating from traditional Isma’ilite Shi’ism’.34 N. A. Zaideh, Syria and Lebanon, Beirut,LibrairieDu Liban, 1968, pp. 34–5; Philip K. Hitti, Lebanon inHistory: From the Earliest Times to the Present, Lon-don, Macmillan, 1957,p. 8; Alixa Naff, BecomingAmerican: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience,Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, Carcondale& Edwardsville, 1985, pp. 22–3.35 J. McKay, Phoenician Farewell: Three Generationsof Lebanese Christians in Australia, Ashwood House,Surry Hills, 1989, p. 27.36 Naff, op. cit., pp. 24, 42.37 E. J. Hooglund, ‘Introduction’, in Hooglund (ed.),op. cit., p. 4.38 W. J. Cahnman, ‘Religion and nationality’, TheAmerican Journal of Sociology, XLIX (July 1943–May1944), pp. 524–29; Philip M. Kayal and Joseph M.Kayal, The Syrian-Lebanese in America: A Study ofReligion and Assimilation, Boston, Twayne Publish-ers, 1975, p. 19.39 Kayal and Kayal, op. cit., p. 19; Cahnman, op. cit.,p. 527.40 P. K. Hitti, The Syrians in America, New York,George H Doran, 1924, p. 34.41 ibid.42 Kayal and Kayal, op. cit., pp. 19–20.43 Illustrated Sydney News, 19 November 1892, p. 4;Bulletin, 18 January 1906.44 E. L. Batchelor to General Secretary, AustralianNatives Association, Perth, 4 January 1911, 14/20363,A1/1 14/20363, NAA (ACT).45 Memorandum from the Chief Clerk, Departmentof External Affairs, 27 October 1914, 14/20363, A1/114/20363, NAA (ACT).46 Memorandum for the Minister from Atlee Hunt,Secretary Department of External affairs, 27 October1914, 14/20363, A1/1 14/20363, NAA (ACT).

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47 Memorandum no. 22/9133, Abraham & GeorgeM, Naturalization applications, 30 May 1922, A1/1,1922/9133, NAA (ACT).48 ibid.49 Memorandum re Turkish Subjects in Australia,RSB/BD, Melbourne, 3 October 1922, A385, Box 1,NAA (ACT).50 Turkish Subjects in Victoria, RSB/BD, Melbourne,3 October 1922, A385, Box 1, NAA (ACT).51 Memorandum no 20363, Atlee Hunt to the Minis-ter, Department of External Affairs, 27 October 1914,A1/1, 14/20363, NAA (ACT).52 ibid.53 Yarwood, op. cit., p. 141.54 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), vol.14, 9 July 1903, p. 1938.55 ibid., p. 1936.56 CPD, vol. 14, 9 July 1903, pp. 1938–39.57 ibid., p. 1939.58 Memorandum from the Chief Clerk, Departmentof External Affairs, 14/20363, A1/1, 14/20363, NAA(ACT).59 E. L. Batchelor to the General Secretary, Australi-an Natives Association, Perth, 4 January 1911, 20363,A1/1, 14/20363, NAA (ACT).60 ibid.61 ibid.62 See for example: Department of External Affairs,Commonwealth Naturalization: Inclusion of Syrians,10 February 1915, 3100/1915, A/60060, 3rd FisherSept 14 - Oct 15, NAA (ACT).63 Memorandum from the Chief Clerk, Departmentof External Affairs, 14/20363, A1/1 14/20363, NAA(ACT).64 ibid.65 ibid.66 ibid.67 Memorandum from Atlee Hunt to the Minister,Department External Affairs, 15 February 1915,15/3101, A6006/1, 3rd Fisher Sept. 14 – Oct. 15, NAA(ACT).68 Joseph A. to Home Secretary, 9 June 1903,Col/74(a), Queensland State Archives (QSA).69 Joseph A. to Home Secretary, 9 June 1903, in-letter 7760, Col/74(a), QSA.70 Alf M. to Atlee Hunt, 17 August 1904, 04/6496,A1/1, 04/6496, NAA (ACT).

71 Joseph M. to Department of External Affairs,A1/1, 07/4778, NAA (ACT).72 J. F. Fitzgerald & Power, Solicitors to Departmentof External Affairs, 10 October 1906, 06/7156, A1/15,06/8801, NAA (ACT).73 Marie M. to Atlee Hunt, 20 October 1914,14/21368, A1, 14/21368, NAA (ACT).74 Richard S. to Department of External Affairs, 5May 1904, 04/682, A1/1, 05/3040, NAA (ACT).75 D. H. Hogan to Department of Home & Territories,2 June 1919, 197316, A1, 21/8418, NAA(ACT).76 Michael M., Naturalization application, A1/1,30/1083, NAA (ACT).77 ibid.78 Legge to Military Commandant, Brisbane, Tele-gram, 5 November 1914, 1268.M/38, A/11954, QSA.79 Michael M. to Department of Home & Territories,Melbourne, 16 October 1919, 14803, A1/1, 30/1083,NAA (ACT).80 ibid.81 Michael M. to Commonwealth Attorney General’sDepartment, 11 July 1918, 8550, A1/1, 30/1083, NAA(ACT).82 Michael M. to Department of Home & Territories,16 October 1919, 14803, A1/1, 30/1083, NAA (ACT).83 ibid.84 ibid.85 E. Austin Bell to Major Saunders Asst. G.S.O.,Victoria Barracks, Brisbane, 13 January 1916, A1/1,30/1083, NAA (ACT).86 Michael M. to Department of Home & Territories,16 October 1919, 14803, A1/1, 30/1083, NAA (ACT).87 A. Batrouney and T. Batrouney, The Lebanese inAustralia, Melbourne, Australasian Educa Press,1985, pp. 27–29.88 Major Wallace Brown, Commonwealth MilitaryServices to Commissioner of Police, Brisbane, 22January 1915, 1268M/38, A/11954, QSA.89 Atlee Hunt to Prime Minister, 1 March 1916, A1/1,21/11220, NAA (ACT).90 Major Wallace Brown, Commonwealth MilitaryServices to Commissioner of Police, Brisbane, 22January 1915, 1268M/38, A/11954, QSA.91 Lieutenant, Intelligence Section, General Staff toOfficer in Charge Police, North Carlton, 24 April1918, MP16/1, 1918/575, NAA (Vic.)92 Nationality Act, no. 48 of 1920, Commonwealthof Australia.

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93 John Gellibrand, Chief Commissioner of Police toOfficer in Charge Police, Windsor, Victoria, 13 June1921, MP16/1, 1918/575, NAA (Vic.).94 Inspector to Commissioner of Police, Adelaide, 12September 1921, SA/580/2, D1915/0, SA580, NAA(SA).95 Report on Application for Naturalization by JohnM. N., A1/1, 21/24869, NAA (ACT).96 Report on Application for Naturalization by So-lomon G., A1/1, 21/24875, NAA (ACT).97 Report on Application for Naturalization byJoseph M., A1, 21/1418, NAA (ACT).98 Report on the Application for Naturalization byMichael M., A1/1, 21/18552, NAA (ACT).99 In the following, the comment on religion is obvi-ously written by a different person: Report on Ap-plication for Naturalization by Abraham M, A1/1,21/15432, NAA (ACT); Report on Application forNaturalization by Massoud N., A1/1, 21/24130, NAA(ACT); Report on Application for Naturalization byHabib M., A1, 23/27431, NAA (ACT); Report onApplication for Naturalization by John M., A1/1,24/29587, NAA (ACT).100 Report on Application for Naturalization by Al-fred M., A1/1, 24/20562, NAA (ACT).101 Report on Application for Naturalization byAbraham M., A1/1, 25/7577, NAA (ACT); Report onApplication for Naturalization by Jameel M., A1,26/11274, NAA (ACT); Report on Application forNaturalization by Fuad M., A1/1, 26/4959, NAA(ACT); Report on Application for Naturalization byPeter M., A1/1, 26/14967, NAA (ACT).102 Statutory Declaration, George M., 3 April 1922,A1/1, 22/9133, NAA (ACT).103 Handwritten notes, George M., Naturalizationapplication, A1/1. 22/9133, NAA (ACT).104 Memorandum no. 22/9133, Home & TerritorriesDepartment, 30 May 1922, A1/1, 22/9133, NAA(ACT).105 ibid.

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TAKING AWAY JOSS

CHINESE RELIGION AND THE WESLEYAN MISSION IN CASTLEMAINE,1868

BENJAMIN PENNY

On October 1, 1868 three Chinese menappeared before His Honour, Judge

Forbes at the Castlemaine County Court inVictoria. 1 One Goon Cheum was theplaintiff in ‘an action to recover the valueof Chinese Temple taken down by the de-fendants’, namely Hoa Ah Pang and LaongOun Hung. Goon claimed seventeenpounds, ten shillings and sixpence. TheMount Alexander Mail, the local newspa-per, reported the next day that Goon hadclaimed in court, ‘On September 29 of lastyear I purchased from Hoa Ah Pang atemple and all its contents for £5’. 2 Ac-cording to him, and several witnesses, Hoahad sold the temple fair and square, intend-ing, as one witness said, to go to NewZealand. Subsequently, it was claimed thatHoa and others had pulled the templedown and taken it elsewhere.

The defence case rested, said theirbarrister Mr Leech, on credibility. Hoa,when called to the stand, said that he hadnot sold the temple but rather had let itfor six months, for which he had been paidfive pounds. The witnesses he producedwere his co-defendant Laong Oun Hong,a Wesleyan minister, and The Rev. MrDubourg, and they corroborated hisstance. The Mount Alexander Mail reported

that, ‘His Honour … give the verdict tothe defendants, with £3 7s costs’. 3

This is a minor case by any accountbut The Mount Alexander Mail does nottell the full story. The case gains greatersignificance because Hoa Ah Pang, theformer temple keeper, had recently beenconverted to Christianity, Laong OunHung (who rendered his own name as Le-ong On Tong, as I will refer to him here-after) was the Wesleyan catechist who hadwon his soul, and The Rev. Mr Dubourgwas a Wesleyan minister in the mission tothe Chinese of Castlemaine and other partsof Victoria. An examination of recordsfrom the Uniting Church archives enablesus to place this strange little case in awider context, that of the meeting ofChinese popular religion (by which I meanthe religion of the masses of the Chinesepeople as opposed to orthodox Buddhismor Daoism) and Protestant Christianity onthe goldfields, and in turn to relate it tothe locus classicus of that encounter, Chinaitself. What I will present takes the formof microhistory, but perhaps cases such asthis enable us to ground our conclusionsabout cross-cultural encounters in theminutiae of quotidian experience and his-torical specificity.

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In The Wesleyan Chronicle for 20 Octo-ber 1868 (three weeks after the case), aletter appeared from The Rev. Ed. Kingunder the title ‘Chinese Mission in Castle-maine – a Joss House Transformed into aHouse of Christian Worship’. 4 King super-vised the mission to the Chinese. His lettergives the following account of the samecase from a rather different point of view:

Some few months since, Ah Pang,the keeper of a joss-house, wasconverted through the instrument-ality of Leong-on-Tong. For aboutten years he had kept a joss-house,but about nine months previousto his conversion he let his templeto an old man named Goon Chin,and became a gold-digger. Havingembraced Christianity, he felt thathe could not consistently continuethe proprietorship of the temple,and resolved to present it to Le-ong-on-Tong, that it might beconverted into a house of prayer.

He goes on:

Having given due notice to thetenant of his intention to resumepossession of the building, onMonday July 20, a number of theChinese Christians met in thehouse of their teacher, and fromthence they proceeded to FiveFlags, Campbell’s Creek, wherestood the idol house.

Hoa, as we shall see below, had estab-lished his temple around 1857. King thenpasses over the account to Leong On Tong.Leong continues:

About three months since, mycountryman, Ah Pang, was conver-ted to Christianity. Eleven yearssince he built a joss-house, but, onhis conversion, he resolved to re-move the idol temple to MoonlightFlat, for the use of the ChristianChinamen. Monday July 20, wasthe day appointed for its removal,and I, accompanied by nine of mycountrymen, went, with twohorses and drays, to Five Flags,and, as I expected great oppositionfrom the Pagans living in thatneighbourhood, I asked the Revs.E. King and C. Dubourg to bepresent on the occasion. We alsosecured the presence of a police-man. During the time the housewas being taken down there weregreat excitement and angrythreats, but the presence of theministers and the policemen hap-pily prevented a breach of thepeace. The rain came down veryfast; and Mr Dubourg for abouttwo hours held joss under his arm.My county men expected everymoment to see him fall down dead,or some judgement to come uponhim.

The word ‘joss’ is a corruption of thePortuguese word ‘deos’, god, thus ‘joss-house’, the building in which the sacredimages of Chinese religion are housed andworshipped. 5 When Mr Dubourg is saidto hold joss under his arm, he would ap-pear to have been holding the sacred im-ages from the temple. King continues:

As might be expected, the Paganswere much incensed at the dishon-our done to their idol, and an incid-

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ent which occurred a few daysafter will show the prevailingtemper of their mind.

Leong-on-Tong was pursuing hislabours amongst his countrymen,and had entered into a tent wherenine or ten Chinese were gathered.Suddenly a man entered, and said,‘I have come to curse you for tak-ing away joss. You preach Christi-an doctrine very good, but whyyou take away joss?’ He was will-ing to tolerate Christianity, butdemanded similar tolerance forPaganism.

These comments are both importantand revealing, and in some ways also per-plexing. Revealing as they demonstratethe attitudes of at least some of the Chinesemen to the actions of Hoa and his newcomrades. They were clearly not pleasedat the removal of their house of worshipand the desecration of their sacred images.More than this, King understood the of-fence given. The comments are importantas they show the Chinese reacting to thatoffence in a serious and meaningful wayrather than simply accepting the actionsof what must clearly have appeared as therepresentatives of the colonial powers. Ifwe can trust King’s reportage this anonym-ous man had come to the place Leong wasproselytising specifically to curse him.

Finally King’s response to the state-ment, ‘You preach Christian doctrine verygood, but why you take away joss?’namely, ‘He was willing to tolerate Chris-tianity, but demanded similar tolerancefor Paganism’, is, I suggest, both remark-able and perplexing. It is remarkable as itacknowledges the open-minded attitudesof the Chinese man who distinguishes

between the evangelism of the missionariesper se, whom he appears to compliment ifonly for their mastery of technique, andtheir actions towards his own religion. Italso sums up very neatly a position ofmutual tolerance that has echoes of mod-ern ecumenism and indeed multicultural-ism. However, the question arises as towhether King endorses such a position orregards it as intrinsically ridiculous. Giventhat his very next sentence begins, ‘Atlength Pagan anger and malevolence foundvent in a legal prosecution … ’ I suspectKing was not a man before his time.

Once the temple was moved, emptiedof its religious articles, and Goon Chin (ashis name is rendered here) was evictedfrom both his workplace and his home, itreopened as a ‘house of prayer’. King re-ported:

It was opened for Divine worship,Sunday, August 2. I first preachedto the Europeans who werepresent, from Isa. xlvi. 1, 4, andwas followed by Leong-on-Tong,who spoke warmly to his as-sembled countrymen from Actsxvii, 30, 31.

These two texts both address the ancienttransgression of idolatry, thus, King andLeong were echoing the cries of protestantmissionaries in every mission field in thelast half of the nineteenth century. 6 Thepotency of idolatry as an accusation isclear especially in the mission to China.

THE CHINESE IN CASTLEMAINE

After the discovery of gold at MountAlexander was made public in 1851, thepopulation of Castlemaine and surround-ing districts rose quickly. Among those

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flooding to the diggings were Chinese menarriving in Melbourne, and then Robe inSouth Australia after the imposition of theentry tax in 1855. By 1858 the Chinesepopulation of Victoria had peaked at some40,000. According to the Annual MineralStatistics submitted by Secretary of Minesin his Quarterly Reports of Mining Survey-ors and Registers, the population ofChinese in the Castlemaine district in thatyear attained 9727 and dropped steadilyafter 1865. By 1868 when our case washeard in the Castlemaine county courtthere were 3080 Chinese living there. 7

These population data should not,however, be viewed as absolutely reliable.In 1868 The Rev. William Young submit-ted his ‘Report on the Conditions of theChinese Population in Victoria’ to theVictorian parliament. Figures in that reporton the major Chinese settlements in Victor-ia were obtained from different local in-formants. In the case of Castlemaine,‘Statistics of Chinese Population, and par-ticulars of their Employments, [were] fur-nished by the Chinese Interpreter JamesAh Coy’. 8 Ah Coy’s report is most inform-ative. At the level of absolute numbers hereports ‘over 80’ Chinese in the townshipitself, 50 at Mopoke, and ‘over 300 Chineseminers near Mopoke gully’, 150 miners atBarker’s Creek, 150 miners at GoldenPoint, 170 miners at Diamond Gully, and‘In the vicinity of the township allaround’, there were 100 miners, 20 whoworked in gardens, 30 market gardeners,300 who were married with wives inChina, seven married to European women,20 Chinese children, five Chinese natural-ised, 25 in hospital, five lepers, and 400Chinese prisoners in Castlemaine gaol. Ig-noring Ah Coy’s endearingly idiosyncratictaxonomy (did any of those married have

an occupation?), these numbers are stillmore than 1000 short of the 3080 souls.Nonetheless, the picture given here is ofa community that had passed beyond thefirst flush of gold fever with the begin-nings of a commercial economy. Ah Coyreports that in Castlemaine there were:

1 Chinese street in the township,

5 Chinese stores,

1 butcher’s shop,

1 eating-house,

5 opium shops,

5 gambling-houses,

2 barber’s shops,

4 fishmongers and

3 druggists’ shops.

In Ah Coy’s report there is no ‘joss-house’ in Castlemaine itself or any of thelocal villages or camps.

Could this really have been the case?

CHINESE RELIGION INCASTLEMAINE

Information garnered from rates re-cords in the Borough of Castlemaine andUnited Shire of Mount Alexander tells adifferent story. These records refer tothree temples in 1860, three in 1861, onein 1865, two in 1866, and four in 1868.They also refer to one in Campbell’s Creekin 1875. 9

However, we are not limited to ratesrecords in this matter. The Mount Alexan-der Mail also noticed Chinese temples andrelated activities throughout the period.Between 1858 and 1876 there are refer-ences to temples ‘on the left hand of the

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Forest Creek Rd, a few hundred yards outof town’ (31.5.58), ‘on the side of the road,just beyond Somerville’s Store [Campbell’sCreek]’ (10.11.58), at Clinker’s Hill(16.5.59), in the township (11.2.67),Clinker’s Hill (again, 22.5.71), Ten FootHill (26.4.72), and Duke St (24.1.76).

Now, by any account this points to areligiously active community. In addition,it should be noted that the Mount Alexan-der Mail’s coverage of Chinese templesundergoes a marked, but perfectly under-standable, change after 1859. The earlyreports clearly regard the simple existenceof a Chinese temple, even temporarystructures, as news in themselves. As theyears go by, and presumably their reader-ship becomes more used to seeing suchthings, the Mail only notes more seriousevents such as the opening of new andimposing structures, or else as sites forevents not necessarily related to the templeitself – ‘a hut near the Chinese joss-houseby some means took fire, and in a fewminutes was destroyed with its contents’(11.2.1867). Thus, we may safely concludethat the references to Chinese temples inand around Castlemaine referred to hereare an underestimation of the true situ-ation.

When the Mail reported on templesor on activities related to them, it adopteda notably neutral tone, concentrating onthe fabric of the building and its orna-ments as an object of curiosity—often inelegant description—rather than in whatthe temple meant. An 1858 article underthe title ‘Chinese worship’ is a good ex-ample. 10 In a rich description of thetemple structure and decoration there isvery little by way of judgement. Whilecertain mildly negative words and phrasesmay be noted—the display objects are

‘tawdry’, mirrors are of ‘Brummagem’pattern (that is of inferior, Birminghamstyle, possibly fake), the lamp burns‘feebly’, the man in the temple ‘muttersto himself’,—there are, equally, referencesto the undoubted sacredness of theplace—it is a ‘shrine’, he is a ‘worshipper’who has ‘devotions’ and is presumed tobe ‘devout’. That is, the author is not dis-missive of this building and these practicesin the way that The Rev. King and LeongOn Tong are in their use of terms such as‘pagan’ and ‘idol house’, let alone in theiractions. Nonetheless the article concludes,‘We cannot say what all this may mean,but however devout the individual wor-shipper may be, his countrymen in thecontiguous tent are not affected thereby,but chatter on as loud and shrill as usual’.Here, I suspect, the author is drawing adistinction between the Chinese observ-ances which could take place at any timean individual preferred and collectiveChristian worship on a Sunday when theChristian Sabbath was observed with de-corum, at least ideally in the minds of theprotestants.

This tone is consistent in the materialfrom the Mount Alexander Mail, even asthe content of the articles changes. Indeed,there is a kind of admiration in some oftheir reports, such as the series of sevenarticles over eighteen months related tothe subscription for, and construction,opening and consecration of the temple atTen Foot Hill in the early 1870s. 11 As faras the Mail is concerned, by this time theChinese are a notable part of the Castle-maine community whose religious build-ings and observances are objects of interestfor the whole community and no longersimply worth reporting for novelty value.

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This is not to say that the stance of theMail was shared with their entire reader-ship. A letter from ‘Iconoclast’ from 6 June1859 spells out a different set of attitudesto Chinese religions. He says that he hasgathered information from a ‘respectableChinese’,—later he tells us this man is aChristian—that the Chinese in Bendigoand Castlemaine both intend to seek sub-scriptions for ‘a joss-house of much largersize than the one now built’. His informantapparently ‘regret[s] the increase of hea-then temples in this country. He wonderswhy they are not prohibited by law, fear-ing that his countrymen will be encour-aged in their idolatrous practices by a tol-eration, which will be construed to meanan indifference to every form of religion’.‘Toleration’ is clearly a threatening andproblematic idea, for ‘Iconoclast’ as muchas it was for King, for whom ‘indifferenceto every form of religion, ‘probably im-plied a threatening latitude for Catholi-cism. ‘Iconoclast’ then bemoans the lackof success of the missions to the Chineseand concludes, ‘So far, indeed, from thedoctrines of Christ having successfullycombated the dogmas of Kung-foo-tze[Confucius], it would almost seem as if thephilosophy of the heathen sage were as-suming the aggressive’.

Iconoclast goes on to bemoan thestandard of the interpreters between theChinese and the authorities and ‘the neces-sity of obtaining honest and competentAnglo-Chinese linguists’. His criticismsfocus in on James Ah Coy:

I am assured on good authority,that Ah Coy, the Castlemaine Inter-preter is sometimes performing theko-tow before the picture ofKwan-ti on Clinker’s Hill, and yetthis official calls himself Christian,

and swears on the Bible. He has aright to be an idolator if he likes,but at least let him avow the fact.

However, not 10 days after this letterthe first of a series from J. M’CullochHenley, Anglo-Chinese Linguist, appearedin the Mail explaining various aspects ofChinese popular religions and Buddhismin a comparatively learned way. 12 It is,of course entirely possible that ‘Iconoclast’and J. M’Culloch Henley were one and thesame, his first letter making the case foremployment of someone just like the au-thor of the latter sequence. Such a conclu-sion is buttressed by the ending of his firstletter, on the Chinese God of War Guandi(Kwanti in his rendering), which echoesIconoclast’s sentiments very closely:

It is to be hoped that some stepswill be taken to evangelise theseheathens and teach them that theknowledge of the God of benevol-ence was superior to that of thesanguinary god Kwanti. If somesteps in that direction do not betaken soon, we will have the hor-ror of beholding the Chineseerecting temples to the gods oftheir native hills, more numerousto those erected to the “UnknownGod”.

Here we have an interesting religiousvariation on the general fear of beingflooded by the yellow hordes from thenorth—that churches will be overrun byjoss-houses.

WHO WAS HOA AH PANG?

It would be entirely predictable thatour sources would be silent on Hoa AhPang before his encounter with the Wes-

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leyans. Surprisingly this is not so—how-ever, the only snippet of information wehave about him is tantalising in its brevity.The Mail tells us in its 3 September 1862issue that the day before in the Castle-maine Police Court, ‘Ah Leung sued HuAh Pang for 30s, which amount he hadkindly lent defendant. The debt havingbeen proved, a verdict was given for theamount’. 13 Who Ah Leung was, why Hoaborrowed the money, if he made a habitof borrowing money and then not payingit back and any number of other questionsare raised by this gnomic reference butcannot be answered.

Some other aspects of Hoa’s life can beelucidated from the statement read out athis baptism in the Wesleyan church, Cas-tlemaine and preserved in The WesleyanChronicle for January 20, 1869 and theMission Notices for that year. 14 Hoa,whose baptismal name was Enoch, camefrom Foo Tow village in Lunning district,Canton province. His family were too poorto send him to school, and he says thatwhen he came to Victoria he ‘brought idolswith me, hoping they would take care ofme, and keep me in health, and aid me tobecome more rich’. He, ‘came here to makemoney. I got a little and went home.’ Helater returned with another idol ‘in whomI trusted for greater prosperity’. This newgod proved popular with other minerswho came to Hoa’s tent to worship him.Not letting the opportunity slip away, Hoasays that he, ‘first thought of building atemple, in order to make money’. Over el-even years, he ‘removed it to six differentplaces, and made £2000 by the specula-tion’. I might pause to note here that forHoa, as for most temple keepers, religionwas a business. This makes it even moresurprising that Ah Coy did not include

joss-houses in his list of Chinese businessesactive in Castlemaine. So, obeying theproper narrative rules for this kind ofdocument, Hoa then speaks of his progress-ive degradation, smoking opium andgambling all his money away. He then tellsof his meeting Leong On Tong on the road,and his gradual acceptance of Christiandoctrine. At his moment of true conver-sion, he describes his realisation in termsthat are, by now familiar:

The Holy Spirit shined into myheart, and I understood that toworship images was to offend God,and to be the owner of a joss-housewas a great sin.

It is clear that the conversion of HoaAh Pang was regarded by the mission asa great coup, demonstrating God’s greatstrength and power. He is singled out inthis article for special mention from threeother Chinese recipients of baptism byboth its author, presumably King, and byLeong in his address reprinted from theceremony.

I have not been able to find out any-thing more of Hoa Ah Pang, includingwhether he remained in Australia or re-turned to China, whether he remained aChristian or became a ‘backslider’, andwhat he did for a living after he hadturned to the straight and narrow andgiven away his means of sustenance.

The situation is different for Leong OnTong.

LEONG ON TONG AND HISVIEWS OF CHINESE RELIGION

Leong On Tong assumed the positionof catechist for the Wesleyan mission in1866. He had been converted himself while

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in Australia, in Vaughan, by his prede-cessor but one as catechist, Leong Ah Toe(no family relationship is ever mentionedbetween the two). He was regarded as verysuccessful and stayed in the position forthirteen years. In 1879 he was ordainedand then was placed in charge of the LittleBourke Street chapel in Melbourne wherehe stayed until 1885. He then returned toChina.

Fortunately, parts of Leong On Tong’sjournal survive. Unfortunately, that partof his journal dealing with July to October1868 is lost, or perhaps better put, has notyet been found. It is a fascinating docu-ment, describing his daily work on thegoldfields and the occasional translatedand transcribed conversation, sometimeswith temple keepers—undoubtedly tidiedup—and the arguments he puts to themstrongly echo the statements of Hoa AhPang in his baptismal statement: worship-ping images is a sin against God, settingup a temple to allow others to worshipimages is thus a greater sin, images arenothing but paper and wood and thereforecannot protect you, buying incense andcandles to worship the images is a wasteof money, and so on.

Leong’s views on idolatry were abso-lutely mainstream in protestant missionsof the time across the world. One favouritebiblical text on idolatry comes from Psalm805, 15 and 16:

The idols of the nations are silverand gold, the work of men’shands. They have mouths but theyspeak not; eyes have they, butthey see not; they have ears butthey hear not; neither is there anybreath in their mouths.

On this logic the worship of idols issimple absurdity, with no possible rationaljustification. Missionaries in China andelsewhere, who belonged to the LondonMissionary Society, in fact encouragedtheir converts to hand over their sacredimages as a sign of true conversion. Themissionaries often sent these to the mu-seum of the LMS in London. The ‘Advert-isement’ on the first page of its cataloguesspeaks of ‘the most valuable and impress-ive objects in this Collection are the numer-ous, and (in some instances) horrible,IDOLS, which having been imported fromthe South Sea Islands, from India, China,Africa; and among these especially whichwere actually given up by their formerworshippers, from a full conviction of thefolly and sin of idolatry - a conviction de-rived from the ministry of the Gospel bythe Missionaries’. 15

Idolatry, specifically in China, arouseddeep emotion in a notable witness to itsreligion in this period. The Right Rev.Bishop C.R. Alford, Anglican Bishop ofVictoria in Hong Kong from 1867 to 1872published a pamphlet for the ChurchMissionary Society called Idols: Idolatry:Idolators in 1887. In it he writes from hisown observations doing the rounds ofAnglican missions from Hong Kong toBeijing, 1000 miles west up the Yangtze,and east to Yokohama:

I can tell you what I myself saw ofthe idolatry of China when, asBishop of Victoria, it was my dutyto visit the Missions … I can testi-fy that, though their languagediffered in every important Mis-sion that I visited, as also theirphysical appearance and eventheir mental temperament, theirsocial manners and customs also

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to some extent, -everywhere thepeople were given to idolatry …In fact, everywhere in heathenlands, and in everything purelynative, as a rule, idolatry overshad-ows the people, like some pestilen-tial cloud enveloping and defilingmore or less the great mass of thepopulation … But I have saidenough to show you that, notwith-standing all that can be writtenabout the philosophy of the an-cient religions of the East, idolatry,whatever name it may assume,holds the heathen nations fastbound in chains of sin, andwretchedness, and death, -apiteous sight that brought the Sonof God from heaven to destroythese works of the devil, and thatought to stir to the bottom of hissoul every soldier of the Cross togo forth in his Master’s name andovercome the Evil One by theblood of the Lamb and the wordof their testimony. 16

CONCLUSIONS

Two conclusions follow from what Ihave described: First, religion existed inthe Chinese community in Castlemaine andit was an important part of the lives ofmany if not most of the Chinese who livedthere. To make such a conclusion leads usto ponder why it was so completely writ-ten out of official documents—includingdocuments based on information collectedby Chinese people. Secondly, the eventsthat led up to our minor case in Castle-maine County Court were part of a muchlarger encounter between Protestant mis-

sionaries and the followers of Chinese reli-gions in China and also in the Chinese dia-spora. Doubtless, little dramas like the oneI have described were taking place acrossthe Chinese world and in all likelihood thedynamic everywhere was much the same.On the one side were usually relativelypoorly educated Chinese people whosereligious observances were based pro-foundly on the primacy of efficacy—didworshipping this god produce results inthe here and now?—and on the other weregenerally well educated Europeans whotried to convince them that the way theysought results was not only not efficaciousbut sinful—a notion entirely novel toChinese religious traditions.

As we have seen, as far as we can tellfrom our sources, the Chinese were farfrom antagonistic to the missionar-ies—their religious world was plural. Reli-gions based on efficacy are welcoming ofefficacious novelties and the history ofChinese religions is one—to a large ex-tent—of borrowings, absorption and ac-ceptance. On the other hand, the religionsof the book tend to be exclusivist and un-compromising so it comes as no surprisethat the protestant missionaries on thegoldfields were not tolerant of the reli-gious practices of the Chinese.

What I think is perhaps more surpris-ing is that this intolerance seems not to bemore widespread. The Mount AlexanderMail, for instance, did not attack theChinese for being pagans or heathens—butrather seems to have adopted the attitudethat if they did not understand what wasgoing on, they would refrain from criti-cism.

This is not to say that the Chinese inCastlemaine were not subject to bigotedcriticism beyond the mission. They were

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subject to all the usual accusations of im-morality, profligacy and besottedness thatthe Chinese across Australia experienced.Indeed, one of the most striking pieces ofanti-Chinese bigotry that survives inpublished form in this period comes fromCastlemaine: the infamous ‘Sketches ofChinese Character, Illustrative of theirMoral and Physical Effect on the RisingGeneration of Victoria’, by ‘Humanity’published in Castlemaine in 1878. In thisshort piece, it is the Chinese debauchingyoung European women that most in-flames our author:

Could I but write – and by Godshelp I’ll try – the scenes of thatawful red, blood-red alley or laneoff Forest-street, and publish it inEngland, it would never be be-lieved that our Saxon and Normangirls could have sunk so low incrime as to consort with such aherd of Gorilla Devils, devilish andleprous in feature, and devilishthey are in nature also. 17

Taking a step back from the materialdiscussed in this paper, the overridingimpression of the encounter between theChinese and Europeans on the goldfieldsis one of two communities largely livingseparate lives, in different languages, eat-ing different food, in distinct places ofresidence, worshipping different gods indifferent ways. The missionary encounterwas one of the very few sites where onecommunity actively reached out to theother. While the missionaries I have dis-cussed held opinions of Chinese religion(and by extension the non-ChristianChinese themselves) that are at best deeplyprejudiced, nonetheless they are also oneof the few groups that also reckon them

worthy of attention and effort. They also,almost uniquely, preserve the voices ofmembers of this community—‘you preachChristian doctrine very good but why youtake away joss?’—even when those voicesdisagree with them.

To most Europeans, the Chinese werecompletely and irrevocably alien and Isuspect that their hatred of the Chinesewas based on those features of their livesthe Europeans understood precisely be-cause they were paralleled in their ownlives: their mining practices, their use ofprostitutes, their use of intoxicants, andthe threat that they would take their landby sheer force of numbers. Religion wasnot such a focus of general bigotry to-wards the Chinese as it was simply beyondtheir understanding.

ENDNOTES

1 The case is recorded in the Castlemaine CountyCourt Register for Thursday, October 1, 1868, heldin the Public Record Office of Victoria, VPRS 733/5.The spelling of the names of the Chinese participantsin this narrative vary according to who transcribedthem. However, as it is clear in all sources used whichperson is referred to, I have rendered the names asthey appear in each source. A general survey of themissions to the Chinese in the Victorian goldfieldshas recently appeared the Victorian HistoricalJournal: Walter Phillips, ‘Seeking souls in the dig-gings: Christian missions to the Chinese on the Vic-torian goldfields’, (72, 1&2, September 2001, pp.86–104). I would like to acknowledge Ian Welch whofirst brought my attention to this case.2 All references to the case are from The Mount Alex-ander Mail (hereafter, MAM), 2.10.1868.3 The costs, according to the Court Register, weremade up of defendant’s costs of three pounds threeshillings and sixpence, a two shilling governmentfee and a two shilling subpoena fee.4 The Wesleyan Chronicle (hereafter, WC), 20.10.1868,p. 149.5 It should be noted that Chinese religious imagesmay also be painted on paper, and in discussions ofChinese religion in Australia from this period ‘joss’are sometimes said to be stuck to walls or doors.

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6 The King James version of the Isaiah text reads,‘Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols uponthe breasts, and upon the cattle; your carriages wereheavy loaden; they are a burden to the weary beast’,and ‘And even to your old age I am he; and even tohoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I willbear; even I will carry , and will deliver you.’ TheActs text reads, ‘And the times of this ignorance Godwinked at; but now commandeth all men everywhereto repent; Because he hath appointed a day, in whichthe righteousness by that man whom he hath or-dained; whereof he hath given assurance unto allmen, in that he hath raised him from the dead’.7 Figures from K. Cronin, Colonial Casualties: Chinesein Early Victoria, Melbourne, University of Mel-bourne Press, 1982, Table 5, p. 141.8 I. McLaren, The Chinese in Victoria: Official Reportsand Documents, Melbourne, Red Rooster Press, 1985,pp. 38–9.9 I am indebted to the Castlemaine Historical SocietyInc. for this information.10 MAM 31.5.1858, p. 3.11 MAM 12.10.71, 24.4.72, 26.4.72, 7.6.73, 14.5.73,15.5.73, 16.5.73.12 MAM 15.6.1859, 22.6.1859, 24.6.1859, 1.7.59,8.7.1859.13 MAM 3.9.1863, p. 2.14 The Wesleyan Chronicle 20.1.1869, p. 11; MissionNotices 1867–71, pp. 143–4 (National Library ofAustralia, Ferguson Collection).15 Catalogue of the Missionary Museum, Austen Fri-ars; including specimens of natural history, variousidols of heathen nations, dresses, manufactures, domest-ic utensils, instruments of war, &c. &c. &c., London,W. Phillips, 1826, p. iii.16 C. R. Alford, Idols: Idolatry: Idolators , London,Church Missionary Society, 1887, pp. 5–6.17 ‘Humanity’, Sketches of Chinese Character, Illustrat-ive of their Moral and Physical Effect on the RisingGeneration of Victoria, Castlemaine, F. Y. Benham,Printer and Bookbinder, 1878, p. 3.

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