This kind of detailed study of mission history is essential if we are to move beyond clichés about mission history and its effect on indigenous Australia.

Too often, generic statements about missionaries colluding with colonialism and destroying indigenous cultures are presumed to say all that needs to be said about this aspect of contact history.

Missionary attitudes were, in
some cases, counter‑cultural

On the other hand, some Christians can whitewash mission history, as though any injustice suffered was justified by the fact that people gained access to the saving Gospel of Christ.

Both these positions call for a more discerning account of concrete mission histories for two reasons – to do justice to indigenous agency in the encounter with Christianity, so that indigenous people are not presented as mere victims; and to do justice to the ways in which the missionary agenda was not only parallel with that of other colonial forces, but also diverged from it.

In Loos’ book, we find the sort of case study that helps to offer this nuance. He shows how missionary attitudes, while very much culturally conditioned, were also, in some cases at least, counter-cultural.

While not denying the view of many missionaries that indigenous peoples were only capable of being ‘civilised’ to the level of the British working classes, he notes also the firm conviction as to their fundamental humanity.

He points to the ABM’s early awareness of the devastation caused by dispossession and of the responsibilities incumbent on those who benefited from this dispossession.

A major character in Loos’story is Ernest Gribble, a veteran of a number of Anglican missions, who, despite a reputation for being an authoritarian mission superintendent, played a key role in uncovering the Forrest River massacres, leading to a Royal Commission investigation.

 

Loos also offers a more nuanced picture of Aboriginal responses to missions, one which points to their active agency within the considerable limitations imposed on them.

Some indigenous people discerned something of value in what was being offered and made choices about how they would engage with that offering. Loos shows this especially by tracing the history of Aboriginal leadership within the Anglican Church, from early leaders like James Noble, through a range of lay evangelists, to significant milestones such as the episcopal consecration of Bishop Arthur Malcolm as the first Aboriginal bishop in the Anglican Church.

He also points to the more recent Christian revival at Yarrabah, led by Aboriginal people, interpreting their experience in ways that make sense to them, despite scepticism from some white church people. For some indigenous people at least, Christianity and mission history “is not an aberration in their experience; it is as central as the Dreamtime”.

One point that Loos refers to only in passing requires further development. This is the area that philosopher-theologian Bernard Lonergan calls incarnate meaning — the meaning of a person or group or way of life.

Mission studies tend to focus on two areas: the verbal communications of missionaries (what they said in their catechesis and preaching); and the social structures of mission life (how missionaries controlled indigenous life, as in the prohibition of local languages and rituals, or the creation of dormitories which separated children from their families).

But for all the ethnocentrism of the verbal communications, and all the destructiveness of the social control, there were also the missionaries themselves — their presence and the relationships they formed with the people.

At various points, Loos shows the deep respect indigenous people had for at least some of the missionaries — people who lived with them for long periods of time, who maintained contact and relationship with them, who shared the hardships of mission life, who persevered with little support from theirownchurchesandculture,and whogave witness, in fragile earthenware jars, of a treasure they wished to share with indigenous people.

The tragedy, of course, is that these same people undermined this reality by various forms of collusion and paternalism.

This book, though, ends on a note of hope, as Loos outlines the growth of a ‘black church’ in which, out of a most ambivalent history, indigenous people emerge with a desire to continue to engage with Christ and to share his Gospel, not simply with their black sisters and brothers, but with the wider Australian Church and beyond.

Robin Koning SJ lectures in Systematic Theology and Philosophy at Jesuit Theological College. He worked for five years in the Kutjungka Cahtolic Parish based at Wirrumanu (Balgo). This review appeared in the online journal Eureka Street in January.