The Contest For Aboriginal Souls

This book covers the missionary activity in Australia conducted by non-English speaking missionaries from Catholic and Protestant mission societies from its beginnings to the end of the mission era. It looks through the eyes of the missionaries and their helpers, as well as incorporating Indigenous perspectives and offering a balanced assessment of missionary endeavour in Australia, attuned to the controversies that surround mission history. It means neither to condemn nor praise, but rather to understand the various responses of Indigenous communities, the intentions of missionaries, the agendas of the mission societies and the many tensions besetting the mission endeavour. It explores a common commitment to the supernatural and the role of intermediaries like local diplomats and evangelists from the Pacific Islands and Philippines, and emphasises the strong role played by non-English speakers in the transcultural Australian mission effort. This book is a companion to the website German Missionaries in Australia – A web-directory of intercultural encounters. The web-directory provides detailed accounts of Australian missions staffed with German speakers. The book reads laterally across the different missions and produces a completely different type of knowledge about missions. The book and its accompanying website are based on a decade of research ranging across mission archives with foreign-language sources that have not previously been accessed for a historiography of Australian missions. ‘A remarkable intellectual achievement, compelling reading.’ — Dr Niel Gunson ‘The range of knowledge on display here is very impressive indeed.’ — Professor Peter Monteath

This book focuses on twentieth-century Australian leprosaria to explore the lives of indigenous patients and the Catholic women missionaries who nursed them. Distinguished from previous historical studies of leprosy, the book examines the care and management of the incarcerated, enabling a broader understanding of their experience, beyond a singular trope of banishment, oppression and death. From the 1930s until the 1980s, respective governments appointed the trained sisters to four leprosaria across remote northern Australia, where almost two thousand people had been removed from their homes and detained under law for years - sometimes decades. The book traces the sisters’ holistic nursing from early efforts of amelioration and palliation to their part in the successful treatment of leprosy after World War II. It reveals the ways the sisters stepped out of their assigned roles and attempted to shape the institutions as places of health and hygiene, of European culture and education, and of Christianity. Making use of accounts from patients, doctors; bureaucrats; missionary men; and Indigenous families and communities, the book offers fresh perspectives on two important strands of history. First, its attention to the day-to-day work of the Australian sisters helps to demystify leprosy healthcare by female missionaries, generally. Secondly, with the sisters specifically caring for Indigenous people, this book exposes the institutional practices and goals specific to race relations of both the Australian government and Catholic missionaries. An important and timely read for anyone interested in Indigenous history, medical history and the connections between race, religion and healthcare, this book contextualizes the twentieth-century leprosy epidemic within Australia's broader colonial history.

In White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments, Joanna Cruickshank and Patricia Grimshaw provide the first detailed study of the central part that white women played in missionary work among Aboriginal people in Australia.

With this volume, the field of rhetoric of science joins its sister disciplines in history and philosophy in challenging the dominance of Euro-American science as a global epistemology. The discipline of rhetoric understands world-making and community-building as interdependent activities: that is, if we practice science differently, we do politics differently, and vice versa. This wider aperture seems crucial at a time when we are confronted with the limitations of Euro-American science and politics in managing global risks such as pandemics and climate change—particularly in our most vulnerable communities. The contributors to this volume draw on their familiarity with a wide range of global scientific traditions—from Australian Aboriginal ecology to West African medicine to Polynesian navigation science—to suggest possibilities for reconfiguring the relationship between science and politics to better manage global risks. These possibilities should not only inspire scholars in rhetoric and technical communication but should also introduce readers from science and technology studies to some useful new approaches to the problem of decolonizing scenes of scientific practice around the world.

This edited collection focuses on Aboriginal and Māori travel in colonial contexts. Authors in this collection examine the ways that Indigenous people moved and their motivations for doing so. Chapters consider the cultural aspects of travel for Indigenous communities on both sides of the Tasman. Contributors examine Indigenous purposes for mobility, including for community and individual economic wellbeing, to meet other Indigenous or non-Indigenous peoples and experience different cultures, and to gather knowledge or experience, or to escape from colonial intrusion. ‘This volume is the first to take up three challenges in histories of Indigenous mobilities. First, it analyses both mobility and emplacement. Challenging stereotypes of Indigenous people as either fixed or mobile, chapters deconstruct issues with ramifications for contemporary politics and analyses of Indigenous society and of rural and national histories. As such, it is a welcome intervention in a wide range of urgent issues. Second, by examining Indigenous peoples in both Australia and New Zealand, this volume is an innovative step in removing the artificial divisions that have arisen from “national” histories. Third, the collection connects the experiences of colonised Indigenous peoples with those of their colonisers, shifting the long-held stereotypes of Indigenous powerlessness. Chapters then convincingly demonstrate the agency of colonised peoples in shaping the actions and the mobility itself of the colonisers. While the volume overall is aimed at opening up new research questions, and so invites later and even more innovative work, this volume will stand as an important guide to the directions such future work might take.’ — Heather Goodall, Professor Emerita, UTS

This edited collection examines art resulting from cross-cultural interactions between Australian First Nations and non-Indigenous people, from the British invasion to today. Focusing on themes of collaboration and dialogue, the book includes two conversations between First Nations and non-Indigenous authors and an historian’s self-reflexive account of mediating between traditional owners and an international art auction house to repatriate art. There are studies of ‘reverse appropriation‘ by early nineteenth-century Aboriginal carvers of tourist artefacts and the production of enigmatic toa. Cross-cultural dialogue is traced from the post-war period to ‘Aboriginalism’ in design and the First Nations fashion industry of today. Transculturation, conceptualism, and collaboration are contextualised in the 1980s, a pivotal decade for the growth of collaborative First Nations exhibitions. Within the current circumstances of political protest in photographic portraiture and against the mining of sacred Aboriginal land, Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art testifies to the need for Australian institutions to collaborate with First Nations people more often and better. This book will appeal to students and scholars of art history, Indigenous anthropology, and museum and heritage studies.

In a global context, understanding and engaging with Indigenous Peoples and understanding their contemporary values is becoming increasingly relevant. This book offers a major insight into Australian Indigenous Peoples’ perspectives on the built environment. Enriched with thoughtful Indigenous voices from across Australia, echoed with several pre-eminent non-Indigenous practitioner voices, the book discusses the value of Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the Australian built environment and landscapes. It provides their perspective of wanting to share, of wanting to be heard, and of wishing to journey into our future landscapes and environments sympathetically and sustainably; of wanting to mutually share this journey respectfully to the betterment of humanity and these landscapes. A major resource for all academics, students and practitioners in the built environment sector, internationally, and not just in Australia, the book embodies issues confronting Indigenous Peoples and their communities, and their concerns about the future of their custodial landscapes. The book’s national significance has already been identified by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) through its inclusion in their ‘Connection to Country: Case Studies’.

“In my bibliographies there are no women in the evangelical tradition, and no Australian women scholars.” This unique volume addresses this gap, with eighteen biblically rich and academically rigorous chapters by established and emerging Australian women scholars in the evangelical tradition. The authors consider our relationship with the land and Indigenous peoples, neighborhood, embodiment, (dis)ability, abortion, leadership, work, architecture, the media, Song of Songs and domestic violence, and Jeremiah and weaponized rape, and demonstrate recent methodologies such as a social identity reading of Exodus, sensory readings of Psalms and John’s Gospel, and discipleship readings of Mary and Martha and the woman at the well. A contemporary Kriol psalm and stories of pioneering Australian women theological students and teachers complete the volume. Valuable for students and teachers across Bible, theology, ministry, and practice subjects, this book is an essential inclusion in any theological library.