Why Christian missionaries struggled in Australia - ANU

Why Christian missionaries struggled in Australia - ANU




Why Christian missionaries struggled in Australia
7 JUNE 2018




Angurugu Bible Class 1951. Image: Groote Eylandt linguistics, Keith Hart Collection.


The Australian missions were government funded. Really, they were government agencies trying to assimilate Aboriginal people into white culture.

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New research from The Australian National University (ANU) has revealed the strength of Aboriginal cultures, as well as heavy-handed government policies reduced the impact of Christian missions to remote Aboriginal communities during the mid-twentieth century.

The research, published in a new book, reveals that the Church Missionary Society's North Australian Mission experienced significant difficulties due to the Federal Government's desire that Aboriginal people be assimilated into 'white Australian culture'.

The book's author, historian Dr Laura Rademaker, said after decades of trying to convert the people of Groote Eylandt to their Christianity, missionaries were eventually forced to come around to Aboriginal culture.

"They realised there was a richness there that they had to come to terms with," Dr Rademaker said.

"In the later years you actually saw missionaries help transcribe some of the traditional songs and advocate for bi-lingual education."

The research focuses on the mission in the remote community of Groote Eylandt, the largest island in the Northern Territory's Gulf of Carpentaria.

Dr Rademaker said due to government influence missionaries were generally unable to operate as they did in other countries - by learning local languages to translate the bible and its teachings.

"The Australian missions were government funded. Really, they were government agencies trying to assimilate Aboriginal people into white culture," Dr Rademaker said.

"So if they were going to convert to Christianity, they were going to have to convert to a white Christianity.
"Australian missionaries took a really different approach, everywhere else in the world they learned local languages and translated the bible - that's how they converted people.

"But in Australia they weren't able to do that, they had to teach in English which created a lot of communication problems."

Dr Rademaker said due to the missionary's lack of local language skills, the Aboriginal population was able to continue practising their culture while maintaining a façade of Christianity.
"The Aboriginal people were able to carve out spaces for themselves even in the very controlling situation," she said.

"The culture was able to survive very much intact."

Dr Rademaker said this had played a role in the people of Groote Eylandt being able to maintain their culture up to the present day.

"Ceremony is still very strong, and the songs are still sung and passed down. Culture is very much alive on Groote Eylandt," she said.

Dr Laura Rademaker is a researcher at the ANU Centre for Indigenous History. Her book Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission has been published by University of Hawaii Press and is available here: http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9911-9780824872656.aspx

Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (Indigenous Pacifics) Kindle Edition
by Laura Rademaker (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Found in Translation is a rich account of language and shifting cross-cultural relations on a Christian mission in northern Australia during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how translation shaped interactions between missionaries and the Anindilyakwa-speaking people of the Groote Eylandt archipelago and how each group used language to influence, evade, or engage with the other in a series of selective “mistranslations.” In particular, this work traces the Angurugu mission from its establishment by the Church Missionary Society in 1943, through Australia’s era of assimilation policy in the 1950s and 1960s, to the introduction of a self-determination policy and bilingual education in 1973. While translation has typically been an instrument of colonization, this book shows that the ambiguities it creates have given Indigenous people opportunities to reinterpret colonization’s position in their lives.

Laura Rademaker combines oral history interviews with careful archival research and innovative interdisciplinary findings to present a fresh, cross-cultural perspective on Angurugu mission life. Exploring spoken language and sound, the translation of Christian scripture and songs, the imposition of English literacy, and Aboriginal singing traditions, she reveals the complexities of the encounters between the missionaries and Aboriginal people in a subtle and sophisticated analysis. Rademaker uses language as a lens, delving into issues of identity and the competition to name, own, and control. In its efforts to shape the Anindilyakwa people’s beliefs, the Church Missionary Society utilized language both by teaching English and by translating Biblical texts into the native tongue. Yet missionaries relied heavily on Anindilyakwa interpreters, whose varied translation styles and choices resulted in an unforeseen Indigenous impact on how the mission’s messages were received. From Groote Eylandt and the peculiarities of the Australian settler-colonial context, Found in Translation broadens its scope to cast light on themes common throughout Pacific mission history such as assimilation policies, cultural exchanges, and the phenomenon of colonization itself.

This book will appeal to Indigenous studies scholars across the Pacific as well as scholars of Australian history, religion, linguistics, anthropology, and missiology.----
Length: 254 pages Word Wise: Enabled Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Page Flip: Enabled Language: English
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Review

Functioning both as a metaphor and a focus for concrete historical investigation, Rademaker's interest in translation proves an inspired choice. While delving into the specifics of intercultural contact on Groote Eylandt, this generous interdisciplinary work thoughtfully illuminates wider themes. Readers will learn about the history of missions, midcentury assimilation policy, the phenomenon of settler colonialism and an Indigenous people's efforts to negotiate its impact - all while appreciating Rademaker's dazzling use of oral history and glowing prose.

--Patricia Grimshaw, The University of Melbourne "Judges' remarks, 2019 NSW Premier's Australian History Prize [shortlisted]"

About the Author
Laura Rademaker is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National University.


Product details

Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 1869 KB
Print Length: 252 pages
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press (30 April 2018)
Sold by: Amazon Australia Services, Inc.
Language: English

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AUSTRALASIA AND THE PACIFIC ISLANDS, BOOK REVIEWS

https://pacificaffairs.ubc.ca/book-reviews/found-in-translation-many-meanings-on-a-north-australian-mission-by-laura-rademaker/

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FOUND IN TRANSLATION: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission | By Laura Rademaker

Indigenous Pacifics. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. xix, 231 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7265-6.

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In Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission, Laura Rademaker explores the role of translation in the interactions between Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries and local people living in the Groote Eylandt archipelago in North Australia in the mid-twentieth century. The author argues that translation allows cross-cultural communication, but it can also be a tool to resist and contest claims of authority and legitimacy. Translation creates slippages and gaps in meaning that allow mistranslation and misinterpretation, which the Anindilyakwa people used to strategically manoeuvre in relation to the missionaries (3). Rademaker’s poignant and sometimes unsettling account of cross-cultural exchange reflects her ability and willingness to go beyond binary descriptions of the missionary-Indigenous encounter; it analyses the complex interactions created by people living in and around the mission station who were “both embedded in and … generative of” social relations 

(Paige West, Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, xv). 

This book provides insight into Australian history, colonialism, mission history, translation, and religion.

Rademaker opens her analysis with an example of mistranslation that helps frame her argument. The example she narrates is of the arrival of the first CMS missionary to encounter Anindilyakwa people in 1921. She relates how he came into the camp singing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” As he greeted the people living there, he encouraged them to join him in singing the song, and asked for a spontaneous translation of the words into the vernacular. Reportedly, after he mimed the word “me” in the song, the people told him the Anindilyakwa word for “chest hair,” and he continued singing “Jesus loves my chest hair.” He later described this meeting as a humorous anecdote and example of how cross-cultural communication can go awry. However, it could also be seen as an example of the type of ambiguities that can arise as part of translating meaning from one language and way of life to another (1).

Rademaker organizes the book chronologically, while also pointing out the important concepts, events, and directions that emerged over time between the missionaries and Anindilyakwa people. Beginning with the history of Christian missions in Australia, her account focuses mainly on describing the interactions that arose after CMS missionaries established the Angurugu Mission Station in 1943. In the mission’s early days, the missionaries saw their ability to explain the Christian message as tied to the Indigenous people’s cultural assimilation to white Australia. In this project, they were supported by the Australian government. However, cultural assimilation impacted many aspects of Anindilyakwa life, such as their language, which was integral to their identity and connection to the land and their ancestors. As Rademaker says, “For Anindilyakwa people, the Anindilyakwa language was irreplaceable. Groote Eylandt’s songs, stories, and ceremonies belonged in Anindilyakwa from ‘the old days,’ and Anindilyakwa belonged in the mouths of its people” (59–60). The missionaries changed their approach in the 1970s, when they decided that they could best communicate their Christian message through the “heart languages” of the Indigenous people (127). They turned to linguistics to learn the vernacular, create an alphabet and literacy materials, and communicate their message to the Anindilyakwa people.

The later chapters reflect prominent areas of translation and mistranslation in the interactions of missionaries and local people: experiences of listening to others, attempts by missionaries to assert the legitimacy of their language in written form, the missionaries’ decision to interact in the vernacular (seen as beneficial by many missionaries and Anindilyakwa people, but also resisted by some), perceptions of authentic conversions (which often ignored how the Anindilyakwa had creatively and innovatively reworked Christian ideas into their own spiritual expressions), and the place of singing in Anindilyakwa appropriation and translation of the missionaries’ songs into local expressions that helped them “find new meanings and create Anindilyakwa Christianities” (170).

I found this book noteworthy for two reasons. 

Firstly, Rademaker has produced a detailed and nuanced ethnographic account of the Anindilyakwa and missionary encounter. She not only interviewed and interacted with the Anindilyakwa people, but also gathered ethnographic data from current and former missionaries and government representatives. Making use of these diverse sources, Rademaker wove together the multiple narratives of the Anindilyakwa people and speakers of other languages of northern Australia, the missionaries and their supervisors in other places, and Australian government representatives.

Secondly, Rademaker eschews a purely “clash of cultures” explanation of the interaction between missionaries and the residents of Groote Eylandt (11). As she notes:

The dynamics of settler-colonialism must be recognized, but they do not explain everything. Overdependence on binaries—whether of colonizer and colonized, Aboriginal religion and Christianity, evangelists and evangelized—can limit the subjectivity of Indigenous people to either victimhood or resistance … and can cause us to overlook the variety and complexity of relationships and exchanges. (11)

The missionaries and the Anindilyakwa people impacted each other in ways they did not expect. In Rademaker’s view, the people she discusses were embedded in “a structural logic of settler-colonialism” who also “operated simultaneously with mutual agency and diversity” (11). In choosing to frame this situation in terms of translation and mistranslation, Rademaker describes “how colonizers and colonized … operated in dynamic, creative, sometimes even productive engagement with each other” (11). As Rademaker puts it, “Instead of a ‘colonization of consciousness,’ the mission was a site of dialogue, of cross-cultural flows, as Anindilyakwa people and missionaries each appropriated and translated the ideas and symbols of the other” (178). Within a context of unequal relationships, the Anindilyakwa people and the missionaries lived in a constant state of translation as they interacted together and influenced each other (xii).

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David Troolin

University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

Summer Institute of Linguistics, Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea