rmansburg Lutheran Mission, where Strehlow's dramas were played out, was one of the saddest and most contradictory of Christian missions. It certainly acted as a kind of refuge for Aboriginal people trying to survive the widespread physical attacks on them, but the price they paid was a constant assault on their cultural traditions by the narrow and bigotted Lutheran missionaries, who regarded Aboriginal traditional religion as Satanic.
The important book by the infuriating postmodernist, Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land (Faber, 1996), is very illuminating on this. Ploughing through Carter's maddeningly obtuse text is, in this instance, well worth the effort. The chapter "A Reverent Miming "is an extraordinary mine of information about what happened at the Hermansburg Mission. p> Carter describes, in a pathetic and moving way, the constant pressure on the Aboriginal elders and religious leaders by the Christian religious maniac, Pastor Albrecht, to surrender to him the traditional Aboriginal religious artifacts, the tjurungas. He also describes the official Lutheran ceremony of "desacralisation" of the Manangananga Cave in which these objects had been preserved for many hundreds of years. Both Strehlows accumulated a collection of thousands of these looted Aboriginal sacred objects, and many of the Aboriginal people in central Australia are still fighting a vigorous battle with the Strehlow estate to get them back for the Aboriginal people before they are dispersed via Christies or Sothebys to rich collectors around the world.
The account of these events in Carter's book is supplemented by the account in One Blood (Albatross Books, 1990) by the Anglican, John Harris, who provides a perceptive overview of the experience of Christian missions in Australia.
Australia played a bloodthirsty role in the South Pacific. Nevertheless, 150,000 people from the South Pacific now live in Australia
From the time of white settlement, Sydney became the main port for the British looting and conquest of the South Pacific. British ships out of Sydney supplied guns to Maori chiefs in New Zealand and to many tribal chiefs throughout the Pacific, using their trade in guns to increase British political influence, and to thereby facilitate their looting of the area.
This activity was almost universally bloodthirsty. The notorious activities of Samuel Marsden, the Anglican minister, flogging magistrate and missionary gun-runner, and the later "blackbirding" of many thousands of Melanesians as semi-slave labourers to Queensland, are only the best-known examples of a whole system of conquest and exploitation.
A typical event was the incident in 1837 when, without warning, the men of Sapwauahfik Atoll (Then called Ngatik) in Micronesia were killed by the crew of a trade ship, out of Sydney, who wished to steal a cache of valuable tortoiseshell possessed by the islanders. This is recounted in the fascinating book, The Ngatik Massacre (Smithsonian Institute, 1993) by Lin Poyer
The story of this community is, in its own way, just as fascinating a story as that of the Pitcairn Islanders. After the massacre, several of the European murderers settled on the island and were joined by a collection of other Pacific beachcombers, who cohabited with the female survivors of the massacre, giving rise to a vigorous new community with its own complex culture, which now numbers some hundreds, descended, in a way, from the murderers and the surviving widows of the murdered men. Needless to say, a collective memory of the massacre is an important part of the cultural history of the island.
Quite a lot of South Pacific history is like this, containing terrible memories of past atrocities mixed with the extraordinary resilience of the surviving indigenous people, recreating a life and culture for themselves from whatever is left to and available to them.
In the light of this bloodthirsty Australian participation in Pacific history, an interesting feature of the racial history of Australia is the presence, today, of vigorous communities of indigenous people from all over the Pacific. For a start, people from the Torres Strait Islands, who are mainly Melanesian with some Polynesian influences, have scattered all over northern Australia, from Darwin to Brisbane, and there are even communities in Sydney and Melbourne.
There are maybe 30,000 of these people. The descendents of the Melanesians (Kanaks) who managed to avoid deportation from Queensland between 1900 and 1910 have developed into a vigorous, self-confident community, nearly 20,000, mainly in Queensland centred on Mackay.
More recently, large communities of people from Polynesia have settled in Australia: Samoans, Tongans, Cook Islanders and others, and some Melanesians from Fiji and Papua New Guinea. There are now perhaps 40,000 people of this background from the Pacific in A...
