Table of Contents
The mission at Mapoon is the site of myriad stories. Many have already been lost to time and more will follow as another generation takes its memories to the grave. The narrative related here is not the only one that might be told. It concerns the missionaries who founded Mapoon and, most importantly for this telling, the Aboriginal people who became Christian while these missionaries were there. There were other Aboriginal people who did not become Christian. Some who stayed did not become Christian; others left permanently. They have other stories to be told another time.
This story is a cyclical one. Someone makes a sacrifice for the Christian God and someone else feels guilty because of it. This guilt leads them, in turn, to suffer in spreading God’s Word and the cycle is renewed. Europeans repeated it for generations before bringing it to Australia. It is at this juncture, at the point of the spread of the cycle from Europeans to Aboriginal people — in which Aboriginal Christians redefined moral transgression for themselves — that this paper is focused. At Mapoon, the tremendous increase in the guilt felt by Aboriginal people as a result of a new emphasis on sin led to a remarkable degree of Christianisation, which in turn reinforced the new prominence of moral transgression.
The story is an important one for several reasons. It demonstrates some of the ways Aboriginal people creatively adapted Christianity to their own unique needs. It provides an exception to the general rule that Aboriginal Australians have tended not to adopt Christianity without accompanying cultural devastation. In doing so, it points the way to at least part of the role spirituality played in pre-contact Australia. It also suggests why Moravian missionaries have been so effective in populations normally resistant to conversion — because rather than focusing on intellectual persuasion, they relied on Christianity affecting the emotions of potential converts. Moravian practice was marked by a cult-like devotion to Jesus, and at some missions this may have been decisive. At Mapoon, however, the emotional lever with the greatest strength was making people feel indebted and guilty.
The arrival and departure of the founding missionaries from Cape York Peninsula in Queensland sets this story in time, from 1891 until 1919. However the beginnings of this story stretch through almost 2000 years of European history to Jesus’ death in a Roman-occupied portion of the Middle East, and are planted firmly in pre-contact Australia.
For hundreds of years, Christianity, and the Judaism it grew from, developed in a context in which people were expected to give their allegiance to a ruler. When someone wronged another citizen, vengeance was to come from the king, not the other citizen. People could plead for his mercy, which he could dispense at will, paralleling the situation in Christianity in which all sins were against God and people must seek his mercy to avoid divine retribution.[1] As a result of the sociopolitical context in which Christianity developed, it is notable for its emphasis on rules. For instance, the book of Leviticus is composed almost entirely of God’s regulations for His people. God’s rules are absolute and incontestable; they separate right from wrong, good from evil, and the sacred from the profane. Out of this conception of immutable boundaries comes the notion of sin: the transgression of God’s law. The Christian story is one of humanity’s sin and redemption. For this reason, transgression occupies a more central place in Christianity than in most other religions.
Aboriginal society before settlement lacked the top-down social and spiritual control that marked the development of Christianity. People negotiated relationships with each other, ancestral beings, and the land in an interactive way. Relationships were always interdependent and reciprocal. Transgressions resulted in imbalance — social, ecological and spiritual — though the separation of these categories is a European one. Boundaries and their transgressions played an entirely different role in traditional Aboriginal spirituality than in Christianity. Deborah Bird Rose argues that in traditional Yarralin spirituality, evil as Europeans know it does not exist.[2] There are immoral acts, actions which disturb the balance of the world, but not evil. There is no one controlling power; everything is interconnected. There is no punishment from ‘on high’ for moral transgressions; instead, the result of these acts on the interconnected world is imbalance.