Aboriginal adoption of Christianity increased their feelings of guilt, thereby increasing the needs that Christianity was meant to be fulfilling. Guilt was critical to a relationship in which the missionaries were viewed as God’s messengers to the unknowing and sinful Aboriginal people. This relationship increased Aboriginal acceptance of a moral dichotomy and increased the degree to which Aboriginal people used Christianity as a guide in defining the limits of God’s law and what constituted moral behaviour.

Aboriginal acceptance of Christianity increased the imbalance of their relationship with the missionaries. If Aboriginal people felt indebted to the missionaries for their sacrifices when they thought they had come to spread a message of dubious truth value, as well as a new way of life, such feelings would surely have increased when they believed the missionaries brought vitally important spiritual information that saved Aboriginal people from eternal damnation. For their part, the missionaries represented themselves as messengers. As the intermediaries of the Gospel between Jesus and the Aboriginal people at Mapoon, they positioned themselves between God and the Aboriginal people. Aboriginal Christians felt indebted to the missionaries for what they believed to be the salvation of their souls. Such a debt could never be repaid and the missionaries would always be holier than the Aboriginal people. The Christianity guilt produced in turn produced more guilt.

Letters Aboriginal people wrote Mrs Ward are eloquent testimony to the Aboriginal feelings of debt and inferiority. Nearly all of the writers thanked Mrs Ward for coming to teach them about Jesus. One fragmentary letter, whose author is unrecorded, is demonstrative, ‘Thank God that he has chosen you to be his messenger and to spread his Gospel to the heathen people at Mapoon and to tell that how our loving Saviour shed his blood on Calvary to save us from going to hell.’ The author continues in a vein that is reminiscent of the shepherd analogy, ‘And now dear Auntie for many years you have been preaching the Gospel here and have brought many souls to Christ. I also do thank you dear Auntie for bringing me up when I was a girl & telling me about the love of Christ and bringing my poor wandering soul to Christ’.^[23]

Aboriginal people were aware of the fact that they had previously been unexposed to Christianity and, according to the missionaries, without Christ’s influence. The missionaries’ depiction of their presence as a Christ-like sacrifice reinforced this idea. Christ and God were portrayed by the missionaries as being infinitely more moral and powerful than weak and sinful humans. The missionaries’ explanation for their presence was to lift up especially weak and especially sinful Aboriginal people to a level closer to, but still below, the European standard. One of the constant themes in the letters to Mrs Ward is the hope that they will meet in heaven. Many of the authors, however, worry that they and other Aboriginal people might not be good enough to enter. Ida wrote, ‘We hope if not here on earth to meet you in Heaven, but we know it will be very hard for us as there are many temptations in this world. But through God’s help we will overcome them, it is only if we look to Him and ask Him for strength’. She concludes, ‘I will try my best to be one of those to meet you in Heaven’.^[24] Harry Shadforth echoes this sentiment, ‘We hope if not to meet on earth we hope to meet at Jesus’ feet that this [sic] if I keep true to the Saviour’.^[25] No one expressed any doubt that Mrs Ward would enter heaven when she died.

The Christianity the missionaries brought with them was tied to a particular moral universe and an extensive set of rules for behaviour. In Europe, these ideas evolved in conjunction with one another, and the moral universe was vastly different to the one Aboriginal Australians inhabited before contact. When Aboriginal people at Mapoon made Christianity their own, they also changed the way they viewed morality, even if they did not adopt all or even most of what the missionaries brought with them. Of course their past actions viewed in this new light often failed to measure up. The negotiation of two separate moral universes is exponentially more difficult than the navigation of one. Traditional obligations to relatives for time and resources often conflicted with similar demands by the missionaries. The missionaries were able to increase the weight of their demands because they had some success in portraying themselves as spiritual mediators between Aboriginal people and God.^[26] Ironically, mistakes made according to the Aboriginal people’s pre-contact ethical code may have led to a Christian-style self-condemnation in a manner foreign to that code.

That Aboriginal Christians did alter their ideas about morality and often judged themselves as committing ethical breaches is evidenced in their letters to Mrs Ward. Bella Busch writes,

Perhaps the clearest statement about how radical the shift in morality was comes ‘out of the mouths of babes’, from Annie, ‘I hope to be a good girl and don’t give any trouble and to obey every little thing even when I at school or at play’.^[28] Annie gets to the heart of the matter in equating the good side of the newly introduced good-bad dichotomy with adoption of missionary values.

The dichotomised worldview the missionaries put forward undermined Aboriginal self-confidence and self-justification. Not only were the Aboriginal people taught that all people were sinners, but that Aboriginal people had fallen farther than the rest of humanity. In many of their letters to Mrs Ward, Aboriginal people wrote about being good with God’s help or the missionaries’ prayers. Many accepted their need for moral improvement; some even doubted their ability to do this without the help of God or the missionaries. They became so fixated on God’s power that they rested their own futures on it rather than themselves. In his letter to Mrs Ward, Alexander asks her to keep in touch so they know how she is ‘But I’ll leave it all to Jesus he knows what is best for you and I’.^[29] The adoption of Christianity to assuage feelings of guilt created more guilt, which of course increased the usefulness of Christianity to alleviate these feelings.