A history of the Methodist Overseas Mission in Arnhem Land has yet to be written. The resources for such a task are immensely rich, including archival sources and the writings of the missionaries themselves. While not possessing its own historian, as the Anglican missions do in the  person  of  Reverend  Keith  Cole, ^[1] the Methodist Church produced a number of educated and passionate superintendents who wrote detailed accounts of their times and experiences. Yirrkala alone had at least three, in  Wilbur  Chaseling, ^[2]  Harold  Thornell ^[3]  and  Edgar  Wells ^[4] . This paper is very much a preliminary excursion into the arena; it is not a history or a case study but rather a proposition, supported by evidence from different sources and periods; an argument that comes, perhaps a little too intuitively, out of my own sense of the history of north east Arnhem Land. It is an argument that develops in a complementay manner to other, received, viewpoints that are in themselves undoubtedly oversimplified and open to challenge—the sense that the neighbouring Anglican and Catholic missions were less positive in their view of Aboriginal religion and culture, and were more likely than the Methodist Church to introduce potentially destructive institutions such as the dormitory system and the banning of traditional ceremonial practices (see Mickey Dewar, this issue). Yet in most respects the Anglican and Catholic Churches have been equally strong in their advocacy of Aboriginal rights.

The title of my paper, 'mutual conversion', exaggerates the case but perhaps only a little. There were some intolerant Methodists, who viewed Aboriginal practices simply as heathen forms. There were missionary linguists who refused to translate Indigenous songs or document bark paintings — the sanctity of written Yolŋu had to be preserved for the production of biblical texts. Religious tolerance applies more to some times and some individuals than others, but as encounters between Aborigines and missionaries go, that between the Yolŋu and the Methodist Overseas Mission was a relatively fortunate one. If bigotry can be defined by its resistance to argument, by its failure to see the other point of view, by its antipathy to choice, then the Methodist Church in Arnhem Land provides a poor example. Indeed the case is not so much an illustration of bigotry as of its opposite, which must involve tolerance and respect but may also include doubt and uncertainty.

The paper is very much a preliminary exercise; it is also partial, perhaps in two senses. It is partial in that I have not fully explored the documentary record. I depend too much on published materials, supported by recorded interviews with the protagonists. I need to do much more work in the archives. My account may also be partial in the second sense that I am biased by my relationship with the missionaries I have met and by the historical context of my own research. I first visited north east Arnhem Land in 1973 in the company of the Reverend Edgar Wells and his wife Anne. Edgar had applied to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies for a grant to redocument bark paintings collected by the founding missionary, the Reverend Wilbur Chaseling. The Institute gave him a grant on condition that I, a newly arrived researcher from England, was allowed to accompany him. We spent a week at Yirrkala and a week at Milingimbi. Yirrkala had been established in 1935 and Milingimbi, the first mission in the Yolŋu region, in 1926. Edgar Wells had spent 10 years as superintendent at Milingimbi and was stationed at Yirrkala during 1962 and 1963. Wells had worked closely with the people of Yirrkala to fight the granting of a lease to mine bauxite over their lands and played a significant role in the battle for land rights. I admired him for what he had done and we got on very well. However his return visit was also charged with tension. Some people had found Edgar a difficult man. At the time of the Yirrkala crisis he maintained strict control over his European staff, censoring their correspondence and forbidding them to speak with government officials. He believed that the government and the mission were involved in a conspiracy to grant the mining lease and did not trust anybody. ^[5] He was probably right about the conspiracy, but the way he handled the situation alienated him from some of his own staff. As a consequence he received a cool reception from the mission staff at Yirrkala, in direct contrast to his reception at Milingimbi and to the warmth with which he was received by Yolŋu at both places.

The other source of bias is in Yolŋu memories of the past. I have no direct data on what Yolŋu thought of the missionaries before my fieldwork began in the 1970s. My work in the Roper Valley suggests that people often create a golden age in contrast to the present which over-emphasises the harmonious state of relationships in the past. ^[6] In the Roper Valley the period of the 1930s to the 1950s was portrayed as a Golden Age sandwiched between the killing times of the African and Asian Cold Storage Company and the confrontational relationship that developed in the 1960s, after equal award wages had been granted to Aboriginal workers on cattle stations. In the Arnhem Land case there was different bread in the sandwich. The time prior to the establishment of the mission was also a time of violence, involving both confrontation with outsiders and inter-clan warfare, and the 1970s brought the mining town and almost catastrophic disruption to Yolŋu life. It is quite likely that this biased oral accounts in the missionaries’ favour.