In this paper I aim to outline the history of interactions between Yolŋu and missionaries, in particular highlighting discourse over religion and cultural values. My primary focus is on Yirrkala, the last mission to be established in eastern Arnhem Land. Mission stations had been gradually established along the Arnhem Land coast during the first half of the last century. They spread out from the areas of earliest European settlement towards those areas beyond the frontier. The Methodist Overseas Mission moved from the west to east along the north coast, from Goulburn Island to Milingimbi and Elcho Island, and the Church of England moved north from cattle country in the Roper Valley to Groote Island. A mission station or two in the region of Yirrkala and Caledon Bay were the next ones to be planned. The planning process was given added impetus by what has come to be known as the Caledon Bay killings. ^[7] In the 1930s people from Caledon Bay and Blue Mud Bay killed a number of outsiders on their land, including the crew of a Japanese pearling lugger at Caledon Bay in 1933. A police party was sent out to investigate, and this led to the killing of one of the party, Constable McColl, on Woodah Island in the north of Blue Mud Bay. Originally there was pressure from the police to send in an expeditionary force to take control of the area and ‘teach the blacks a lesson’. ^[8] The Anglican Church led by the Reverend Warren of Groote Eylandt, together with the Methodists strongly resisted the idea and convinced the federal government to follow a very different course of action. ^[9] The anthropologist Donald Thomson was sent to Arnhem Land to uncover the concerns of the Yolŋu people and the Methodist Overseas Mission was given the go-ahead to establish a station at Yirrkala, overruling the claims of the Church Missionary Society.

It was decided to locate the settlement at Yirrkala, because it had an excellent permanent water supply and was in a sheltered location with apparent potential for developing gardens. The foundation missionary was Wilbur Chaseling, who arrived with his wife in 1935. The context of the founding of the mission was significant: Yolŋu had found the previous few years very stressful because of the increase in violent encounters with outsiders, the arrests of clan members and the threat posed by the police. ^[10] At the same time there had been an increase in clan warfare, probably exacerbated by the encroachment of Europeans in the south and west. Yolŋu today recall that Wonggu and other clan leaders made a conscious decision to make peace with outsiders rather than continue hostilities, and the missionaries presented themselves as peacemakers. Chaseling was surprised by the speed with which Yolŋu moved to settle in the mission. When I interviewed Chaseling in 1973 about the early years of Yirrkala at one point he asked rhetorically: ^[11]

Why did they come? For curiosity, medical benefits, and because we were a new type of people — not police, Macassans, pearlers, Japanese — a new type of person without guns, working for their benefit, curing little children suffering from yaws — within a few weeks the scales falling off.

Yolŋu moved to the mission station of their own free will and with no suggestion that they had been conquered or had ceded any rights to outsiders. Equally important was the fact that the government had transferred effective authority to the missionaries, who became a de facto instrument of government, administering the region and introducing a system of local law. Their presence solved a major problem for the government; the area was pacified with no loss of life and administered with little cost to the budget. Yet although they carried out the functions of government the missionaries presented themselves as being independent of it. For most of the subsequent life of the mission the missionaries saw themselves operating as representatives of the Yolŋu people rather than of the central government. Indeed in Yolŋu discourse missionaries were opposed to government men and, interestingly, when the government sent Bill Grey, a patrol officer, to be their first permanent representative to the region in 1963, the missionaries insisted that he camp in a caravan outside the settlement. Grey was sent as a government representative in response to the protests by Yolŋu and missionaries over the bauxite mining proposals. ^[12]

The trajectory of the mission at Yirrkala was set by the earlier practice established at Goulburn Island and in particular at Milingimbi under the auspices of Theodore Webb. Webb showed a deep interest in Aboriginal culture. He had a number of motivations for this: he believed that effective missionisation could only occur with a background of cultural knowledge; he realised that craft production provided a potential source of external income; and he realised the need to inform the Mission’s supporters in the southern States about the Yolŋu way of life, both to gain support and rid them of misconceptions. ^[13] All of these motivations however presupposed a respect for, or at least an understanding of the autonomous nature of, Aboriginal culture. By the time Chaseling was preparing to leave for his vocation, the Methodist Mission was encouraging their senior staff to learn some anthropology under Professor A. P. Elkin at Sydney University.

A  number  of  the  missionaries  have  written  books   on   their   life   among  the   Yolŋu:   Webb, ^[14]  Chaseling, ^[15]  Thornell ^[16] and Anne Wells. ^[17] The books combine lay ethnographic accounts of the Yolŋu way of life and semi-autobiographical accounts of mission life, but they also contain reflective passages that outline the main aims and aspirations of the missionaries. Two themes come across strongly and consistently, a Protestant work ethic and religious tolerance. Mickey Dewar ^[18] has drawn attention to the former theme and I will only briefly allude to it here. There was a strong belief in the dignity of labour, linked to a quasi-evolutionary theory that it was necessary to lead Yolŋu from the state of hunting and gathering through agriculture to a broader participation in the Australian economy. This economic transformation was not seen as being incompatible with respect for Aboriginal culture, and indeed the intention was to build on the Indigenous skills base. These aims were explicit in Chaseling’s and his successor Thornell's policies. In my interview with him Chaseling stated:

I started them painting craft within a week or so of arriving. I established the principle that I would give them nothing free - nothing except medicine. If they were to get things they had to work. I sent things only to museums and charged them the price I paid plus freight - I sent tons of stuff down. I realised that we had to start some kind of industry and craft seemed the most obvious one, even if I had to burn some of the things produced at first I had to do it. ^[19]

Tolerance and understanding of Aboriginal culture combined with an agenda of economic development were developed as policies at the Yirrkala Synod of 1938. According to Thornell 'It was realised that sooner or later contact with our culture and economic  way  of  life  was  inevitable’. ^[20] The policy was to prepare them without harming their culture: 'It was important to respect Aboriginal culture instead of destroying it, important to better understand the culture, and to learn and use the Aboriginal language. One other vital point was that there were to be no hand outs. Nothing would be given unless it was earned.' ^[21]

Chaseling’s and Thornell’s attitudes to Yolŋu religious practice were generally positive. In his book Yulengor published in 1957 with a preface by A. P. Elkin, Chaseling wrote:

(It) seemed only reasonable at Yirrkala to preserve Yulengor [Yolngu] culture. To encourage the revival of old ceremonies, and to stimulate in the people an appreciation of their own social organization which often suffered from alien contact. It is unjust for any alien to come amongst primitive people for the purpose of upsetting their mode of life and converting them to thinking as he does.

In my interview with Chaseling he said:

I found close parallels between the Christian religion and Yolngu religion. In fact when I first arrived I found that there was more for me to learn. I was able to gain insights into the significance of religion in its natural context and on the basis of their own beliefs I was able to begin to introduce the Christian gospel. To lead them one step at a time to the acceptance of the teachings of our Lord. I found it difficult at first - but they went away, talked among themselves and applied it. ^[22]

Chaseling’s words are echoed in those of another missionary, the Fijian Fuata Taito, based at Goulburn Island in the 1940s: ‘Some of these customs could be used as a step towards Christianity, instead of our telling them it is foolish to  follow  customs’. ^[23] In much of the writings of Methodist missionaries of the time there is an often unspoken tension between using Indigenous religion as part of the process of conversion and recognising value in Aboriginal religious practice.