It is likely that from the very beginning Yolŋu and missionaries had moments of doubt, scepticism, and resistance to the dialogue that was developing. Missionaries and Yolŋu clearly differed among themselves and some missionaries were downright hostile to Yolŋu religious practice. Chaseling expressed his own uncertainty: he is unsure about this equivalence, in effect, between Wangarr and God but concludes that ‘Wangarr is scarcely less vague in the nomads mind than the “Eternal” of the early pages of the bible.’ But he lets it go since ‘It enables Jesus to be accepted without  doing  damage  to  Yolŋu  culture’. ^[37]

There were, as Wells hints, missionaries who took a very different view from his own and who saw ‘heathen’ customs in Aboriginal religious practice. Some of the missionaries who followed Wells at Milingimbi were less tolerant of Aboriginal religious practice than he was.

One of the main contexts of potential conflict is in mortuary rituals, where both Yolŋu religious practice and Christianity come together in the disposal of the dead. Yolŋu mortuary rituals extended over a lengthy period and involved both a secondary stage, when the bones of the deceased were collected and carried around in a bark coffin for several months or even years, and a tertiary stage when the bones were placed in a hollow log coffin. Yolŋu mortuary practices offended the sensibilities of some missionaries, contradicted their pollution beliefs and, because of their extended nature, threatened to interrupt the economic life of the settlement. Over time Yolŋu mortuary rituals have evolved to incorporate both religions, with different spaces or stages in the proceedings being allocated to each. Christian prayer and the viewing of the body are interspersed with Yolŋu ritual performance until the climax of the ceremony. The body is brought to the ceremonial ground and placed in the grave through Yolŋu performance, before being buried in a Christian ritual. Sometimes the divisions are less clear cut and some elements combine Christianity and Yolŋu practice in the same event. Not surprisingly it is in these events, in which the two beliefs systems directly confront each other, that conflict sometimes occurs. Certainly they generate mixed emotions.

When I visited Milingimbi with Edgar Wells, the community leader Djawa led us away one evening to talk to an old man, Dawarangalili. A central element of Yolŋu mortuary rituals was the painting of clan designs on the dead person’s chest. Wells and the missionaries who had preceded him were perfectly happy to allow this practice. However one of the ministers who followed him had insisted that if people were to have a Christian burial then they could not be buried with a painted chest. Dawarangalili asked Wells to intervene and indeed poignantly stated that he had delayed dying because of his fear of being buried without the painting on his chest.

What Wells himself referred to as fundamentalism increased after the 1970s. At Yirrkala in 1975 the local minister almost literally threw the Church Panels into the street, wanting to rid the church of heathen idols.

The syncretic discourse between Yolŋu and Methodists has involved changes in Yolŋu religious practice that are at least as great as the concessions made by the missionaries. In north east Arnhem Land there has been a gradual process of opening out of Indigenous religious practice, a reduction in the role of secrecy, without any sense that the icons of the religion—the paintings, songs, dances and sacred objects—have lost their power. The panels placed on either side of the altar in 1962 contained paintings that a few years previously had been used largely in restricted contexts, and appeared in public contexts in slightly modified form. Yolŋu and missionaries alike express doubts and anxiety in some of the same contexts—where Christian and Yolŋu religious practices come into potential conflict. There is anxiety over the opening out of Yolŋu religious practice, and there are questions of compatibility in shared contexts. The adjustments that have been made to the European colonial presence at times seem to have come at too great a cost. A recent case can be used to exemplify the kinds of issues that arise in the contemporary context, though it must be stressed that Yolŋu attitudes to Christianity are very diverse, reflecting a number of different religious orientations within eastern Arnhem Land that are linked to different movements in the wider Church. ^[38]

Recently a Yolŋu person developed a serious eye infection and put it down to exposure to sacred religious objects at a burial ceremony. The person said that the funeral combined Christian and Yolŋu ritual and that they felt uncomfortable about the Yolŋu ritual inside the church. There was particular concern that a wapitja, a ceremonial digging stick, was taken into the church—it made the person feel sick inside. The person felt that Yolŋu ritual was for outside and before the final internment. The person concerned argued that God had given the Yolŋu ancestors a caretaker role but that they were under the more general spiritual authority of God. The person took a middle ground between those who see Yolŋu religion as incompatible with Christianity and those who see it as autonomous. Yolŋu religion is seen in this case as local representation of God’s power. It was not that the digging stick was a restricted sacred object. It was more a matter of combining Yolŋu religious practice and Christianity in the same context, under the same roof. The person would have been quite happy if the events had followed one another sequentially separated in time and space: the digging stick in the camp, the prayers in the church. The fact that those boundaries appeared to have been crossed was believed to have made the person spiritually vulnerable, causing the illness.