School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemCollecting cultures for God: German Moravian missionaries and the British colony of Victoria, Australia, 1848-1908( 2007)The thesis focuses on six decades of German Moravian involvement in the British colony of Victoria, Australia, from the Moravian Church’s decision to send missionaries to the colony (then the Port Phillip District of New South Wales) in 1848, to the closure of the last Moravian mission in Victoria in 1908. The missionaries of the Moravian Church, which was known as the Brüdergemeine or Brüder-Unität in German, were heirs to a particular spiritual and cultural heritage, and brought to the colony a long and distinctive experience of evangelical missions. Their outreach was grounded in an emphasis on a lifelong commitment to conversion, and a special concern to bring Protestant Christianity and western ways of living and relating to peoples who appeared specially resistant to other denominational mission practices. Moravians prioritised humble living alongside their converts and sustained abroad as at home a distinct separation of church and state. They began their first mission station in Australia at Lake Boga in the north-west of Victoria with high hopes of sustaining their customary faith practices, and continued to work in distinctive ways in their expanding labours in the south-east of the colony. The Moravians were, however, ‘strangers in a strange land’, and it would prove to be not only their own pragmatic response to indigenous Victorians that shaped the fortunes of their mission. The Germans shaped their mission methods and goals to the demands of the governing authorities – not simply of distant British colonial officials, but, as the British swiftly granted a degree of self-government to the colonists, increasingly to a series of colonists’ regimes with their particular policies on the management of indigenous survivors. The mission objectives of German Moravians coincided in many ways with those of many humanitarian colonizers. They believed like other humanitarians that Aborigines were equal in the eyes of God, and that Christianity offered Aborigines the one true path to assuming their full humanity. Not only did the wider colonial community, however, sustain other narratives about Aborigines that dismayed the Germans, but colonial governments had other concerns – above all, saving money through swift assimilation of Aborigines into white society. Over a sixty-year period the Moravians found themselves transformed from evangelisers of indigenous people to keepers of institutions for a state government with little desire to continue funding indigenous affairs. Aborigines who did not leave the stations to make a life elsewhere found themselves subjected to mission surveillance and compulsion – a far cry from the original goals, and the continuing practices elsewhere in the world, of the respected Moravian Church.