School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications

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Type: Book Chapter × Subject: Aborigines ×

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    'To exercise a beneficial influence over a man': marriage, gender and the native institutions in early colonial Australia
    CRUICKSHANK, JOANNA (eScholarship Research Centre in collaboration with the School of Historical Studies and with the assistance of Melbourne University Bookshop, 2008)
    This chapter examines understandings of marriage among missionaries and humanitarians connected with two early colonial ‘Native Institutions’. A comparison of the Parramatta Native Institution in New South Wales and the Albany Native Institution in Western Australia demonstrates that concerns about marriage were central in discussions about the formation and maintenance of these Institutions. Both of these Institutions were established and supported by British evangelicals, who had brought with them to Australia powerful assumptions about gender roles, particularly in marriage. These assumptions influenced their decisions regarding the children who resided in the Native Institutions. Within specific colonial contexts, however, the assumptions of humanitarians and missionaries did not remain static, and debates over the futures of the Aboriginal children they sought to educate reveal complex and shifting hierarchies of race, gender and class.
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    'A longing desire in my heart': faith, family and the colonial frontier in the life of Euphemia Kramer 1887-1971
    Barry, Amanda (eScholarship Research Centre in collaboration with the School of Historical Studies and with the assistance of Melbourne University Bookshop, 2008)
    This chapter considers how writing the life stories of women missionaries can inform larger narratives about Indigenous-settler relations, gender and colonialism, through an examination of Euphemia Kramer, a Pentecostal convert from Victoria who travelled across central Australia with her husband in the 1920s, spreading God’s word. The Kramers’ travelling mission (supported by Adelaide humanitarian group the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association) provided sermons and bibles to isolated Aboriginal groups in the interior, as well as medical and other essential supplies. An effective study of Euphemia’s life must consider her various roles as a ‘missionary wife’, as a missionary in her own right, as a white woman on the colonial frontier, and as a mother. Her intense commitment to the Pentecostal faith, like her husband’s, informed much of her behaviour and actions; indeed, her written recollections are notable for Indigenous people’s absence. Despite working for and with Indigenous people for much of her life, faith and family commanded a much greater focus in Euphemia’s own view. This apparent contradiction runs counter to historical narratives of colonialism which seek to place missionary work at the centre of the European oppression of Indigenous peoples, suggesting instead an approach that considers the missionaries’ many motives.