Did the Missions destroy culture?

[PiousTemplar]

Nonsense.

Aboriginal culture simply collapsed upon the arrival of the white settlers. Their beleif systems and world view were totally nullified when white Europeans came riding along on strange animals, seemingly having food supplies on tap and with the power to harness energy in ways the Aborigines found unfathomable. They also had absolutely no immunity to the diseases white settlers bought with them, like chicken pox, measles, small pox and whatever else. Certain tribes showed signs of having had small pox well before white explorers even got to them, suggesting the disease had travelled overland well before the arrival of white men.

The Christianisation of some of the Aborigines came after the intial culture shock had led many of them to abandon their traditional way of life. The large groups of Aborigines permanently camped around the settlements and towns caused great consternation amongst government oficials and led to the formation of Aboriginal Protectorate Boards. Still the decline continued.
As the article points out -
However, the British Government and colonial humanitarians were concerned about the fate of Aboriginal people as settlement progressed. After the failure of an early Protectorate system, the Victorian Colonial Government decided to allocate reserves of land variously known as stations, missions or reserves on which Aboriginal people could live. While the Government ran some Aboriginal stations, others were in the control of missionaries such as those of the Anglican or Moravian Churches. Regardless of their secular or religious management, life on Aboriginal stations revolved around efforts to control and ‘civilise’ Aboriginal people.

The Missions were set up to save the Aboriginals from extinction. The only way it could be seen to save them was to ‘modernise’ them and the Christian Missionaries Christianised their charges. However, Aboriginal culture was all but destroyed before the missions were even set up. For you to suggest otherwise is rediculously wrong and to link what happened in the 18th century with a U.N, charter is equally as rediculous. The U.N. didn’t even exist back then. Next thing you’ll be telling us the invasion of Britain by the Romans was against the U.N. Charter.

Sorry, I’m just simply saying what I learnt in History Class. Thanks for the info!

 

[Big_Dummy]

Its true that some missionaries imposed some of their culture on others.

examples,

a culture that are head hunters and eat people, changed to eating big macs.

a culture that is immodest clothing wise by western stands, changed to put on clothes.

So, where missionaries changed culture, one must look at if those changes were posative or destructive thus one would have to handle each change objectively to see if it was good, nutural or destructive.

 

[John21652]

Sorry, I’m just simply saying what I learnt in History Class. Thanks for the info!

I’m sorry if my response seemed a bit harsh.

The historically documented decline of the Australian Aborigines was taken over by the politically correct, left wing idealogues back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. If you research the subject you need to be very careful about the resources you use and need to go back to original sources wherever possible. A lot of the literature from the 1980s onwards is very coloured.

The notion of the so called “noble savage” could not be further from the truth. Aboriginal tribes were very, very territorial and were at constant war with one another over territorial transgressions. An escaped convict by the name of William Buckley lived with them for 32 years and he described them as being constantly at war. That link is to an account of his time with the Aborigianes just west of Melbourne. As an example of how these inter tribal enmities caused great trouble, in the 1860s in Victoria, a unit of Native Police were formed. That unit was sent into a region of Victoria called ‘Gippsland’, in the south east of the state, to round up the last of the Gippsland tribe, the Kurnai. The Native Police unit was made up of Aborigines from tribes around the area where Melbourne is now and those tribes had always been enemies of the Gippsland tribe. So, given all this ‘power’, what did the Native Police unit do in Gippsland? They slaughtered as many of the Kurnai’s as they could get their hands on!

To the Aborigines, the arrival of white men absolutley destroyed their world view. Their spirituality, their total reliance and affinity with the land they roamed over, was crushed in their heads by the way white people appeared, lived, used animals, fed themselves and obtained food. Imagine seeing a man kill a kangaroo from 100 yards with a stick that made a loud noise! The first Aborigines who saw men on horseback fled in terror because they thought their spirit ancestors had suddenly come amongst them riding some strange creatures. When an Aborigine dies, his skin lightens considerably and so the effect of a white skinned man on a strange animal was pretty scary. If there is a true example of the term ‘culture shock’, the arrival of white men caused it.

As I mentioned earlier, explorers who ventured into the interior found eveidence of whole tribes that had been hit by diseases like smallpox, thousands of miles from any white settlements. It was apparent that the diseases had travelled inland from the coastal tribes.

Once the gold rushes of the 1850s drew in hundreds of thousands of new settlers, all the problems exacerbated. By the 1860s authroities were very concerned about the squalid living conditions of the Aboriginals who came to camp around the edges of melbourne, which was pretty much a tent city then anyway. The Aborigines were giving up their nomadic lifestyles to camp near what they saw was a ready supply of easy food. As white settlement spread out, their supplies were also becoming harder to find. However the real damage was donebefore white settlement had gone very far. By the late 1800s authorities were trying to slvage the remnants of the tribes and so missionaries were established. Naturally, in the main, the job fell to the Christians who took the Aborigines in and tried to educate them. Mistakes were made, because no-one had a proper understanding of the Aboriginal’s culture. Some were sent to Missions away from their lands and breaking that bond was deadly in terms of their cultural and spiritual relationship to their particular territory. However, the attempts at saving the Aborigines from extinction were very genuine.

However, to cut a long story short, in the 1980s and afterwards, the villification of white settllement and the efforts of the white Christian Missionaries began. If you mange to get into state and university libraries and read the original materials, a vastly different picture emerges.