Historical Information Sheet No 12: ASSI and Christian Missions in the 19th Century

Today, many Pacific Islanders are fervent practicing Christians.  They first encountered Christianity four hundred years ago through forced baptism imposed by Catholic Spanish explorers like Luigi Baéz de Torres who kidnapped young southern New Guineans and took them away with him on his ships in 1606, never to return.[i]  However, the real spread of the faith dates back to the Spanish Catholics in the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam beginning in 1668, with Protestant Christianity following from 1796 when the Interdenominational British Missionary Society, later known as the London Missionary Society (LMS) entered Tahiti.

The initial method of proselytising was to establish European missionaries in the islands.  Mission work was always slow and it often took ten years before any real progress was made.  Initial missionary work was in Micronesia and Polynesia, with more populous Melanesia—the islands closest to Australia— not approached until the second half of the nineteenth century.  Several methods of conversion were used, including resident European missionaries who eventually trained Pacific Island pastors and priests to work in and away from their home areas. The first missions to try using indigenous Pacific Island missionaries were the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Methodists.  The first waves were Tahitians who went to Hawai’i, Cook Islands, Tonga, Samoa and Fiji.  And in turn, these new converts became missionary pastors in their own islands and in Melanesia, as Christian missions were planted throughout the islands.  All of these methods were slow and expensive, as they relied on single missionaries or families moving to new areas, learning new languages and over many years gaining the trust of the local people.[ii]

The Church of England was the first to try a different method.  The concept used by their Melanesian Mission was to persuade adolescent boys (and a few girls) to leave their islands to be trained at mission schools, first in New Zealand and later on Norfolk Island, where teaching combined evangelism, education and industrial skills, with the aim of returning young men to their villages to establish their own schools.  George Selwyn, appointed as Bishop of New Zealand in 1841, with a brief that extended into the Pacific Islands, wanted to create what he called a black net (the Islander teachers) supported by white corks (White mission workers).  After two years, the students were returned to their homes for six months, and on the return trip were allowed to bring the woman to whom they were betrothed and to undergo baptism.  If all went well, students remained for around eight years before returning home to establish the church in their own district, assisted by visiting or resident European clergy.  During 1849, the first year of the Melanesian Mission, the first five, Loyalty Islands youths, were brought to St. John’s College, Auckland.  The school moved in 1859 to St. Andrew’s College at Kohimarama, Auckland, then to St. Barnabas College on Norfolk Island in 1867, where it remained until 1920.  It was an adaption of this ‘away from home’ training that forms the basis of the missions discussed in this paper: the mission on Queensland’s nineteenth century sugar plantations.

Another part of the European colonising process was also underway at around the same time that the first missions were established in Melanesia—the labour trade which took Islanders from eighty islands in what are now New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati and Tuvalu.  In Queensland, the labour trade and Christian missionary work combined.  Pacific Islander labour migrants first entered New South Wales in the 1840s and Queensland in 1863, but there was no attempt to conduct organised missions until the 1880s, although there were Christians amongst the early labourers, particularly those from the Loyalty Islands and the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), where missions already existed.  

When missions developed, the motivations of the mainstream churches which participated were all quite different.  For most, the important thing was Christian outreach in the colony, without thought of the eventual consequences in the Pacific.  Only the Anglicans immediately saw the connection between the cost-effective process of bringing God to indentured labourers and their missionary network in the islands.  The Queensland labour trade also created two major indigenous churches that eventually left Queensland and flourished in the islands, the South Seas Evangelical Church and the Churches of Christ.  Once the Queensland missions began, the most active were run by the Church of England and the Queensland Kanaka Mission, with lesser operations mounted by the Presbyterians, Churches of Christ, Lutherans, the Salvation Army and the Brisbane City Mission.  Despite its Pacific presence, the Catholic Church never competed for Melanesian souls in Queensland.

Although there is a substantial literature on the history of Christianity in Melanesia,[iii] almost no research has been done on the foundation missions that dealt with Melanesians on the plantations and farms of Queensland and Fiji.  Using the Islander labourers on Queensland’s sugar plantations and farms as the base for Christian Pacific networks was very successful.  Although the missionary effort was slow to begin, estimates from the early 1890s suggest that around seventy-five per cent of the Islanders in Queensland had some degree of contact with Christian missions.  In the early 1900s the level of contact was even higher.[iv]  These male (and some female) labourers were transported to Queensland at their employers’ expense, which provided a cheap way of accessing potential Christian converts.  They were separated from their extended kin, usually for the first time, in a strict work environment and bewildered by the experience, which left them open to ministrations and friendship from the missionaries.  The missions provided an educational venue at night and on weekends that reduced the chance of the Islanders getting involved in less wholesome activities.  Beginning in the 1880s, Queensland-based missions began to teach literacy through the bible, provided a path to Christian conversion and encouraged abstinence from alcohol.  This paper will concentrate of the Church of England missions, and discuss the implications of all Queensland missionary endeavours in the spread of Christianity in Melanesia.

Estimate of Major Pacific Islander Populations in Queensland, 1891 and 1901

Source: Based on Census of Queensland, 1891, p. 459, Queensland Votes & Proceedings (QVP), 1892, Vol III, p. 1391; 1901, p. 16, QVP1901, Vol. 11, p. 956, and accumulated personal knowledge. It is difficult to estimate from the Census Districts, which changed between the two census years.)[v]

Church of England Missions: Queensland Dioceses and Melanesian Mission

Selwyn Mission (Mackay) 1882: 

• Te Kowai 

• Palms

• Marion 

• Nindaroo 

• Meadowlands 

• Mandurana

• The Leap 

• Pioneer 

North Rockhampton & Yeppoon 1889-94 

Bundaberg & Isis 1892 

Brisbane 1892 

Herbert River (Ingham & Halifax) 1895-98 

Johnston River (Innisfail or Geraldton) 1890s 

Cudgen 1890s  

Although there was interest in Queensland in the work of the Melanesian Mission right from the inception of the colony, various circumstances meant that there was no close connection until the 1890s.  For most of the period under discussion there were three Church of England (Anglican) dioceses in Queensland, each of which controlled its own mission activities, until 1895 when the Melanesian Mission began to work co-operatively with all three to develop missions along the same line as their school on Norfolk Island.  Queensland’s Anglican dioceses evolved in a quite convoluted way as the colony grew.  The Brisbane area was included in the Newcastle Diocese after 1847, while more northerly areas of what became Queensland in 1859 were still controlled by the Sydney diocese.  Once the new colony was formed, Brisbane became a separate diocese reaching north to the 21st parallel (which included the area that from 1860 became Port Mackay, the major northern sugar-growing district).[vi]

Brisbane was an early major Pacific port, and the Melanesian Mission always had some contactswith the Brisbane diocese.  The Melanesian Mission was always interested in establishing links with the Queensland plantations as an extension of the net that had been cast first from New Zealand and then Norfolk Island.  Queensland, however, had its own Anglican ecclesiastical organisation quite separate from the sphere of the Diocese of Melanesia, more commonly known as the Melanesian Mission.  Several heads of the Melanesian Mission visited Queensland.  Bishop John Coleridge Patteson preached in Brisbane as early as 1864 and returned the next year to consider Curtis Island (off the Queensland coast, near Gladstone) as a replacement Mission headquarters for St. Andrew’s at Kohimarama, Auckland.[vii]  In 1872, Rev. Robert Codrington from the mission’s Norfolk Island school (and temporary head of the mission after Bishop Patteson’s death) felt discouraged by the lack of support from Bishop Edward Tufnell in Brisbane. While in Queensland, Rev. Codrington visited Islanders in Maryborough, and after the visit Tufnell made plans to interest the priest at Mackay in beginning a mission to the Islanders, but the challenge was not taken up for six years, by which time Mackay was in a different diocese.  Tuffnell’s successor Bishop Mathew Hale, said that he felt frustrated by the colonists’ prejudice against any attempts to spread Christianity to non-Europeans, whether Aborigines, Asians or Pacific Islanders.[viii]  The next Melanesian Mission link came when Bishop Cecil Wilson toured coastal Queensland in 1895, trying to foster links between the Queensland dioceses and his Diocese of Melanesia.  While Wilson was in the colony several Islanders sought his permission to join the Norfolk Island school.[ix]

In 1878, a North Queensland Diocese was formed, cut loose from Sydney with a new boundary between the Brisbane and North Queensland dioceses at the 22nd parallel (roughly at Broadsound), which placed Mackay into the northern diocese.  The next change came in 1892 when Rockhampton Diocese was excised from the north of the Brisbane diocese, creating a boundary just north of Bundaberg.  In the same year the Australian Board of Missions took responsibility for British New Guinea.  The last of the colonial changes came in 1900 when Carpentaria Diocese was formed, cutting through Queensland’s east coast just above Cairns (placing Mossman’s sugar fields in the new diocese) and including Cape York and Torres Strait, the Gulf of Carpentaria and all of the Northern Territory.  These divisions are important because the Church of England missions to the Islanders were usually diocesan initiatives.

The first Islanders to work at Mackay arrived in 1867, although the earliest and always the most substantial Anglican mission to the Islanders was not begun at Mackay until 1882.  This may have been an initiative from the newly installed Bishop George H. Stanton in Townsville, or it may have been an independent move by Rev. Albert Maclaren, Minister at Mackay from 1878 until 1891 (the same years that Stanton was bishop), after which he left to found the Anglican mission in east New Guinea.[x]  When he arrived in the sugar town, Maclaren faced opposition from some of his parishioners, which was probably typical of attitudes found in other cane-growing districts.

The white people are against me doing anything in the way of teaching them [the Islanders], their argument being that they pay me not to look after the souls of black but of white people.[xi]

Given the racist nature of Queensland colonial society, this attitude changed very little over decades.  In late 1906, one of the earliest Anglican missionaries on Malaita Island, Arthur Hopkins, found much the same attitude when he visited Queensland:

In some places it was lamentable to see how Church people themselves hindered the work.  They turn a cold shoulder on boys coming to the Holy Communion, and grudge the use of Sunday Schools for classes.  The battle that S. Paul had to fight against race-prejudice is not even fully won.[xii]

However, Maclaren was able to interest two prominent parishioners in beginning mission schools.  Mary Robinson, the wife of a plantation manager, began the Selwyn Mission at Te Kowai plantation in 1882, followed soon after by a smaller venture by Elizabeth Watt Martin, the wife of a pastoralist at Mandurama on the other side of the Pioneer River.  Initially, Robinson conducted the classes in her home, then shifted to land donated at Meadowlands closer to Mackay, before moving the base to Marion further down the Pioneer Valley when her husband became mill manager there in the early 1890s.  One 1896 report describes the unusual degree of access that she allowed the Islanders to her home:

Before school begins they wander into her private house, of which they have the run, and sit about in her parlour as if it was their own.  She has always allowed this, and says they have never abused the privilege on any occasion.  Few ladies would have the power and influence necessary for the allowing of such liberties.  She is not only pastor and instructor, but doctor and sick nurse to the boys, and her house is their hospital.  While there, we saw one of her patients, a sick boy about 18, lying in a little room adjoining her house.[xiii]

When Rev. A. Brittain visited Marion on behalf of the Melanesian Mission in 1894, he described the Selwyn Mission as “worked on a system of her [Mary Robinson] own, and gradually evolved” and “undoubtedly the best school in Queensland”.[xiv]  Mrs Robinson gave instruction in Pijin English, which she found a better medium than English, and worked “single-handed, and without any intermission as a rule even for an evening from year to year, and without any fund from which to supply the ordinary school materials.” [xv] She taught reading, writing and arithmetic and prepared men for baptism and confirmation.  Men walked nine or ten kilometres every evening to school, in some cases foregoing their evening meal, and even in the cold of July seventy to eighty attended.[xvi]

After her husband died in the mid-1890s, the Selwyn Mission shifted back to Meadowlands, where she continued to operate under reduced circumstances. In 1903 Robinson finally left the district to retire to England, replaced by Charles Sage, who had previously worked in the New Guinea Anglican Mission.  Robinson’s Melanesian assistants were able to carry on the mission’s work after she left, based at Meadowlands and Te Kowai, and then at St. Mary’s church at Pioneer on the north side of the river on land donated by the Coakley family, supervised by Sage. 

When labour trade captain William Wawn visited Selwyn Mission in the early 1890s, he found over eighty pupils and described a “fine commodious school-house…with excellent fittings, prettily decorated walls, and a harmonium.” Another visitor, in 1896, described Mary Robinson hard at work, teaching children in the mornings, and men and women after they finished work at night.  In her quest for converts, Robinson also visited the hospitals on plantations, the government hospital at Mackay, the jail, and sick Islanders on farms.  Between 9.30 and 11.30 am she held a school for Islander children, then arranged materials for the adult evening school before visiting the sick, some of whom she took into her home to nurse. On Saturday and Sunday the school was a focal point for Islanders, who came from as far away as thirty kilometres to attend.  Sunday service began at 10.00 am, followed by a class for Confirmation candidates, and lunch for those from far away.  Baptism candidates were taught at 2.00 pm followed by Sunday School at 3.00 pm.  Sunday evenings were reserved “for going after the wild Malayta [Malaita Islanders], and recruiting them for School.”[xvii]

The Selwyn Mission also established branches on plantations and farms throughout the valley: Te Kowai, Palms, Marion, Nindaroo, Meadowlands, Pioneer, Mandurama and The Leap.[xviii]  Malaitans were the dominant recruits late in the labour trade and hence became the main focus in the final years of all missions.  Both the Selwyn Mission at Mackay and Florence Young’s Queensland Kanaka Mission managed to interest large number of Malaitans, but there was always antagonism from traditional believers.  For instance, three Malaitans baptised Rev. W.A. Turner at Mackay in September 1896 faced ostracism from other Malaitans; one found himself locked out of the house he shared.  Many others were under instruction and Mary Robinson had high hopes in training teachers to go back in the islands.[xix]  Her star Malaitan pupil was Jack Taloifuila from Su`ufou Island in Lau Lagoon, who became the first indigenous Anglican priest on Malaita.[xx]

In 1905, the main Selwyn Mission school was furnished with desks, and every night between 7.30 and 9.30 pm Islander men could be seen bent over their ‘copy books”, reading aloud, or learning Scripture.”

 The children of the District have their teaching in the mornings.  Each Sunday there is a grand assembly from all parts of the District: some arrive on horseback, some on bicycles, some driving the wife and children in a sulky.  Long before the time of the service the brown faces may be seen everywhere, and the service itself is hearty and reverent.  One a month those who are communicants tramp into Mackay for the 8 a.m. Celebration, a few of them going in the night before: there are about 60 on the communicants’ roll.  Besides the main school there are small branch schools at plantations too far out for the “boys” to reach the Selwyn Mission, and these are conducted by Islanders under Mr. Sage’s supervision.[xxi]

 Details of the Islander baptismal records remain.  The first Selwyn Mission baptisms in 1885 included one Solomon Islander, and Joseph Baramula, on the early teachers at Fiu, malaita from 1905, was another of Robinson’s early students.  Remaining records do not show enough details of island origins to be certain about the extent of baptisms from individual islands, however, just as occurred with the QKM, we can presume that Malaitans dominated the 1900s.[xxii]  My 1970s computer sorting on Mackay records, which includes adults and children, recorded 512 Malaitan baptisms at Mackay between 1890 and 1906, among a total 572 baptisms.[xxiii]

The Melanesian labourers lived mainly in the North Queensland and Brisbane dioceses.  Some of the early labourers also worked in the pastoral and maritime industries, but overwhelmingly they worked in the coastal cane fields.  The other cane growing areas in the North Queensland Diocese were on the Burdekin River at the twin towns of Ayr and Homehill, at Ingham and Innisfail (Geraldton), around Cairns, and at Proserpine and Mossman.  Rev. Francis Drinkall Pritt ministered to the Islanders, based in the North Rockhampton parish from 1889 until 1894.  He then transferred to the Herbert River district at Ingham from 1895 to 1898, termed “missionary to alien races”, operating what predominantly was an Islander mission.[xxiv]  Pritt’s replacement, Rev. Drake, showed little interest and Ingham district Islanders were left to organise their own services.  They built a grass church at Cordelia Mount, where an Islander taught every Sunday, and at nearby Halifax there was a church on Anderson’s farm where Islanders held regular services.  At Innisfail on the Johnson River there was a grass church run by Motlav Islanders and visited every Sunday by Rev. Tomkins.  There were about 600 Islanders in the Cairns district, but no Anglican presence, although the Presbyterians had a teacher and a church for Islanders at Mulgrave.[xxv]

Mossman mill, a farmers’ cooperative begin in the mid-1890s, was the most northerly mission in the new Carpentaria Diocese.  A large group of ‘Old Chum’ Anglican Islanders transferred from Bundaberg to Mossman in the mis-1890s, spreading the denomination further north, and there were also many Islanders living in the far north of the diocese in Torres Strait, remnants of 1860s and 1870s labour migration.  Torres Strait came under the LMS from the 1870s until 1914, when the area became an Anglican preserve.  Most of the immigrant Islanders in the Strait never returned to their islands of origin.  There were also Islander individuals and families living in pastoral districts, such as the Kulijeris at Charters Towers, but they were isolated and blended into Aboriginal communities.[xxvi]

The Brisbane Diocese stretched north to Bundaberg, and included three major ports through which Islanders entered and left Queensland: Brisbane, Maryborough and Bundaberg. There were substantial numbers of Islanders around Brisbane, most long term residents of the colony.  Brisbane and neighbouring Logan district had a Melanesian population onwards from the 1860s.  ‘Time-expired Islanders (having served their first three-year contract) began to drift south from Bundaberg and Maryborough, particularly during the economic recession in the early 1890s, gravitating to Brisbane and Tweed Heads over the border in New South Wales.  In 1892, Canon Stone-Wigg began classes for them at St John’s pro-cathedral and a house (‘Roslyn’) in South Brisbane was acquired as a base for Anglican Islanders in the city.  About the same time, Archdeacon Rovers was given the oversight of all missionary activities in the Brisbane Diocese, and early in 1897, Mr. J.D. Anderson, who was reading for holy orders and was attached to the Cathedral parish, took over leadership of work with local Islanders.[xxvii]  About twenty attended the pro-cathedral on Sundays and had a club-room in a street close by where they met every night, with formal classes on Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday, run by Mrs Birkbeck, Mr Gardiner, Archdeacon David and Rev. C.A. Hutchinson.[xxviii]

The Melanesian Mission sent Rev. A. Brittain to Queensland in August 1894 to reconnoitre the scene, in expectation that he would begin missionary work there.  He was well received by the Bishop of North Queensland, who wanted to bolster the work already underway at Mackay and advocated that more outreach begin at Cairns, on the Johnson and Herbert Rivers, and around Ayr and Homehill.  Good responses were also received from the bishops of Brisbane and Rockhampton.  At the time, the plan was for Brittain to begin Melanesian Mission work at Bundaberg, but this never eventuated.[xxix]  The Bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson, aware that the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. and some planters had promised financial support, kept faith with them by visiting Queensland in mid-1895.  In Brisbane in April he had discussions with Premier Nelson, Colonial Secretary Tozer and other government officials before proceeding north to Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Mackay and Townsville.  The bishop counselled the government against closing Malaita to recruiting, which was a possible solution to deal with ferocity against recruiters over many years.  Wilson told his Brisbane listeners that Christianity was the only good thing that the labour trade had brought to Malaita and to cut access would be a retrograde step.[xxx]

Wilson had been told that only 2,000 of the 8,700[xxxi] Islanders in Queensland were receiving religious instruction.  He advocated establishment of special training colleges which could act as feeders to St Barnabas College on Norfolk Island.  The trip was also part-motivated by rumours that 200 Queensland Malaitans were about to accompany a lay missionary back to Malaita to form a Christian colony.[xxxii]

In Brisbane he visited two Malaitans about to be hanged for the murder of a European at Bundaberg.  Maraskima had been in Queensland for six years but did not understand English.  Miori had been in the colony a similar length of time and had three months’ schooling, although his English was poor.  Six had been charged and four pardoned.  The executions were difficult to explain to the other Islanders, particularly as Wilson felt that the clemency given to four was incomprehensible to Melanesian ideas of guilt and justice.[xxxiii]  The bishop proposed to establish small training schools—colleges along the lines of St Barnabas College—in several districts, the graduates of which would then be available to staff Mission schools in Queensland.  One college site was identified on Mon Repos plantation and a mission church site was suggested at The Grange, both near Bundaberg.  Wilson also announced plans for colleges at the Burdekin and Mackay.  These college developments never eventuated.  The expense would have been great, the Presbyterians pre-empted the Anglicans when they established their mission at Walkerston (near Mackay), and the Queensland government agreed to subsidize payment of staff at mission schools in the colony, which took away some of the urgency.[xxxiv]

Details remain of the bishop’s time in Bundaberg, where he visited several plantations, including Fairymead, the headquarters of the already well-established Queensland Kanaka Mission.  Wilson was accompanied by Rev. Percy T. Williams, who returned in November 1896 to take charge of the Bundaberg Mission as the first full-time “organising priest in charge of Melanesians” in Queensland, under the auspices of the Bishop of Brisbane.  His charge was renamed as the “Melanesian Mission in Queensland”.  A Bundaberg Kanaka Mission to South Sea Islanders Committee already existed, although it was not responsible to the Diocesan Board of Missions.[xxxv]  Between 1892 and his death in December 1895 Rev. J.E. Clayton, a deacon, operated a small mission school for Islanders at Bundaberg, his £200 stipend raised locally. After his death his wife and daughter and Mr Thornburn took over until Williams arrived.[xxxvi]  New Zealand-born and Cambridge University-educated, Williams set to work in the Bundaberg and Isis districts.  His count of the Melanesian population differs slightly from that of Bishop Wilson and is probably more accurate as the number of Islanders around Bundaberg never outnumbered those in the Mackay district, although Bundaberg and Isis combined were larger.  Williams said there were slightly under 2,000 Islanders around Bundaberg and another 1,000 working in the Isis Scrub district.[xxxvii]

The planters were behind with their pledges, which Williams had to extract to pay arrears owed to Mrs Clayton.  When he first preached, Williams’ Islander congregation numbered eighty-seven.  Reports from 1896–97 suggest that twenty Islander men took Holy Communion in Williams’ Anglican church at Bundaberg and 160 came to Matins.  About ninety men attended Christmas services in a church hall that year, predominantly from Gela, led by John Lamosi who had been a pupil at Norfolk Island.  Between services they amused themselves with games of cricket and football, and at the end of the day prayers were said in the Mota and Gela languages.  School classes were held in the Central Mission room every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday night to an average of thirty-seven Islanders, with another twenty-four attending evening classes on plantations.[xxxviii]  Williams was most unflattering about the Mission room:

It is simply an old disused barn, attached to a stable and cowshed.  It is low and narrow, with an iron roof, and absolutely devoid of paint.  There are no windows, merely holes cut in the walls. It is rotten in places, letting in wind, rain, and sun.  There are planks for seats, and when there are, say 150 boys in there on a hot Sunday morning, one melts and needs something very good to smell.[xxxix]

Around Bundaberg he was assisted by Rev. William Morris and Miss Brands. Williams regularly visited plantations and farms around Bundaberg to conduct school classes and raised £100 to pay for a resident teacher at nearby Childers in the Isis district, £50 of the money provided by the Colonial Sugar Refining Co.  There was no church building for the Isis Islanders and funds were harder to raise there because the sugar cane came mainly from small-scale cane farmers rather than the large plantations that dominated around Bundaberg.  Williams took the train to the Isis every Monday and remained there until Wednesday, ministering to around forty Islanders.  When he was unable to make the trip, local clergyman Rev. Ashburner took the service.  Around thirty Islanders attended the service and another forty attended the school.[xl]

Williams left in 1897 and reappeared back in the Diocese of Melanesia in 1900, from 1902 to 1905 based on Guadalcanal.[xli]  He was replaced in Bundaberg by the aforementioned J.D. Anderson, and by Mr G.E. Layton in the Isis.  European missionaries took the weekend services and Islander teachers ran classes during the week on various plantations.  In 1899, an observer on one Bundaberg plantation noted that seventy-five Islanders attended the afternoon Sunday School.  Moody and Sankey’s hymns were sung perfectly to tune and lessons and preaching was in Pijin English.[xlii]

The educational, pastoral and religious programs at Bundaberg continued.  During 1903, the total attendance at classes was 3,075 Islanders and 891 Chinese.  Miss McIntyre, who had begun to teach the Islanders in the mid-1890s, held five classes each week, three for Islanders only, and two for Islanders and Chinese, assisted by the rector, Rev. Hay.  About eighty Islanders regularly attended church services, twenty-six had been baptised and eighteen were confirmed by the Bishop of Rockhampton.  The Islanders attended the early service at the parish church, and they also had their own church on the north side of the river, which operated in much the same way as the Selwyn Mission.[xliii]

The Brisbane Diocese seems to have made little progress at Maryborough, another major cane-growing area, although there were Christian Islanders there (from Lifu) as early as 1871.  In 1876, attempts were made to establish a Church of England Maryborough mission, and several Islanders contributed to a fund to build the parish church in the late 1870s.[xliv]  Richard Eva, Rural Dean at Maryborough from the early 1880s into the 1890s, is said to have made some attempt to minister to the Islanders, but nothing further is known.  One report notes that these Islanders were colonists, not circular migrants.  In 1890 the Lutheran Church began a Sunday School, with good results, and six years later a similar Anglican mission presence began when ailing Mrs Clayton shifted from Bundaberg to Maryborough.[xlv]

The diocese to the north was based on Rockhampton, the only Queensland centre that has retained a substantial Anglican Islander population and one that provided pastoral and sugar cane occupations.  The new diocese was created in1892; in 1889 while it was still part of the Brisbane diocese, Francis Drinkall Pritt became the new minister in North Rockhampton.  Having previously visited the islands and observed Melanesian Mission activities,[xlvi] he was keen to begin work with the local Islander population, both in north Rockhampton and at Yeppoon on the coast.  When Pritt arrived, there were 200 Islanders in his parish, seventy-eight at Yeppoon sugar plantation and the remainder scattered about.  Rockhampton Islanders were mainly from the New Hebrides and the Loyalty Islands, and had arrived to work in the pastoral industry in the 1860s and 1870s.  By 1889 many of them were long-term immigrants with certificates of exemption from restrictions that covered Islander immigrants who arrived after 1884.  As mentioned above, in 1894 Pritt transferred to the Herbert River district (Ingham) and was replaced by Canon Julius, who stayed until 1904 and also fostered the Islanders within his congregation.[xlvii]

Up until 1897, most of the cost for running the Queensland missions came from mainstream churches and the Islanders themselves, plus small subsidies from the Melanesian Mission.  In 1894 Mary Robinson at Mackay received £50 a year, half from the Melanesian Mission and half from the Diocese of North Queensland, and Rev. Pritt at Bundaberg was being considered for payment by the Melanesian Mission.[xlviii]  Robinson received £70 from Melanesian Mission funds during 1895 supplemented by another £50 raised locally, the sum intended to cover her keep and all expenses for the school.  By 1896 the bishop had defaulted due to a shortage of funds and was “anxious to incur the responsibility no longer”.[xlix]  Mary Robinson could not keep herself and her daughter on the money while also paying all expenses, and contemplated closing the Selwyn Mission.  A “Robinson Fund” was established with £109 collected by Christmas 1897 to subsidize the Selwyn Mission.[l]

Anglican and Presbyterian parishioners were also involved in supporting the various missions, through subsidising missionary salaries.  Plantation owners and farmers appreciated the quieting effect of Christianity on their often quite volatile workforce, although they were not keen on Islanders constantly attending night classes, which meant they were tired for work the next day.

The Queensland government had £30,000 in its South Sea Islanders Fund, made up of the compulsory return fare capitation and unclaimed savings from Islanders who had deposited money in the Savings Bank and subsequently died.  The government agreed to Wilson’s proposal that interest from this sum be used to subsidize schools for Islanders in Queensland.  After his 1895 visit, Bishop Wilson announced ambitious plans to take Clayton at Bundaberg on to his staff (his £200 per annum salary guaranteed by the local congregation), to pay Pritt (then on the Hebert River) £100 a year to work with Mrs Robinson at Mackay (with another £100 and a house guaranteed by local planters).  The final part of the deal was to pay Mrs Robinson £150 per annum, and to replace Pritt with a part-time appointment paid £50 a year to work with Islanders at the Herbert River.[li]  Although Wilson’s grand plan never eventuated, in 1897 the Queensland government approved £600 per year in subsidies from its South Sea Islanders Fund.  That year the Bundaberg and Isis branches of the Melanesian Mission benefited to the extent of £97-10s, which enabled J.D. Anderson to be employed.  Similar sums were doled out to the Selwyn Mission at Mackay (which, like Bundaberg, also received £70 directly from the Melanesian Mission, subject to its reporting to the North Queensland Board of Missions), to the Queensland Kanaka Mission and the Churches of Christ Isis mission.[lii]  The Queensland Islanders also gave money to support the Melanesian Mission: in 1900 Islanders at the Selwyn Mission at Mackay donated £21-17s to the New Ship Fund [to replace the Melanesian Mission’s Southern Cross], the equivalent on one year’s pay for an experienced labourer.[liii]

 The Queensland Kanaka Mission

The Queensland Kanaka Mission (QKM) achieved the largest missionary outreach to immigrant Pacific Islanders in Queensland, with 2,484 Melanesians baptised between 1886 and 1906. The Young family, from England via New Zealand, had arrived in Bundaberg in 1880. Steeped in the beliefs of the Open Plymouth Brethren and influenced by the English Keswick Convention,6 Florence Young moved to Sydney after her parents died and then to her brothers’ Fairymead plantation at the height of the 1880s boom. As soon as she arrived at Fairymead in 1882, Florence Young became interested it spreading the Christian message to the Islanders. Her brothers offered her the use of an old tumble-down house on the plantation. She recounted the beginning:

There were the ten stalwart men from the New Hebrides … and little La-as-si, who formed my first class … I knew nothing then of missionary work, but the Master had said, ‘Preach the Gospel to every creature’, and these people had never heard the good news.7

Florence Young formally established the mission in 1886, with herself as superintendent, supported by the Young, Deck, and Grant families, and assisted by Mr C. Johnson as the first missionary.  Initially, Young also relied on help from her sister-in-law, Ellen Young, and was encouraged long-distance by a friend, Mrs Ben Dowling, who had been a missionary in India. The QKM was a non-denominational evangelical mission, typical of several that began following the model of the China Inland Mission. The pattern in these missions was a founder or a small nucleus of founders and a focus on a particular region of the world where the ‘heathen’ inhabitants were beyond existing missionary activities. Theologically they maintained an uncompromising evangelical stance with doctrines centred on a literal interpretation of scripture and were organised by voluntary unions of lay members of various denominations who agreed to come together for the specific purpose. These missionaries were dependent on gifts from individual sympathisers and usually did not appeal directly for funds, believing that God would provide, often based on Christ’s teachings on providence in the sixth chapter of St Matthew.10 The main financial support for the QKM always came from the Youngs, who were a well-connected, wealthy family. Florence Young’s brothers shared the proceeds of their profitable plantation with their sisters, and the whole extended family freely supported the QKM and later its successor the SSEM.

The QKM stressed salvation before education or civilisation and was well received by the Islanders and other planters. Early the next year, Florence Young and her brother Ernest wrote to the Bundaberg district plantation owners asking for classroom space and assistance to get their Islander employees to attend evening and Sunday classes.8 Young was in England and India from 1888 to 1889 and then spent six years between 1891 and 1900 as a missionary in China, suffering a nervous breakdown because of the tensions there. She returned to Bundaberg after the Boxer Rebellion, swinging her full energies over to the QKM and later the SSEM between 1904 and 1926, making lengthy annual visits to the Solomon Islands while based in Bundaberg, Sydney, and Katoomba. During her absences in the 1890s, the QKM was run by Arthur E. Eustace (a Baptist minister) and his wife, who joined the mission from Victoria; James Coles; Mr and Mrs C.F. Johnston (who had previously worked on the Lower Congo as part of the Livingstone Inland Mission);9 and Mr and Mrs McKenzie, with assistance from Florence Buchanan and Ellen Young. The mission’s message was spread by open-air hymn singing, long prayer sessions, and mass baptisms in local rivers.

By 1904, the QKM had 101 Islander and seventeen European missionaries in eleven different centres along the southern Queensland and northern New South Wales coast. Converts of the QKM returned to the BSIP and New Hebrides at the turn of the century. In the 1890s, one of them, Peter Abu`ofa, established a Christian school at Malu`u in north Malaita and appealed to the QKM for help. Three men from Queensland came in response: Charles Pillans, Peter Schwieger and another named Ruddell. Pillans and Schwiegert died of malaria and Ruddell returned home ill. In 1903, after the Australian government signalled in 1901 that it intended to expel immigrant Melanesians, the QKM began to think of moving the Mission to the Solomon Islands.

The QKM attracted large numbers of adherents, with 4,776 classes held in 1900–1901 alone. Proselytising efforts increased as the 1906 total deportation ordered by the new Commonwealth Government loomed closer.16 During the 1900s, the QKM spread into north Queensland and northern New South Wales. Beginning in 1903, Florence’s brother Ernest and his wife Margaret began an annual ‘Convention for the Deepening of the Spiritual Life’, based on Keswick principles, at their holiday home at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. At the 1904 convention, a decision was made to form a Solomon Islands branch of the QKM, with a separate council with members based in Sydney and Melbourne. At the age of 48, Florence Young decided to lead the first official QKM expedition to the Solomon Islands in the middle of 1904 despite fears that the environment was too severe for European women.17

In January 1904, the QKM formed a Solomon Islands Branch and on 8 April Florence Young arrived at Tulagi. She travelled to Langalanga Lagoon and to Malu`u to visit Peter Abu`ofa. Young began to make annual visits to the Protectorate and in 1905 the QKM established its principal station at Onepusu on Malaita’s west coast. At the end of 1906, the QKM closed its Queensland operation and transferred to the BSIP. Its name was changed to the South Sea Evangelical Mission (later Church) in 1907, and it has continued to operate in the Solomon Islands. The church also expanded into Papua New Guinea. 

New South Wales

An area of Islander settlement that is often forgotten was in northern New South Wales.  There were around 200 Islanders there in 1897.  Some had fled Queensland to live under a more benign regime, and others drifted south to escape the 1890s depression years.  They grew cane which they sold to the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. mills and worked on the district’s sugar and banana plantations.  Exempt from Queensland regulations (but not from the Commonwealth’s 1901 deportation order) most of them were from the New Hebrides, and lived around Cudgen and Tumbulgum.[liv]  The Islanders built two small Anglican churches:  St. John’s, at Cudgen, where Jonah Woqas from Mota Island and Ravu from Gela Island conducted services for a few dozen Islanders; and St. Barnabas’ at Tumblegum, where John Tala from Mota and Jimmy from another New Hebridean island were the preachers.  Rev. Reynolds, the Anglican priest at Murwillumbah and the local Presbyterian minister visited both groups regularly.  The Queensland Kanaka Mission also established a base at Cudgen.[lv]

 The Implications of the Queensland Missions for Christianity in Melanesia

The missions to Islanders in Queensland were successful ventures cut short by the 1901 legislation of the new Commonwealth of Australia that stopped the flow of new indentured labour from Melanesia to Queensland after 1903 and led to the deportation of the majority of the Islanders between 1906 and 1908.  The labour trade was a circular migration, and there were always Islanders returning home, some of them after conversion to Christianity in Queensland.  Some did join the scattered mission stations in the islands and bolstered the efforts of the few European and Islander missionaries and their small congregations.  For most, Christianity became just another story to recount about life far away in Queensland.  The social pressure on the to return to their customary ways were great and not many ever managed to establish schools or missions of their own.

The forced exit of thousands of Solomon Islanders and New Hebrideans in the 1900s created different circumstances.  The numbers were larger, and there was provision made to drop them at mission stations if they requested.  Others set out to form Christian colonies on their own islands, thus expanding the overall Christian population.  It is not possible to make exact estimates of the number of Christian Melanesians who left Queensland in the 1890s and 1900s.  And even if we had exact information, it would be difficult to calculate their effect as they returned to more than eighty different islands and were all at different stages of conversion.  My main area of interest is Malaita Island, the major source of labourers during the 1890s and 1900s, and we can presume that the large number of returning labourers to that island had a significant impact.  The only exact baptismal statistics come from the Queensland Kanaka Mission, which claimed to have baptised 2,484 Melanesians between 1886 and 1906.[lvi]

 Queensland Kanaka Mission

 Bundaberg: 

• Fairymead 1882

• North Bundaberg

• Bingera

• Kalkie

• Avondale

Isis:                 

• Hapsberg

• Gin Gin

• Ayr

• Ingham

• Innisfail (Geraldton)

• Cairns

• Mossman

• Cudgen

 The Church of England missions were the next largest, and based on Mackay statistics we know that there were 572 Islander baptisms at the Selwyn Mission between 1890 and 1906.  If we take into account the number and size of the other Church of England mission areas, a conservative guess might be around 900 to 1,000 Anglican baptisms in Queensland before 1906. The next most important were the Presbyterian and Churches of Christ missions, which must have added another several hundred baptisms.  Three other smaller missionary endeavours have been located:  the Lutherans who began a mission at Maryborough in 1890, the Salvation Army which seems to have concentrated its efforts at Buderim, and the Brisbane City Mission which made quick progress amongst the labourers gathered for deportation at the Immigration depot in Brisbane between 1906 and 1908.

 Churches of Christ Missions

• Isis 1892

• Knockroe 1895

• Gregory 1895

• Maryborough, 1890s

 Presbyterian

• Mackay         

• Walkerston 1888

• Sandiford

• Oakenden

• Miclere

• Mulgrave (Gordonvale) 1890s

• Tweed

 Lutheran

•  Maryborough 1890

 Salvation Army

• Buderim 1893

Brisbane City Mission

• Brisbane 1906-08

Official estimates suggest that around 15,000 Islander adults and children remained in Queensland after 1908, although unofficial estimates suggest a number closer to 2,500.  There may have been as many as 4,000 Christian Islanders in Queensland during the 1890s and 1900s, which suggests that around 2,000 went back to the islands.[lvii]  These returns had a disproportionate effect in the islands, as the majority of the 1890s and 1900s labourers came from Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands, but it is reasonable to suggest that these Queensland Christian had far more effect on the spread of Christianity in Melanesia than previously has been realised.

REFERENCES

[i]  Brett Hilder, The Voyage of Torres: The Discovery of the Southern Coastline of  New Guinea and Torres Strait by Captain Luis Baéz de Torres in 1606, St Lucia (Qld): University of Queensland Press, 1980, 48-51.

[ii]  John  Garrett, To Live Among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania, Geneva and Suva: World Council of Churches in association with the Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1982.

[iii]  John Barker, "Christianity in Western Melanesian Ethnography", In History and Tradition in Melanesia, James Carried (ed.), Berkley: University of California Press, 1992, 144-173.

[iv]  Peter Corris, Passage, Port and Plantation: A History of Solomon Islands Labour Migration, 1870-1914, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1973, 96.

[v] Bishop Cecil Wilson gave the following estimate in 1895, presumably based on figures provided by Church sources, which differs from my calculation: Brisbane (1,000); Bundaberg (2,500); Isis (800); Rockhampton (70); Mackay (2,240); Burdekin (500); Herbert River (800); Johnstone River (800). Occasional Papers of the Melanesian Mission (OPMM), November 1895, 155.

[vi]  Clive Moore, Kanaka: A History of Melanesian Mackay, Port Moresby: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and the University of Papua and New Guinea Press, 1985, 26.

[vii]  Moreton Bay Courier, 9 April 1864; R.M. Ross, Melanesians at Mission Bay: A History of the Melanesian Mission in Auckland. Wellington: Historic Places Trust, 1983.41.

[viii]  Information provided by Dr Alan Davidson at St. John’s Theological College, Auckland/University of Auckland from letters held in the Rhodes House Library, 11 May 2006.

[ix]  David Wetherall, Reluctant Mission: The Anglican Church in Papua New Guinea, 1891-1942, St Lucia (Qld): University of Queensland Press, 1977, 101; David Hilliard, God’s Gentlemen: A History of the Melanesian Mission, 1849-1942, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1978., 105-6.

[x]  Report of the Church of England  Synod, Brisbane, 1872, 10.

[xi]  Moore, Kanaka, 310.

[xii]  A.I. Hopkins, “A Letter from Queensland”, The Southern Cross Log, journal of the MelanesianMisison (SCL), March 1907, 114.

[xiii]  V.A. Buxton, “Impressions of Plantation Life”, OPMM, March 1897, 276.

[xiv]  Report of Rev. A. Brittain, OPMM, Christmas 1894, 98-99.

[xv]  Brittain, OPMM, Christmas 1894, p. 99.  Also see Mary G. Robinson to A. Brittain, 16 August 1894, OPMM, Christmas 1894, 100-1.

[xvi]  Report of Rev. A. Brittain, OPMM, Christmas 1894, 99.

[xvii]  Mary G. Robinson to Bishop J.R. Selwyn, 26 October 1896, OPMM, Christmas 1896, 260-1.

[xviii]  “Selwyn Mission, Queensland”, SCL, July 1901, 72; “Selwyn Mission (Mackay), SCL, February 1905, p. 7; “Selwyn Mission, Mackay”, SCL, August 1905, 6; “Selwyn Mission, Mackay”, SCL, December 1905,  4.

[xix]  William T. Wawn, The South Sea Islanders and the Queensland Labour Trade, Pacific History Series No.5, Peter Corris (ed.), Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973. [Orig. 1893], 439; SCL, April 1896, 10, November 1896, 3; “The Melanesian Mission in Queensland”, SCL, March 1897, 7-8.

[xx]  Hopkins 1949; Rt. Rev. Dr. Terry Brown, Sermon, All Saints Church, Brisbane, 9 July 2006.

[xxi]  R.M.F.D., “Sugar Plantations in Queensland”, SCL, September 1905, 11.

[xxii]  Holy Trinity Mackay Anglican Baptismal Registers.

[xxiii]  This quantitative research was carried out as part of my PhD thesis research, submitted in 1981 as Kanaka: A History of Melanesian Mackay, History Department, James Cook University of North Queensland. The printouts are available at James Cook University and the Mackay City Council Library.

[xxiv]  Blain’s Biographical Directory of Anglican Clergy, Http://www.kinderlibrary.ac.nz/resources/bishop/index.htm (accessed 19 July 2006).

[xxv]  “R.M.F.D.”, “Sugar Plantations of Queensland”, SCL, September 1905, 11.

[xxvi]  “Notes”, SCL, July 1897, 4-5.

[xxvii]  Wetherell, Reluctant Mission, 101.

[xxviii]  Percy T. Williams, “Notes from Queensland”, SCL, September 1905, 11.

[xxix]  He felt no particular call to the ministry and he was already well-established in the New Hebrides.  Re[ort of Rev. A. Brittain, OPMM, Christmas 1894, 97-100; Bishop Wilson, 6 September 1894, OPMM, Christmas 1894, 95-97; Bishop Wilson, 17 June 1895, OPMM, November 1895, 164-5.

[xxx]  Bishop Cecil Wilson, 20 May 1895, OPMM, August 1895, 123.

[xxxi]  Census of Queensland, 1891, 459, Queensland Votes & Proceedings (QVP) 1892, Vol III, 1391; 1901, 16, QVP 1901, Vol. 11, 956.

[xxxii]  Mr Brittain, quoted in OPMM August 1894, 69; Bishop Cecil Wilson, 6 June 1895, OPMM, November 1895, 153.

[xxxiii]  Bishop Cecil Wilson, 20 May 1895, OPMM, August 1895, 122-3; Bishop Cecil Wilson, 6 June 1895, OPMM, 153. 

[xxxiv]  Bishop Cecil Wilson to Bishop J.R. Selwyn, 5 February 1896, OPMM, August 1896, 207-8; The Church Chronicle (Brisbane), May 1895, p. 3, June 1895, 11-13; Wetherell, Reluctant Mission, 101-2; Bishop Cecil Wilson, OPMM, August 1895, 122.

[xxxv]  Report of Rev. A. Brittain, OPMM, Christmas 1894, 97-100.

[xxxvi]  “Notes”, SCL, July 1897, 4.

[xxxvii]  Charles A. Price with Elizabeth Baker. "Origins of Pacific Island Labourers in Queensland, 1863-1904: A Research Note." Journal of Pacific History 11, no. 1/2 (1976): 106-21., 115.

[xxxviii]  Percy T. Williams, “The Melanesian Mission in Queensland”, OPMM, March 1897, 269.

[xxxix]  Percy T. Williams, ‘Notes from Queensland”, OPMM, March 1897, 270-2.

[xl]  Williams, “The Melanesian Mission in Queensland”, OPMM, March 1897, 269-70; and, Notes from Queensland”, OPMM, March 1897, 270-2; “With ‘Our Boys’ in Bundaberg”, OPMM, September 1897, 289-90; “Report of Queensland Branch of the Melanesian Mission”, OPMM, Christmas 1897, 323-4.

[xli]  Blain’s Biographical Directory of Anglican Clergy, http://www.kinderlibrary.ac.nz/resources/bishop/index.htm (accessed 19 July 2006).

[xlii]  “Melanesia in Queensland”, SCL, 15 September 1899, 4.

[xliii]  “Mission Notes”, SCL, July 1904, 7.

[xliv]  John Kerr, Sugar at Maryborough: 120 Years of Challenge. Mayborough: Maryborough Sugar Factory Ltd, 1987., 68-69.

[xlv]  “The Melanesian Mission in Queensland”, SCL, April 1890, 10-11; “A Melanesian Christmas at Bundaberg”, SCL, June 1897, 4; R.P.W., “With ‘Our Sons’ at Bundaberg”, SCL, July 1897, 8-9; “The Melanesian Mission in Queensland”, SCL, 14 May 1898, 8.

[xlvi]  He may have made a visit to Rev. Lonsdale Pritt who served with the Melanesian Mission, 1861-67 in New Zealand, although Francis Drinkall Pritt does not seem to have left England until 1889.

[xlvii]  Julius also had links to the Melanesian Mission as his cousin Ethel Julius (herself the daughter of the Bishop of Christchurch in New Zealand) in 1899 married Cecil Wilson, Bishop of Melanesia. Carol Gistitin, Kanakas: Labour of Love. Rockhampton: Carol Gistitin, 1989; Carol Gistitin, Quite a Colony: South Sea Islanders in Central Queensland 1867 to 1993. Brisbane: Aebis, 1995. 

[xlviii]  Bishop Cecil Wilson to Bishop J.R. Selwyn, 6 September 1894, OPMM, Christmas 1894, 95-97.

[xlix]  Mary G. Robinson to Bishop J.R. Selwyn, 26 October 1896, OPMM, December 1896, 28.

[l]  “Robinson Fund”, OPMM, Christmas 1897, 326.

[li]  Bishop Cecil Wilson, OPMM, August 1895, 122.

[lii]  “Notes”, SCL, July 1897, 4.

[liii]   SCL, October 1900, 1.

[liv]  The area was within the Anglican Diocese of Grafton and Armidale.  Faith Bandler, of Tana Island and Anglo-Indian ancestry, is the best known of Islander descendants from this region. She has written several books based on her father’s life at Mackay and Tumbulgum.  Bandler 1977, 1984; Bandler and Fox 1980; see also Lake 2002.

[lv]  “The Melanesians on the Tweed River”, SCL, May 1897, 2-3.

[lvi]  I am indebted to Dr Ben Burt for providing these QKM statistics.

[lvii]  Clive Moore, "'Good-Bye, Queensland, Good-Bye, White Australia; Good-Bye Christians': Australia's South Sea Islander Community and Deportation, 1901-1908." The New Federalist 4 (2000): 22-29; Patricia Mary Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in North Queensland, Studies in North Queensland History No.21. Townsville: Department of History and Politics, James Cook University, 1995; Moore, Kanaka, 274-331; Peter Corris, "'White Australia' in Action: The Repatriation of Pacific Islanders from Queensland." Historical Studies 15, no. 58 (1972): 237-50.