History Aboriginal Christian Missions in Australia

Questions: 1. How did Aboriginal people respond to missions and missionaries? Justify your answer with examples.2. Why were Aboriginal children removed from their families? What role did race and gender play in child removal?3. What rights were Aboriginal people fighting for in the 1930s? Why were they denied these rights? Answers: 1. The early Aboriginal Christian missions in Australia are surrounded by controversy. It should first be noted that missions to the Aborigines were seen in terms of a charity rather than as an inescapable Christian responsibility demanding an unavoidable call on the individual's or the church's resources. Very few Christians indeed would have considered their Christianity tested or salvation threatened by their response to the material or spiritual needs of the Aborigines. They were an optional extra. The reaction of the first generation of adult Aborigines to have contact with the Missions is interesting. Initially there was a rejection of Christian ideology and morality. It was thought to be irrelevant to Aborigines (Shenk 2015). Thus, at Bloomfield, the Aborigines were astonished that the Ten Commandments were meant for all human beings. However, access to the missionaries' material wealth necessitated a good deal of conformity with their expectations. This resulted in two patter ns of behavior: one for the mission and another for real life. For example, Mission Aborigines married mission Aborigines and produced mission children to grow up, work, live and die on the mission. 2. Children were taken from mothers after birth; others were taken once they reached the age of three or four years. Many Aboriginal families were thus denied the right to nurture, to rear and educate, to love their own children, to see them grow up. They lost these children, and the children became lost themselves.The main reason for removal of Aboriginal child was the inability of the family members to raise the children. Most of the problems facing Aboriginal people today stem from generations of oppression and have resulted in a lack of trust of white society (Lyons et al. 2014). The reason for removal of children was racism and discrimination. Aboriginal people were denied the right to live by their own rules, to decide on their own policies. They were denied the freedom to run their own economic and family life. Racism was created by the white man and maintained by the white man.Racism is an external factor that has hit Aboriginal families hard. It has caused great disadvantage in employment, housing, health, education and training, and this in turn puts an incredible strain on Aboriginal family life. Racism has also separated children from the Aboriginal parents. An example is employment; if a father cannot provide for his family because of the lack of job opportunities for Aboriginal people, there is a lot of stress and anger within the family, which affects each family member (Nielsen et al. 2014). This leads the parents abandon their children due to lack of money to nurture their children. 3. Campaigns for indigenous rights in Australia gathered momentum from the 1930s. In 1938, with the participation of leading indigenous activists likeDouglas Nicholls, theVictorian Aborigines Advancement Leagueorganized a protest "Day of Mourning" to mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of theFirst Fleetof British in Australia and launched its campaign for full citizenship rights for all Aborigines.Through the interwar period, Aboriginal people ceased to be major points of public debate. Their powerlessness, lack of economic competition and geographic isolation contributed to their absence from public attention (Casey 2015). People were fighting for discrimination and the rights that the Aboriginals should get. References Casey, M., 2015. The Great Australian Silence: Aboriginal Theatre and Human Rights. InTheatre and Human Rights after 1945(pp. 74-89). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Lyons, K.J., Ezekowitz, J.A., Liu, W., McAlister, F.A. and Kaul, P., 2014. Mortality outcomes among status Aboriginals and whites with heart failure.Canadian Journal of Cardiology,30(6), pp.619-626. Nielsen, M., Mushin, I., Tomaselli, K. and Whiten, A., 2014. Where culture takes hold:Overimitation and its flexible deployment in Western, Aboriginal, and Bushmen children.Child development,85(6), pp.2169-2184. Shenk, W.R., 2015.Changing frontiers of mission. Orbis Books.