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A History of Aboriginal Missions in Australia · Martyrs And Missionaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Martyr's Emissionaries is a production of Revive Studios.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But before we get started, I want to read some of the recent reviews from Spotify.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: This first one is from Christianity under the French Revolution by Kai, and he says, Great Episode.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: This episode is definitely up there with the Henry in Stanley, and David Lemmaic's episode thoroughly enjoyed it.
• 0:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am glad you enjoyed it, and then this one comes from Jane Kennedy on the same episode.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: She says, thank you for all your research.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was so well done.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I attended a Catholic Mass last night in Paris, and it was packed to the rafters with young Christians.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The spirit is moving in France.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is really good to hear this was actually a bit older during all the rioting and stuff not long after it all started.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is good to hear.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this next one comes from Gabriel.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is from the Dick Hillist episode.
• 1:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He says, amazing.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for this story.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I pray my faith grows increasingly stronger.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So God can use me to change many lives.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Please pray for me.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: My fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, and this last one is from the first martyrs of the Reformation.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is from Kayla who says, have you done one about Amy Carmichael?
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I have, actually, it's one of the very first episodes I ever did.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can find it.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I believe the title is Amma at AMMA.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It should be very early on in the catalog.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So thank you guys for those comments.
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I enjoy reading them and I'm glad you all are enjoying the episodes.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to share with you guys about the origin of how this episode came to be and it has changed shapes many many times because I got sent a book by a man in Australia and the book is called I speak for black people, the story of pioneer Christian missionaries, James and Angelina Noble, this is by Weihon Kwan and it is a good, very short little book but it's good and he said hey maybe you could get a little something out of this enough to make a short episode and I said yeah sure no problem.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as I read it, I really enjoyed it, but then I thought, well, let's like back it up and get like a fuller picture of missions in Australia and that took me in a lot of directions.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a very complicated complex history and it's not pretty, especially like as you look a little bit into missions in in Australia and the government, all that stuff.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what I want to focus on and hopefully this is achieved.
• 2:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I want to focus on specifically the history of Christian missions in all Australia.
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's not a holy battle or a holy good story.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just somewhere in the middle where it was a broken system.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bad things happened.
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good things happened.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I hope that that shines through as we do this episode.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I will cover their story a bit later.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But before we get into that, I want to start us off at the very beginning.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why did Britain get involved in Australia in the first place?
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: What brought them to those sunny shores?
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it all starts with James Cook.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1770, he claimed the Eastern part of Australia for Britain and called it New South Wales.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now after the American Revolution, they didn't.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: They weren't really doing anything with it up to this point.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was kind of there.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But after the Revolution, England had nowhere to cast off their criminals.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so they experienced a lot of overcrowding due to their newly-extreme criminal code.
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So people were getting thrown into prison just for stealing bread or whatever.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they had resorted to using these decommissioned ships called prison hoax and even children as young as eight were kept on these ships with hardened adult men, which seems like not the best idea, but diseases were rampant and in the reform policies of the 1820s, they eventually got separate ships for the kids and the men.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they had another idea and they said, hey, we've got all of this land out there in Australia, why don't we just ship them off there?
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this was self-serving in two ways.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Number one, you can offload your prisoners.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But number two, it would keep the French from sagging it and then making it their own.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because for the time being, the only people who had really any other steak as far as European powers in Australia was kind of the Dutch, but not really, they were in Western
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they were kind of staying put in the Dutch East Indies.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: They didn't see a whole lot of reason to come into Australia.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they really just had it kind of, but not really.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the French were kind of eyeball on it.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they figured, hey, let's go ahead and jump in here before the French do.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the first fleet of 11 ships arrived in the Sydney Harbor in May of 1787, carrying around 1,000 or so prisoners, sailors and soldiers, and the men worked six days a week, essentially building all Australia.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The women were primarily working in the domestic sector, but others were in female factories spending wool making clothes, doing laundry and things like that.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you were a female prisoner, you definitely wanted to be in the domestic sector and not in the female factories.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And after they served their sentences, it was often too expensive than to go back to England so they just stayed.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And eventually,
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: England wanted this to be a free colony like sure it was a prison colony, but it could be so much more and they began promoting families to come and women to marry the men and they subsidized all the early travel.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then the people who were staying in Australia, you had now for a second generation all Australians and they said, hey, we don't really want Australia to just become a prisoner dumping ground.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the petitioned Britain to stop this, and I finally did, in 1868, after a 20-year, slowball, slowly stopping in each one of the states.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: In an 80 years, Britain had sent around 160,000 prisoners to Australian, and the overall British population of Australia had expanded to 1.6 million people helped in part by the Gold Rush.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now as far as how many native peoples were on Australia, that is a difficult question because the numbers fluctuate quite wildly.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The earliest reports up until actually a couple months ago said 300,000 and there was a report that came out in September, I believe this is 2.2 million people.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not really sure which one is more correct, but regardless of the exact amount, there were between five and six hundred tribes and about two hundred and fifty languages.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there are two distinct people groups that live in Australia.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have the Aboriginals who live on the mainland and the Torres Strait Islanders.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we don't know how many Torres Strait Islanders that are were pre-Europeans,
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: but today they have about 83,000 people.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: For this episode we're going to be sticking with the Aboriginalism selves on the mainland.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And with that let's talk about their belief system a little bit.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: They believe that the role was created during the dreaming that ancestor beings rose from the earth and their stories and actions formed the landscape, the mountains, the rivers, etc.
• 7:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they created everything that we can see and their spirit still lives on in creation.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Very animistic, very poca-honicy, and ancestors also established the moral codes by which they abide.
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rainbow serpent is the most prevalent of these ancestor spirits among the Aboriginal people groups.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they formed the rivers and the gorgeous and the valleys, and there's a life-giving connection there because of the water that it would create with their little tunnels.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It also serves as a fertility goddess, well, and also as renewal because of the shedding of skin.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: After death, many believe the spirit returns to the dreaming, the spiritual realm, but some hold to reincarnation into humans or inanimate objects.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, as for how these early British settlements affected Aboriginals, when Britain first claimed Australia for the empire, they declared it to be Tera Nellius, which means nobody's land.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this term was only used by them a few times in the colonial history, most famously in Australia, but also in Penning and in Singapore, and they used it to denote a land that they saw as unpopulated or untended.
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when the first slate arrived, they were under strict orders, not to harm the Aboriginal population, but history shows us that this was wishful thinking, because even unintentionally European diseases began sweeping through the populations on the settlements.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And some studies suggest that a death toll of 50 to 70 percent occurred very quickly, and then violence further violence broke out as settlers ventured deeper and deeper into the interior.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is a lot more that we could talk about between European and indigenous relations, but as I said earlier, it's really quite messy and quite complex.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we'll talk about it more as it comes up, and we'll look at some of the aftermath.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what I want to do is talk about some of those first missionaries.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the first missionary to come to Australia came with the first fleet, but his ministry was not to aboriginals but rather to convicts.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: His name is Richard Johnson, and he was actually helped into his position by John Newton and William Weber Force, who felt that the new colony needed a committed Christian as its first chaplain.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he named his daughter in a Aboriginal name, Milba, which was quite rare for these times.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he also adopts a little girl whose family had been killed by a smallpox epidemic.
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she eventually returned to her people, but continued to visit the Johnsons until they returned to England.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you want to hear more about this guy, actually, revive thoughts did a recent episode on him.
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I highly recommend you to check it out, and I will actually link it in the episode description as well.
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the very first story we have that actually is more personal between all Europeans and originals is the story of Governor Philip and Benelong.
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Benelong was a chief, I believe, and he was kidnapped by Governor Philip who was the first governor of the Sydney area.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the goal was to teach them English, Christianize them, I suppose.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then use them as kind of a bridge between the to the Aboriginal tribes.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It didn't go so well.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not really how one does things.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as a result of this, you had one guy who died, one guy who ran away and actually been along himself, ran away.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: But one day he spotted along the riverbank.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Governor Philip is told and Governor Philip goes to approach him and been along back in some in, but there's a guy standing next to Benelong who then stabs him in the shoulder with a spear and Governor Philip says, don't hurt them, don't worry about it like I'm fine.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the prevailing theory on why this happened seems to be that it was a bit of an eye for an eye situation.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: You kidnapped me, took me away from my people, and I'm going to do some justice.
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that seemed to be how it went because they stayed friends.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, Governor Philip took him to England to kind of show him around, uh, been along really enjoyed it.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, as he's sailing back to Australia, he writes to the governor.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he says, hey, can you just send me some stockings?
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think a hat or something like that, he really liked.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So those two remained friends, even after Governor Philip had returned back to England.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mission's movement to add originals really started with a trickling in of missionaries.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the very first missionaries was a man named William Walker.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a Wesleyan minister from 1820-1822 when he married and gave up missionary work by a large pot of land and maybe doing some pastoral work.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He also adopted the son of Benalong, and there's a letter that exists about he and feeling as though he had failed the young man who had actually died a few months into William's marriage.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, not sure what that's all about, but that is what we have from William and also Benalong's son.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next person in our lineup is Lancelot Threckold.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is a London missionary society missionary with an amazing name.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was originally sent to the Polynesian Islands, but his destination was later changed.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: In order for him to work among the Awa Bakal people of the New South Wales area in Eastern Australia in 1826.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was tasked with teaching people agriculture, carpandry, and also learning the local language as a precursor to introducing them to Christianity.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: and this he did.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was quite successful.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He worked closely with a local man named Beerabhan, who was fluent English, and actually translated the gospel of Luke, almost single-handedly, although it doesn't seem as though he ever came to faith himself.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the LMS decided that this mission work wasn't resulting in conversions and pulled the plug on Lancelot's funding offering them to send him home to which he refused and so he was taken in by the governor of New South Wales who gave him permission to work on behalf of the colony and build the Ebenezer mission.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, this too was considered a failure because it wasn't moving fast enough for people who were in charge and it was closed down in 1842.
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He then continued to translate the scriptures, continuing to perfect the written language of the Awa Bakal through spelling and grammar books, and one of his goals was to make sure that the language was recorded before it's very speakers died out.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is a theme you will see as we continue on this episode.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a theory that a Aboriginal's had a limited amount of time left because their death rate was much higher than their birth rate.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the prevailing theory was that they were a dying group of people, and
• 13:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: best to preserve what you can, at least among the missionaries, the average people.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It didn't feel that way.
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: They felt they were dying out, but there was no instinct relay to help save them.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I guess.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Lancelot also served as a liaison between the aboriginals and the colonial courts, because aboriginals were not allowed to give testimony in court unless they were Christians and could swear on the Bible on this led to their testimonies of mistreatment, and other legal issues being thrown out in the court.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And let's a lot complained about this practice directly to the court itself, writing, I am now perfectly at a loss to describe to the aboriginals their position.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Christian laws will hang the aboriginals for violence done to Christians.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Christian laws will not protect them from the aggressions of nominal Christians, because aboriginals must give evidence only upon oath.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sadly, Lancelot died while in the process of translating the foregospels,
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: in 1859, but his annual reports are still used in Australia today as evidence of Aboriginal mistreatment during this period in history.
• 14:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we get to more of the heavy hitters and in the sense that not that their work is so much more important, but there's just a lot more known about them and the first one we're going to cover is John Gribble.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's an Anglican missionary.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He moved to Victoria with his parents when it was very young, and he became a minister at 30 around 1876, moving to his town in New South Wales, where the Kelly gang had set up a shop.
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Kelly gang story is really fascinating.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a classic outlaw story in all the hits, it hits all the marks, and John had at least two runs with them, which are related in a book, and I will share them with you.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was in general, Darry, that Gribble had his legendary encounter with the Bush Ranger Ned Kelly.
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the Kelly gang held up the town in 1879, Gribble having lived a mile out of town was it first away unaware.
• 15:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hearing the news from a escaping bank official, Gribble set off for town.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the way, he met a distraught girl, the daughter of a local publican, whose horse had been taken by Steve Hart, as certainly an ill-tempered member of the Kelly gang.
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grible then found a Ned Kelly himself right in the girl's mirror, calling on Kelly to stop Grible told him it was unmanly to steal from a girl.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kelly told him he would consider returning the horse.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Going on his way, Grible came across Steve Hart and the act of stealing a new saddle from the public end at gunpoint.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grible told Hart that he had told Kelly if his unmanly act, Hart then aimed his revolver at Grible and after some argument, took a Grible's watch.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Anchor Gribble, Ben went back to find Kelly who was by now drinking in the hotel, striding down the dusty main street of Gerald Ari.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gribble confronted Kelly calling him out of the pub to the man the return of the watch.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: For a brief moment, two men of courage stood face to face.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps they glimpsed something similar in each other.
• 16:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gribble got his watch back and bowed to the Bush Ranger before they went on their separate paths to the great ordeal of their lives.
• 16:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: In that one story, you get a little bit of an insight into the character of John Gravel.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was definitely a man that had the metal to do the work.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was also sympathetic to the plight of young Aboriginal women who were used as concubines, and then discarded when they became pregnant, leading to an entire group of children who were known as half cast, which of course is now an updated term.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: terribly offensive, but these children would eventually prompt the governments of Victoria and Western Australia to adopt the Aborigines Protection Act of 1886, which later spread to the other states, and by 1910 took children from their families, and forcibly attempted to assimilate them, leading to a phenomenon known as the stolen generations.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And these policies only stopped
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you are interested in more about this story, there is a movie called Rabbitproof Fences, and it's been many, many years since I watched it, but I recall it being good, so give that a watch if you're interested in more of this kind of history.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the movie itself is based on a true story.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So John ended up setting up a mission for these children and their mothers about a decade before the first government policies came into being, and it continued to preach and minister, and I traveled back to England and raised support and awareness for his mission and the plight of aboriginals.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was later invited to found a similar mission in Western Australia, but when he held a lecture talking about the treatment of settlers against aboriginals,
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crowd became hostile and honestly, it was a major downward spiral from there, including court cases, ambushes, newspapers smears and all sorts of unpleasant business, and then he was let go by his mission's committee, any lost his license, which caused the newspapers to gloat over the financial straits of him, his wife, and their five children.
• 18:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1888, he was appointed as a Travelling Missionary General by the App Original Protection Association.
• 18:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then a few years later, he helped found the Yara Bomb Mission in Queensland.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: in Northeastern, Australia, which he asked his son Ernest to oversee while he attempted to recover from malaria, and a lung inflammation called plurzy, which is one of those common antique illnesses that one stumbles across as about as often actually as tuberculosis and old documents.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But apparently it rhymes on the in on the co-tails of a viral or bacterial infection, and now it can be cleared up very simply with some medications, but sadly John did not have access to those and he passed away at the age of 45.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the inscription on his tombstone reads, The Black Fellow's friend, and there's a monument to him at Yarbaugh today.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Did you know that the word Advent comes from the Latin Adventist, meaning coming or arrival?
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Advent gives us a chance to slow down during the busyness of Christmas and reflect on the coming of Christ.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this year, send an international has put together something really neat.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's called Drawn to the Light, a free four-week Advent devotional that helps us reflect on God's heart for the world and the hope we have in Christ.
• 19:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just sign up for sins, engage newsletter.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where you'll also receive stories from missionaries around the world, prayer requests and updates about how the gospel is reaching those who've never heard it.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Get your free devotional at send.org slash advent 2026.
• 19:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's send.org slash advent 2026 and help send the gospel this Christmas season.
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, his son Ernest Gribble is a complicated complex
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's really hard to pin down, which one kind of defines his legacy.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm not going to try to do that.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to present the facts as they are.
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you want to learn more about Ernest Grable, there is a book, and actually more about this entire subject.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a book called One Blood 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter with Christianity by John Harris.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Harris spent his early life on an Aboriginal mission, where his parents worked, and he said that I have been writing this book from most of my life.
• 20:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is quite lengthy.
• 20:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's about a thousand pages, but it contains the most comprehensive data on missions and Australia ever written, and it gives an unflinching but balanced account of a difficult history.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's definitely worth the read to learn more, and from what I have been able to read, I think it's very informative and very helpful.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I wanted to give that bit of a preface before we get in to Ernest, and we start Ernest's story with the fact that he never wanted to be a missionary, at least not initially.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because he had seen what that life had done to his father and how the entire country seemingly came together to destroy him.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he later wrote, my father had gone to Northern Queensland to start a mission to the Aborigines there.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had urged me to join him, but my reply was in fact that I would never go as a missionary among the
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, he wanted to go into the military, but in a tail as old as time, in the stories he had poor health, and so he was denied admins.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he has a bit of a change of heart when his father asks him to take over the mission while he recovered.
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He went up to a hilltop and he prayed about it, and then he decided to stick around.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so he had this mission, but he had no one to care for.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then slowly people trickled in, but the funding was low, like $1 a month for the whole mission, and then he was given $4 a month by the board to care for his mother and siblings.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even this after a time was taken away from him because they decided he wasn't doing enough.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: What she seems to be, a classic story in this chapter of Australian history with missions or
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another difficulty that he had was convincing Aboriginals to stay, because they fear that their children will be taken away, and this was mostly fear-mongering by antagonistic settlers.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: This would happen later, but it wasn't happening yet.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then a turning point in the mission came when a chief elder named King John asked for he and his family to come stay at the mission, as long as they could come and go.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was baptized, became a Christian, and many came and went as they pleased,
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And later on, many of them would leave their children behind as they left.
• 22:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: He also began taking in very young addicts of opium and alcohol, and very young girls who have been abused by European Chinese and Filipino traders.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The home secretary visited and was so impressed that he offered the mission as type into 17 pounds a month.
• 22:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And going back to this idea of saving of the remnant, there's a quote from Ernest that says,
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: We owe them a debt for the country we have taken from them.
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: We also owe the race reparation for the neglect and cruelty of over a century.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lastly, we owe them the bets that our civilization has to give, and that is the gospel of our Lord.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: which above all can instill peace, love, and an incentive to live.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And another quote says, it is not by might nor by power but by the spirit of the Almighty God.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Christ paid the same price for the souls of the Aborigines of Australia, as he did for the souls of any other race.
• 23:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: We may despise the race, but Christ is not.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: We may not need them any longer, but he does.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He needs them in the building up of his body, the church.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have the qualities as a race that he needs, and among other qualities,
• 23:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: a little note on the difference between Aboriginal and Aboriginal.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Aboriginal is a more outdated term, it's not really used today and it is slightly offensive, but it is used in these original quotes, and therefore, that's why I have included them, but the proper term for today would be Aboriginal.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Going back to the Yara Bomb Mission, there were so many different rules that the locals held in the mission itself.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is from
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I speak for black people by Juan here.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He says of the occupied the position of organists, music teachers, dispensary matron, motor mechanic, engineer in charge of the mission's launch boat, and ex-prisoner now drummer in the brass band, a dentist extracting and filling teeth, a server at the church, and printers at the mission press.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They also had leading roles in the Yarraba Hospital and on several farm-scrolling vegetables, fruit, cotton, dairy cows, and pigs.
• 24:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mission also had an operating fire brigade that carried out weekly trainings and a rifle corps.
• 24:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not all work and no fun.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was also a sailing club sports team and a subsequently famous brass band.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yarraba's court of dust justice met weekly to deal with complaints and misbehavior.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in spiritual matters, aboriginal men were free to take the initiative to organize and preach at informal services for aborigines camped on the fringes of the mission compound.
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, sadly, Ernest suffered a mental break at some point in his career, and his health did not permit him to return to Yarabha, so he took over the forest river mission in Western Australia.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is where he becomes a very complex character because he practiced physical punishment, but he also tolerated aboriginal spiritual practices because he knew they would disappear with time.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: as the Christians were convicted and sanctified with a Holy Spirit, but he was very difficult and later he was impossible to work with, because if he were another Australian or British or whatever, trying to work with him, it could be done.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's actually quotes and first hand evidence that this is the case.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I wonder if he was just never quite himself after his mental break.
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He tried creating perfect British subjects,
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: every morning and eventually he was dismissed from his posts and the average those left wept as he left because they loved him so much and I think this is one of those times where two things can be true at once.
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can be loved by the people that you serve and you can be impossible to work with with people who serve alongside you.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He then went on and volunteered as a chaplain at a reserve in North Queensland.
• 26:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Harris writes that Ernest's happiest years were when he was joined by his friend James and Noble.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we need to back up a bit and talk about the man who started a slash inspired this episode.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: James Noble made Australian history in 1925 for being the first Aboriginal admitted to the Holy Order or ordained ministries in the Anglican Church and in a church address a few months before his ordination he shared his heart with the church body in Melbourne saying, I am very blown.
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am the only black people left.
• 26:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I speak like this you know what I mean.
• 26:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wish we could come back two or 300 years ago, and they were plenty of black.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you might have saved them, but now it is too late.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not your fault.
• 27:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They tried to live like you and so they died.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only way to save their life is Christian, grace, and teaching.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alone they will die out because they have no people to stand and speak for them when I die.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can speak for those black people.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this seems like a very dire and pessimistic speech, but it was, like I said before, a very commonly held sentiment among all Australians of this time period because there were only about 80,000 Aboriginals left in all of Australia.
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to illustrate this, Ernest scribble was over the moon when the birth rate at Yarabha began to exceed the death rate.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the dominant mindset was that this was the setting sun for the aboriginals, and so the best you can do is make them comfortable in their last generations, and for many Christians that meant sharing the gospel with them.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And James Noble was born in 1876 in North Queensland.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Any spent as teenage years working as a drover moving cattle for a family called The Doils.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And their son asked his father for permission for James to be educated to which the father agreed and then he was cared for by the Doyle family and educated at the Scone Grammar School.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The doils were a Christian family, and James attended Sunday's school with him and he was baptized at 19, and he later told about his conversion saying, Before I became a Christian, I was a bush native.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: My mother and father died in the bush.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I first saw white people when I went to a station.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: in Lekert County.
• 28:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And by the time, at that time, I was only a boy.
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I stayed there for a long time, and the station owner took me to his home at Scone.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I learned to read at the Grammar School at Scone.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I reached the fourth class at school.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And up to that time, I had heard about lots of prayers, where big and in churches.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then a missionary came along and lectured on missions.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was the Reverend Mr. Boyce.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was when I heard the real things that influenced me.
• 28:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I felt that I wanted to do some good.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to go to New Guinea where Mr. Boyce came from.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I was not permitted to do that, owing to the prevalence of disease there.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was at Townsville for three or four years and afterwards at Yarraba.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or Mr. Gerbow was stationed.
• 29:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I stayed there with him.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was not a missionary at that time, but was wishing that someday I would be.
• 29:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can see it in its testimony here, but one of the things I stood out to James about his Christian faith were its missionary origins from the very beginning the gospel being spread the Roman Empire and its continuing missionary impulse.
• 29:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was sent a study under a certain bishop, but this man died not long after James arrived at his mission, and their James began to attract the wrong kind of attention because he was incredibly fast and athletic.
• 29:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He could run 150 yards in 14 seconds, which is only just a little bit slower than you sane bolt.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And understandably, another bishop was concerned that he would get pulled away into a sporting career and so they sent him to study at Yarraba under Ernest Gribble in 1898 when he was 22 years old.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is here at Yarraba where he meets all three of his future wives.
• 29:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: because things moved very quickly in those days.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: His first wife and child died within a few weeks of each other, and then a few months later he was set to marry another woman, but she died before the wedding.
• 30:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so then he married a woman named Angelina in October of 1902.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: So for context, his first wife had died in May of the same year, so 1902 was a bit of a whirlwind, and they just did things very differently back then, but he and Angelina stayed together until his death, and she is an amazing woman, but her background was really rough and sadly representative of what many native women went through, because
• 30:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was kidnapped by a horse trader as a young girl and was put to work as a stockman's boy.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her hair was cut short and she wore men's clothing, and she was renamed Tommy.
• 30:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But she was really there to serve as a concubine to the man who was stolen her.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then she was later freed by police and was sent to live at the Yara Bomb Mission.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: She arrived still dressed like a man and the police who picked her out thought she was a young man and it wasn't until they were cleaning out their toilets that they discovered that she wasn't in fact a girl.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But more on Angelina later, James quickly established himself as an excellent preacher and teacher, it was appointed as a lead teacher and Yara Bosch representative to the North Queensland Sinod.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He and Angelina were even placed in charge of one of the largest garabot outstations, and about two years after they were married, they accompanied Gribble to Mitchell River on the western side of North Queensland to explore starting a mission there.
• 31:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Angelina's role in the early success of the mission cannot be understated and reading from Guan's book here.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The presence of Angelina Noble had opened up for the missionaries a whole new domain of interaction and confidence with the women and children.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whilst a bush average niece had seen Aboriginal men as native police, stockmen or general retainers to whites, it is most unlikely that they would have been countered an Aboriginal woman traveling freely with her husband in a party of whites.
• 31:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The main experience of aboriginal women with whites was that of rape or abduction into concubinage, concubinage.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: With those aboriginal women on the station precincts, mostly detained against their will.
• 32:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Coming as she had to be his experiences herself, Angelina would have been well placed to understand the apprehensions of aboriginal women and their fears for the safety of their own children in the presence of whites.
• 32:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her ability in languages was also key.
• 32:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: She spoke five aboriginal languages and around 14 dialects.
• 32:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you talk about a skilled polyglot.
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was amazing.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the mission foundation was laid there at Mitchell River and so they returned to Yaraba.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the mission they started there were later be known as Kowan Yamma and is now a self governing aboriginal municipality with a 76% Christian population.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Four years later, the nobles joined three missionaries to found the Roper River Mission in the Northern Territory to the west of Queensland.
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hope these little tidbits of where things are is helpful to you because I'll be honest my knowledge of the geography of Australia is very sketchy.
• 33:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So hopefully you are able to kind of track with where all these things are, if not, maybe pull up a map for this episode.
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Angelina was specifically begged by the Yara box community to go to this new mission because in the words of one boy, she can do the work among the women that the men can't do.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: and work at the mission progressed rapidly.
• 33:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The locals realized that it was a place of safety and refuge.
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: A highly respected elder named Gadja Yuma, or Old Bob, his son was also named Bob, led the way in bringing his people and other clans to the mission.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And one of those who came later said, if the missionaries hadn't come, my tribe would have been all shot down.
• 33:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Due to persistent ill health, the nobles were forced to return to Yaraba, but they were remembered for years and years as the ones who helped bring the gospel to the region.
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when the nobles returned to Yaraba, Ernest Gribble was no longer there, this was after his mental break, and while he was serving as a rector in New South Wales.
• 33:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And James wrote to him and told him to let him know if he ever were to start up another mission and he would come at once.
• 34:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a few years later, he got the chance.
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: An urgent call went out from a mission in Northwestern, Australia, at the Forest River Mission was in danger of collapse.
• 34:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: They land was being cleared and the locals were more than willing to counter violence with violence.
• 34:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And reading from the book again,
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once the nobles arrived, the team began to accelerate their work of giving practical as well a spiritual instruction.
• 34:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within the first year, a large number attended weekly services, where James led and preached regularly.
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: A school was opened and locals weren't to trust their children to the mission school, leaving them there for lessons when the rest of their context was unsafe for children.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Angelina played a key part in this, as a black woman with children there, whom the local women could trust.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three children were born to the noble set for a stripper, Angelina's linguistic gifts were also critical, especially as James was weak in this area.
• 34:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to the noble's daughter, her father never really picked up the local language, and was limited to his native language from Normandon.
• 34:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: By contrast, Angelina spoke five languages over there, as well as the language from Darwin, Angelina translated for James, Gribble, and the public authorities.
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Her linguistic capacity would have been matched by the cultural insight that comes from learning a new tongue.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was the only woman worker at Forest River for at least six years, in charge of the school dormitory health care, doing all the baking and teaching, cooking and laundry skills.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is no wonder at all that Gribble had the highest esteem for her as a missionary.
• 35:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Early 1925 saw Gribble and the nobles travel around Australia on a nine month reputation, telling the story of the mission and asking for more support.
• 35:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the first years of the mission, there were many more conversions on baptisms, and
• 35:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Too often I hear people say you can't teach the black man.
• 35:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I hear a man say that, I ask, well what am I?
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: God is strong and the missionary does good things in his name.
• 35:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: 11 years ago they were all heathen people at Forest River.
• 35:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then Mr. Grable came and devoted his life to the master.
• 35:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He came to try and save the black people and then God is blessed his work.
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead of the wild bush and nothing else at Forest River there is now a cross standing.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once upon a time, black people ate black people, all people like meat, and black people like it, too.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Mr. Grivel came in the good news spread, and now there's no more cannibalism.
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: They put that all the way, God is strong.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: During this deputation, James was often speaking at three times a day, and the crowds were drawn to his eager, heartfelt and impassioned presentation.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: One newspaper remarked.
• 36:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mr. Noble, the Aboriginal preacher, has won the hearts of everyone and has made many friends during the time he has been in the parish.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The social committee felt that they could not let him leave for his home without showing him in some way their feelings of love and respect.
• 36:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Quite a large number of parishioners were present at the Kiosk call on Friday night, and Mr. Noble was giving a rousing reception.
• 36:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another newspaper says, Mr. James Noble, who has become exceedingly popular among the exhibition audiences, spoke in an earnest sincere way on the good effects of the upon those of his countrymen in the passing from Heathenism to Christianity.
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then in May of 1926, Aboriginals and these Frontier settlers got into a confrontation.
• 37:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The settlers took the chief, Flog Tim and broke his spear, and the old chief then used his broken spear to kill the settlers, and settlers got all riled up and they went out to get retribution.
• 37:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the local police helped, an organized group of 13 men who wrote the area, capturing, chaining, and finally killing every aboriginal they could find.
• 37:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Initially, Grable had sided with the police, believe in if they were trying to bring those responsible to justice.
• 37:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when he began to have doubts, he asked James, who was quite a good tracker to go and investigate.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And from the book again, Noble returned this evening having found the spot on the upper forest where the police shot and burned their native prisoners.
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He brought back a parcel of charter maines.
• 37:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The natives were shot on stones and the bed of the river.
• 37:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The blood is still all around.
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were able identify 12 victims, most of the evidence was washed away by a time they began the investigation.
• 38:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The local police ended up being cleared, it was decided they were acting in self-defense.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were then transferred out of the district and also promoted if I'm not mistaken.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And from this event, the settler community turned against Gribble and against the mission.
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gribble was then sacked by his org and it left the now struggling mission in 1928, and the nobles followed a few years later.
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gribble moved back to Queensland to serve at a mission there, and he asked the nobles to join him, but they couldn't seemingly because of the government laws that severely hampered the movement of avariginals from one area to another.
• 38:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So instead, they worked nearby on another small island in the same area.
• 38:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: until James's health began to fail.
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to live out his final days back at Yarraba and so he and Angelina moved back there.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reading again.
• 38:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The picture of James' final years at Yarraba is one of an Aboriginal man returning to his cultural roots and loves, fishing, hunting, teaching younger men how to make shields, boomerangs, stone tomahawks, and spear tips from stingray spines.
• 39:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He maintained Christian ministry, and visiting the sick and leading services, but he was also a growing senile.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: James Noble died in the Karen's hospital, and the 25th of November 1941, and is buried at Yarraba.
• 39:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Angelina Outlived James by 23 years, also dying at Yarbaugh and his very next to her husband.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there is an Angelina Noble Center, which opened in 2019 and it honors her legacy by training women to minister cross-culturally.
• 39:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then Ernest Gribble died in 1957, and he is also buried near his friend James.
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a quote in this book that I quite like, and I want to share with you.
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It reads, We must remember Barnabas Roberts' words.
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thank God for the missionaries.
• 39:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the missionaries had not come, we would all be dead.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is not to say that missionaries got everything right, or that the following history is flawless, and faultless, far from it.
• 39:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in an age when all things Christian are missionaries are too easily dismissed as colonialists, or patriarchal, or culture destroying, their story demands and more nuanced and fair assessments.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment and co-sign it, because even as I was looking up, different sources and things of that for this episode, I came across some very hateful and vitriolic sentiments against Christians and against missions, and the thought of saying that there was everything was done perfectly, as we have emphasized many times.
• 40:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But to say that I think it is unfortunate that it is so slanted, and there is a lot more we could say on this subject and certainly on more people we could cover.
• 40:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But for now, let's just leave it here.
• 40:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Although once again, I do say if you bite more information on this subject, I do recommend one blood by John Harris.
• 40:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I will also link that.
• 40:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the episode description, and also if you want to read more about amazing people, look into David, Unaipan.
• 40:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was born in 1872 on a mission in South Australia, and he was the son of the first Christian Convert at the mission, and he was brilliant.
• 40:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was later called Australia's Da Vinci.
• 41:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is also on the $50 Australian note, fastening individual, definitely look into him if you get the chance.
• 41:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as always, thank you for listening to