Martin Nakata is the director of the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning and the chair of Australian Indigenous education at the University of Technology in Sydney.

Disciplining the Savages Savaging the Disciplines

By Martin Nakata

Aboriginal Studies Press

Copyright © 2007 Martin Nakata
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85575-548-5

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Map: Islands of the Torres Strait,
Introduction,
Part One,
1. Missionary inscriptions of the ‘lost soul’,
2. Domesticating the savage,
3. Linguistic inscriptions of the language,
4. Psychological inscriptions of the mind,
5. Physiological inscriptions of the senses,
6. Anthropological inscriptions of the community,
7. Disciplining and regulating the body,
Part Two,
8. Disciplining the Islander in formal education,
9. Disciplining Indigenous Knowledge,
Part Three,
10. The Cultural Interface,
11. An Indigenous Standpoint theory,
Concluding remarks,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Missionary inscriptions of the ‘lost soul’

We can understand you captains, you come and trade with us, and then return to your own country to sell what you get: but who are these missionaries? Have they done something in their country, that they dare not return? (A Lifuan of the Loyalty Islands cited in MacFarlane, 1888, p. 41)

Despite the many thousands of years Islanders have spent developing complex and diverse cultures in the islands of Torres Strait, and in their interactions with mainland Australia and Papua New Guinea, in 1871 it appeared obvious to missionaries from England that the souls of the Islander people needed to be rescued. In this chapter, I chart one particular missionary’s rationalisation of his actions — his founding principles — to gain a broader understanding of the motivations that appeared to justify this major intervention into other people’s lives. Of course, this is not to find out who was responsible for the missions in the 1870s and apportion blame accordingly; nor is it to evaluate the obviously massive impact the missionaries have had on Islander communities retrospectively. My aim here is purely to explore and chart the way in which the Islander was transformed into both the subject and object of this early missionary endeavour, and provided from without with an inner soul that needed to be rescued and reshaped.

In his book Among the Cannibals of New Guinea — the first major publication dealing with the London Missionary Society’s (LMS) work in the Torres Strait — Rev Samuel MacFarlane (1888) has provided an interesting account of his mission to evangelise ‘New Guinea’. At the time the New Guinea Mission was established in 1871, the islands of the Torres Strait had not yet been annexed by the Queensland government so MacFarlane, quite arbitrarily, included them as part of New Guinea.

Despite twelve years of evangelising in the South Sea Islands, missionaries from the LMS did not know much about the region at all, so MacFarlane, in his own words, found it necessary to set out ‘at once to collect information and mature plans … to spy out the land’ (1888, pp. 12–13). Although knowing little, MacFarlane took with him a considerable body of assumptions which were to prove hard to shift. He believed that in Torres Strait he would find a fantastic, primitive, timeless world inhabited by people who were, seemingly all at once, cannibals, noble savages and lost souls.

It would be difficult to describe our feelings as we sailed towards that great land of cannibals, a land which, viewed from a scientific, political, commercial, or religious point of view, possesses an interest peculiarly its own. Whilst empires have risen, flourished, and decayed; whilst Christianity, science, and philosophy have been transforming nations, and travellers have been crossing polar seas and African deserts, and astonishing the world by their discoveries, New Guinea has remained the same … where the natives may be seen in the cocoanut groves [sic] mending their bows and poisoning their arrows, making their bamboo knives and spears, and revelling in war and cannibalism as they have been doing for ages. (MacFarlane, 1888, pp. 14–15)

MacFarlane’s reasoning posited a particular concept of the unknown in relation to what was already known about the outside world. By using developments in the civilised world as a benchmark, the ‘uncivilised’ world he was approaching was easily conceptualised as static, implying a society that knew no change or progress, a society from the past rather than with a past. What appeared to be commonsense provided the only possible conceptualisation for what had already been observed elsewhere in the region and what he felt sure he would be observing on arrival. Perhaps what was not so evident to MacFarlane was that his own views of progress and his own partial interests in the inhabitants of this ‘unknown’ part of the world would colour his observations to such a degree that his subsequent accounts of Islanders, who they were and why they were, would be a fiction. In the process, the view of Islanders with their own histories could be submerged, indeed rendered invisible, without challenge.

On 1 July 1871, MacFarlane and his crew arrived at Darnley Island in the Torres Strait. MacFarlane had chosen this island not randomly but quite deliberately. For him it possessed, in fact, a rich evangelical symbolism.

A consideration of the known, as well as the unknown and probable difficulties, led me to select Darnley Island as the most safe, central, and in every way the most suitable place at which to commence our mission. For such a work as we were beginning, we required a central station, which we might make our sanatorium, city of refuge, and educational centre. As a Scotchman, I remembered Iona and its history in connection with the evangelization of Scotland, and hoped that Darnley would prove the Iona of New Guinea. (MacFarlane, 1888, p. 28)

Like a latter day Saint Columba building an Iona-in-the-South-Seas, MacFarlane set out to do battle with the devil for the souls of these apparently primitive people. Like Saint Columba before him, MacFarlane was clear that he would need to establish a safe haven in what he foresaw as an inevitably hostile world. He needed a strong strategic base from which to mount his evangelical offensive.

Twenty years earlier John MacGillivray, who had been the naturalist on the HMS Rattlesnake’s expedition to survey the waters of the Torres Strait, had also considered the idea of establishing strategic settlements both on Cape York and to the east on Darnley (Erub to the Islanders) and Murray Islands (Mer to the Islanders). He, too, was thinking in terms of a strategic base, although in his usage this had at once a military and a religious sense.

In a military point of view the importance of such a post has been urged upon the ground, that in the event of war, a single enemy’s ship stationed in the neighbourhood, if previously unoccupied, could completely command the whole of our commerce passing through the Strait …

5th. From what more central point could operations be conducted with the view of extending our knowledge of the interior of New Guinea by ascending some of the large rivers of that country, disemboguing on the shores of the Great Bight?

6th and lastly. But on this point I would advance my opinion with much diffidence — I believe that were a settlement to be established at Cape York, missionary enterprize, judiciously conducted, might find a useful field for its labours in Torres Strait, beginning with the Murray and Darnley Islanders, people of a much higher intellectual standard … and consequently more likely to appreciate any humanizing influence which might be exercised for their benefit. (MacGillivray, 1852, p. 320)

It would be helpful here to understand that the narrow waterway known as Torres Strait, which lies between Australia and Papua New Guinea, is less than 200 kilometres wide, a narrow bottleneck between two great oceans: the Arafura Sea to the west and the Coral Sea to the east. It is considered such a bottleneck because of the many islands dotted throughout its waterway, the maze of coral reefs that span the length and breadth of the Strait, the shallow waters, and the dangerous tidal surges and currents that run between them. The scores of ships that lie wrecked on reefs in the Strait are testimony to the difficulties sailors faced in manoeuvring through the narrow passages. Introducing a settlement to this region would have the effect of taming and civilising the unknown; it would eliminate the isolation and make the region part of the known world.

Adding to the perception of danger at this time were the stories of sailors who survived shipwrecks only to be attacked and eaten by natives. One of these tales had, in fact, become something of a preoccupation with travellers and voyagers in the nineteenth century. Thomas Wemyss (1837), for example, retells, in sickening detail, the story of a group of intrepid sailors and travellers who were ‘massacred … by natives addicted to thieving’ (p. 36) and ‘addicted to cannibalism’ (p. 24). Unfortunately, the mud was to stick for a very long time. Over a century later McInnes (1983), a historian who specialises in north Australian maritime history, continues to typecast the Islanders as cannibals, using — still in gory detail — the undisputed evidence from the wreck of the Charles Eaton:

[t]hey [the shipwrecked survivors] plodded around the island in search of food and water but were so exhausted by fatigue and hunger they could scarcely crawl and fell to the ground in despair. At this time the peaceful attitude of the natives changed alarmingly. The natives stood grinning and laughing in the most hideous manner and it soon became evident that they were exulting in anticipation of their murder … At a short distance off, making the most hideous yells, the other savages were dancing round a large fire before which were placed in a row the heads of their victims; whilst their decapitated bodies were washing in the surf on the beach, from which they soon disappeared. (McInnes, 1983, pp. 36–37)

In this way, the stain is still there in the records, intact and relatively undisputed.

In his narrative of the gruesome fate of the surviving members of the shipwreck Charles Eaton in the Torres Strait Islands, Wemyss suggests there could be four possible responses to the massacre:

To send a suitable force from India and New South Wales to seize these islands, to exterminate their inhabitants, and to take possession of them in the British name, so as to form settlements or colonies, in which the shipwrecked mariner may in future find a secure refuge.

To invade the islands as before, and without exterminating, to expatriate the natives, by landing them on the coast of New Holland [Australia], leaving them to find their own way in that vast continent.

To subdue the islands, and to preserve the inhabitants, making them tributary, and using such efforts to civilise and improve them, as would render them less formidable to all who might visit them.

But, as all efforts to civilise, by merely introducing the arts of life, have proved either very tedious or absolutely ineffectual, there remains only another plan, and that is, to introduce the Gospel among them by means of missionaries, and by translating the Scriptures into their language. (Wemyss, 1837, p. 34)

The first two responses were clearly rather drastic and, indeed, would have been counterproductive in terms of the established framework of Christian beliefs about preaching the gospel in ‘heathen’ lands. In contrast, the last two pointed the way towards the more acceptable response of introducing civilisation and improvement as well as the notion that communities ‘destitute of the light of the Gospel’ (p. 39) could be reformed and that such intervention was ‘the proper province of missionary exertion’ (p. 39). Whatever else motivated these early concerns with the souls of Islanders, it was essentially the strategic need to find a safe passage through the Strait from countries to the west to the eastern seaboard of Australia that had brought them into contact and created the problem in the first place.

Although MacFarlane (1888) could say, seemingly without intentional irony, that ‘[i]t was this terra incognita that we were approaching, with its primeval forests and mineral wealth and savage inhabitants’ (p. 15), he appears to have had very definite ideas about what he would find there:

It comes with a sense of relief to visit a country really new, about which little is known, a country of bonâ fide cannibals and genuine savages, where the pioneer missionary and explorer truly carries his life in his hand. A land of promise, capable of sustaining millions of people, in which however the natives live on yams, bananas, and cocoa-nuts [sic]. A land of mighty cedars and giant trees, where notwithstanding the native huts are made of sticks, and roofed with palm leaves. A land consisting of millions of acres of glorious grass, capable of fattening multitudes of cattle, where however neither flocks nor herds are known. A land of splendid mountains, magnificent forests, and mighty rivers, but to us a land of heathen darkness, cruelty, cannibalism, and death. We were going to plant the gospel standard on this, the largest island in the world, and win it for Christ. (MacFarlane, 1888, pp. 15–16)

The missionary’s task operated on two basic premises. The first was the need to inculcate Islanders into a moral world through what MacFarlane termed ‘a pure simple religion’ and the second was the need to insulate them from any encroachment from the civilised worlds which could prove pernicious. MacFarlane (1888) was convinced that he had a God -given mission to rescue ‘the multitude of souls who have lost the image of God’ (p. 24). Indeed, for these ‘lost souls’, he believed that the gospel was not ‘only the best civilizer, the best reformer, and the best handmaid to science, but that it … [was] the only way to eternal life’ (p. 24). It was the only means of preventing the natives from being overcome by human progress and civilisation.

So much was anticipated by this imaginative visionary and yet so little was actually known, as MacFarlane’s colleagues later found to their detriment. Before departing Lifu for the southern coast of Papua New Guinea in 1871, MacFarlane had recruited a fellow missionary, Mr Murray, as well as four native pastors and their wives. Illness and ailments claimed approximately half of their South Sea Islander recruits, especially in western areas of New Guinea where it was low and swampy. Far from being a land of promise, capable of sustaining millions of people, MacFarlane found what he was to later describe as a ‘sickly country’ (p. 160). It took a while, however, for him to accept the defeat of his initial blueprint, and it was only with reluctance that he resolved to train Islanders in the Torres Strait as missionaries. These Islanders, it was reasoned, would be more resistant to ailments in New Guinea and were also more akin to the people of its coastline communities than the Lifuan recruits from the Loyalty Islands. He thus moved to establish the Papuan Institute on Murray Island in 1880 as the central training ground, rather than on Darnley Island where he had first landed nine years prior. As far as MacFarlane was concerned, Murray Island was just that bit further off the main route yet still central to the New Guinea communities. Most importantly to the mission, it was reasoned, Torres Strait Islanders could be recruited from other islands and brought to Murray Island so that they were far enough away from both ‘their evil surroundings’ (p. 81), and the damaging influence of explorers, travellers and traders. That way there was little chance to stall his efforts to ‘win it for Christ’.

Nowhere in his later writings does MacFarlane cite any direct observation to support the practice of cannibalism in the islands and his worst fears, it would seem, were never realised. Indeed, the reality portrayed in his later writings and in the earlier writings of people who had spent some time in the region, was quite different. Joseph Beete Jukes (1847) and John MacGillivray (1852) had, in fact, found the Islanders to be mostly hospitable and helpful. They had, they said, welcomed them, willingly sharing their water and food supplies and demonstrating experience as traders. Far from being cannibals, MacFarlane was to find, these Islanders possessed all the attributes of ‘the noble savage’.

Although the idea of the noble savage has not weathered as well, it has, we will see, brought with it even further-reaching consequences for Islander people. Certainly, the original concept of the noble savage was at the time a very powerful one in Western thought, with its image of mankind living in a primitive state of innocence in nature; their own nature as yet unspoiled by the depredations and contaminations of civilisation. In MacFarlane’s writing the image is tied up with what he defined as the ideal ‘social state’ (p. 129) and rests on his inability to recognise, as evolved forms and structures, the complex societies that existed in New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands. As a missionary, he contended that ‘[t]here must be some goal, some state of perfection which we may never reach, but to which all true progress must bring us nearer’ (pp. 129–30). There is a crucial distinction in his mind between progress towards a distorted goal ingrained in civilised and developing nations and true progress to the ideal social state.

Observing Islander society he initially saw it thus:

It is a state of individual freedom and self-government, rendered possible by the equal development and just balance of the intellectual, moral, and physical parts of our nature — a state in which we shall each be so perfectly fitted for social existence by knowing what is right, and at the same time feeling an irresistible impulse to do what we know to be right, that all laws and all punishments shall be unnecessary. In such a state every man would have a sufficiently well-balanced intellectual organisation to understand the moral law in all its details, and would require no other motive but the free impulses of his own nature to obey that law. (MacFarlane, 1888, p. 130)

(Continues…)Excerpted from Disciplining the Savages Savaging the Disciplines by Martin Nakata. Copyright © 2007 Martin Nakata. Excerpted by permission of Aboriginal Studies Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.