I’m impressed that you managed to get the Muslims into these threads—but that isn’t anything new in these threads. But since I've put in some history--no complaints here.
The Nth cont.
Although the garden plots yielded well at the end of the wet season, later on there was not always enough to feed the Aboriginal people. To their sorrow, the missionaries had occasionally to send them away for a while. The missionaries were often hungry themselves and referred to their situation as one of extreme poverty. 'We sometimes catch a bandicoot,' wrote Strele in 1883 and three years later the Jesuits were still saying that 'up to the present we have lived on Divine Providence.
The first results of this more concerted language research appeared within a few months as translations of prayers and hymns. Later missionaries were to benefit from 'notes on grammar collected from the actual speech of more than a thousand natives'.
The Jesuits became particularly in Larakla and by March 1885, they felt they had gained sufficient language competence to start a school with Larakia as the language of instruction and a lively group of about twelve pupils was taught basic literacy in Larakia, basic numeracy and Bible stories.
But the Jesuits were continually frustrated by fluctuating attendance. Whereas the adults were happy for the missionaries to care for the children, they were not happy to leave the children without a relative nearby. Consequently, whenever adults went away, they took certain children with them.
There were sometimes as many as fifty adults willing to do some work, at other times none at all. Agriculturally, the mission still succeeded exceptionally well when compared with the other failures in the Darwin region.
This was important to the Jesuits, as they considered St Joseph's to be a 'head station' from which they would extend their missionary outreach into the inland. The Jesuits decided to expand their work first into the Daly River region and by 1886 there were ten missionaries, so they felt able to spare three men for some exploratory work.
They were granted a mission reserve with an eight kilometre frontage to the river.On foot, with a dray load of supplies, they struggled for 250 kilometres to reach the Daly River late in September 1886.
The water had a soft soapy taste, like an extract, as it were from alligators and they spent some anxious nights, fearful of both the 'alligators' (crocodiles) and the Aborigines, four white men having recently been killed in the region.
