The Gulf Country ----A National Disgrace, page-45

The Roper River Mission Cont.

Apart from this highly important distinction, the missionaries saw industrial and agricultural training as closely related to the gospel. The instructions they were given sounded spiritual, but after all it depends on what is meant by the gospel. All of these early missionaries saw work and gospel as almost synonymous. They even referred to the 'gospel of work' the function of the mission.

 

They would instil European cultural traits as labour and cleanliness were not merely next to godliness -they were godliness: Our work is of an industrial nature. Gardening, building.Stock work, school, sewing, laundry, and raffia, cooking. Housework,cleanliness, all taught under the influence of Christianity: the Ideal.

Of course, being Christ-likeness.’ It was, then, with these kinds of objectives,with these thoughts filling their minds that three missionaries left Melbourne on 13 July 1908. On their way to Roper River, via north Queensland, the founding party called at the Church of England mission at Yarrabah.

 

Three Aboriginal Christians from Yarrabah agreed to join the team. These were James Noble, Angelina Noble and Horace Reid. The party, now six in number, set out on the Francis Putt from Thursday Island on 8 August 1908, arriving at the chosen site on the Roper River on 27 August. Their first act was to hold a communion service as a thanksgiving to God for all his mercies since 'leaving the homeland' and to mark the founding of the mission.

 

From the moment these first missionaries arrived, they were welcomed by the Aboriginal people of the immediate vicinity. In particular, they were encouraged by the acceptance and active support of Gajlyuma, an old and respected elder, not only in his own Mara tribe, but throughout the whole region.

Soon nicknamed King Bob. Gajlyuma assumed responsibility for the people gathering at the mission and it isobvious that the local people perceived the newly-established mission as a sanctuary, within the protection of which they were safe from European violence.

 

Barnabas Roberts, an Alawaman who came to the mission as a young boy when it first commenced, once said:'If the missionaries hadn't come, my tribe would have been all shot down.' In the 1960s, there were older people at Roper River who could still recall the atrocities and spoke about them.

Max Hart visited the district in 1965 to gather data and obtained information from some of these people: The older Aborigines at the mission still talk about these murders knowing that they were protected from them.