About time aborigines thanked white colonial christian missionaries for saving them from extinction...let's just ignore the sacrifices colonialists made for them..that's racism! Finding a suitable spot for missions was tough. Droughts and deserts, low-fertile soil, crocodiles and venomous snakes, swamps and jungles, malaria, typhoid and cholera, and long distances were huge challenges. Sadly, the missionaries often ran out of Aboriginal people whose demise was commensurate with the proximity of white settlements. Until after World War II, the missionaries were the only people who cared for the Aboriginal people, and the missions were places of Aboriginal survival. Without them, it’s likely there’d be no Aboriginal people left today. For example, missionary Joynt wrote in 1918 that the “function of the mission was to protect the Aborigines from being: (1) Exploited. (2) Demoralized. (3) Killed.” Remembering his childhood in the Northern Territory, Roberts, an Alawa man said in 1979 - “If the missionaries hadn’t come, my tribe would have been all shot down.” Harris writes – “In south-eastern Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century, missions like Lake Tyers and Maloga were places of survival. The major threat from which these missions protected Aboriginal people was no longer violent death. Missions later provided such refuges elsewhere in Australia, as the frontier extended north, but in Victoria and NSW the killing was mostly over. The ultimate threat to Aboriginal survival came from the low birthrate.” The earlier, southern missions were smaller, more regimented, and often wedged between farms. The later, northern missions were larger, less regimented reserves. This reflected the landscape and historical sequence because the south was settled earlier than the north.
