117 5. Managing mission life, 1869–1886 Claire McLisky (with Lynette Russell and Leigh Boucher) 1 In settler colonies such as Victoria, missions and reserves were the sites where colonial legislation and missionary/humanitarian ambitions encountered Aboriginal people and their own goals, where theories about race, conversion and ‘civilisation’ were translated into everyday practice. Colonial power, in the words of David Scott, ‘came to depend … upon the systematic redeinition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of the colonized was lived’, 2 and as the primary physical location in which these transformations were carried out, missions and reserves were laboratories both of Christian evangelical theories and of colonial rule. Granted astonishingly broad powers over Aboriginal people’s lives, mission and reserve managers applied and tested a variety of approaches to achieve the related goals of Aboriginal paciication, protection, conversion and civilisation. 3 Their ability to do this was aided by the fact that missions and reserves were usually isolated from both rural settler populations and the metropolitan centres that often sought to dictate colonial and missionary policy. Yet despite this isolation, the low of information and inluence between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ was anything but unilateral; missions, reserves and Aboriginal people themselves fed ‘knowledge’ back into colonial, and metropolitan, understandings of race and ‘Aboriginality’, which in turn came to inluence subsequent policy and legislation. 1 I would like to thank Alan Lester for his incisive comments on the review copy of this piece, and also the other, anonymous reviewer for his/her helpful feedback. In addition, Ben Silverstein and Felicity Jensz provided advice that helped to sharpen its argument. Most importantly, many thanks to my co-authors Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell, whose input whilst I was on maternity leave made its publication possible. 2 David Scott, ‘Colonial governmentality’, Social Text 43, Autumn 1995: 205 (original emphasis). 3 During the period under consideration, missionary and oicial ideas about what the end point of Christian mission to Aboriginal people might mean were often contradictory. Discourses around ‘smoothing the pillow of a dying race’ through material assistance and deathbed conversions often co-existed with the ideal of creating a Christian Aboriginal population which, it was imagined, would eventually assimilate into settler society. With the advent of the Aborigines Protection Act 1886 (Vic), however, a clear distinction was made between those who should be ‘protected’ (people of unmixed Aboriginal heritage), and those who should be immediately ‘assimilated’ (people of mixed Aboriginal heritage). The Act envisaged missions and reserves exclusively as places for the former ‘category’. It should be noted, however, that not all missionaries and reserve managers agreed with this policy. John Bulmer, for example, was repeatedly cautioned by the Board for giving supplies to ‘half-castes’ (Clare Land, ‘Law and the construction of ‘race’: critical race theory and the Aborigines Protection Act, 1886, Victoria, Australia’, in Penelope Edmonds and Samuel Furphy (eds), Rethinking Colonial Histories: New and Alternative Approaches, RMIT Publishing, Melbourne, 2006: 155, ftn 107). Similarly, Daniel and Janet Matthews at Maloga Mission in New South Wales took in ‘half-castes’ who were no longer welcome at Victorian missions. See Claire McLisky, ‘Settlers on a Mission: Faith, Power and Subjectivity in the Lives of Daniel and Janet Matthews’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2009: 22.