ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 looks at the Protestant attempts to convert the Aborigines to Christianity. Commencing with the chaplaincy of Samuel Johnson, the chapter covers the most significant of the Christianising endeavours carried out by the colonial government and Protestant missionary societies. Their missionaries, while adopting the hierarchical view of indigenous peoples, simultaneously dismissed race as an impediment to development, which demonstrates that their views bore more than just a passing resemblance to the progressive ideas of Enlightenment philosophers. In their attempts to introduce agriculture and “mechanical arts” the missionaries were not only trying to eradicate indolence, considered by them as incompatible with Christian ethics, but also to “advance the Aborigines in the scale of civilisation”. Dwelling on the substance of the “civilisation-Christianisation” debate and its influence on the nature of the evangelising strategies, the chapter highlights the preponderance of secular “civilising” approaches, reluctantly adopted by the missionaries in the face of the Aborigines’ unabated rejection of the alien to them religious doctrine.
