ABSTRACT
By the end of the 1840s, accounts of missionary failure in Australia were seized upon in Britain, where popular views were informed by scientific arguments for fundamental racial difference. In attempting to counter ideas of essential otherness, the 'conversion narrative', contrasting a former state of savagery with a subsequent elevated Christian state, was widely deployed. Their visible transformation as signalled by clothes and other personal possessions revealed the progress made on the road to civilization, and Short concluded that there was 'now a small body of trained Christian natives, the nucleus of the native Church'. But Short was also echoing a discourse of noble savagery, as old as classical Greece, which praised the natural morality, simplicity or social harmony of Indigenous peoples. It is revealing to compare the 'happy deaths' of the Christian Aboriginal children with the death of the homeless London waif, Jo the crossing-sweep.
