Ethnographers, historians, and linguists have argued for many years about the nature of the relationship between missionaries and their collaborators. Critics of missionary linguistics and education have pointed out that Bible translations were tools forged for the cultural conquest of native people and that missionary impacts on local cultures nearly always destructive and frequently overwhelming (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Rafael 1988; Sanneh 1989). Sociolinguistic readings of scripture translation have emphasized the cultural loss inherent in the act of translation and even seemingly benign activities such as dictionary making (Errington 2001; Peterson 1999; Tomlinson 2006). To make this point, Rafael (1988: xvii) notes the semantic links between the various Spanish words for conquest (conquista), conversion (conversión), and translation (traducción). Historians, on the other hand, have generally been more skeptical about the power of mere words to exert hegemonic pressure on colonized people and have emphasized the more tangible power of guns and commerce as agents of empire (Porter 2004). Few would deny the symbolic power of the Bible as a representation of colonial domination, as in the saying attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu by Cox (2008: 4): “When the white man arrived, he had the Bible and we had the land; now, we have the Bible and he has the land.”
Of all the various infections that afflicted Aboriginal people in Australia during the years of first contact with Europeans, smallpox was the most disastrous. The physical and social impacts of the disease are well known. This article considers another effect of the contagion. It is argued that a nativist movement in the form of a waganna (dance ritual) associated with the Wiradjuri spirit Baiame and his adversary Tharrawiirgal was linked to the aftermath of the disease as it was experienced at the settlement site of the Wellington Valley of New South Wales (). The discovery of this movement is of considerable significance for an understanding of Aboriginal responses to colonization in southeastern Australia. It is the earliest well-attested nativist movement in Australian ethnohistory.
Greater Britain -the English-speaking settler colonies of the British empire which we are more likely now to refer to as the British world -was an idea as much as a set of territories. 1 For the free Christian churches of the peoples of Great Britain and Ireland, it was also a mission field. This is a novel idea and one which I hope to argue throughout the course of this book. Chapter 1 begins by examining the idea of Greater Britain , first as a concept in the writing of Charles Wentworth Dilke , and then as it was taken up by the churches who adopted the term as their own in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It also introduces topics raised in subsequent chapters which examine the arrangements and organisations that were marshalled across the empire in order to provide religious services for colonists. In subsequent chapters, this book considers the development of missions to British settlers, including the colonial missionary societies ( Chapters 3 to 7 ), missionary training colleges for colonial clergy ( Chapters 8 to 10 ), church emigration societies ( Chapter 10 ), and Christian colonisation ( Chapters 11 and 12 ). Together, these provisions for the colonial churches helped shape the powerful, shared sense of British identity that suffused the British world and to which Dilke was able to give a name.In 1897, the English Baptist pastor and writer , John Clifford , completed a tour of Australia , New Zealand and Canada , during which he was swept up in the elaborate colonial celebrations for the Queen 's diamond jubilee. 2 Experiencing at close hand the wave of colonial devotion to the Queen, he confidently predicted a great coming federation of Greater Britain , which would be made up of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland , 1Colonialism, colonisation and Greater Britain1 For settler loyalism and the 'imagined British world', see C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, eds.,
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