The history of the early missionary enterprises in Australia and the Pacific is a little-known but extraordinary saga of sacrifice, misapprehension, confusion, disaster, courage and a great deal of misdirected effort. Firm in the conviction of their cultural, moral and spiritual superiority, and of the essential role of their own religious beliefs in the maintenance of that superiority, missionaries by the boatload crossed the world to realms almost completely unknown. Many died, some were eaten, and others gave up and returned to their comfortable existences in England.

Still, as time progressed, the foothold of Christianity became a stranglehold, with notable missionary triumphs recorded in many parts of the Pacific and in the early phases in New Zealand. No sustained successes, however, could be reported in Australia up to 1850, and singularly few after that. The failure of the early missions seems to have played a large part in confirming the common settler belief that there was nothing to be ‘done about’ the Aborigines and provided a justification for continuing violence against them.

My explorations of these early days through newspapers, official reports, missionary documents, published papers, pamphlets and books of the time were carried out at the same time as I was researching historical events in the Northern Territory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I had the great advantage of being able to talk with elderly Aborigines who gave accounts of events at the time from their own recollections, or from stories told by their parents.