No abstract

Lutheran missionaries from Germany arrived in 1887 to ‘care for’ and to evangelise to the Kuku‐Yalanji people of the Bloomfield River area of the north Queensland rainforests. They left fifteen years later without having converted a single soul. Was this failure the result of inept missionisation? Was Lutheranism at odds with Kuku‐Yalanji religious beliefs? This paper argues that the answer lies rather at the core of the Kuku‐Yalanji worldview and social universe. Using rich historical sources, this paper demonstrates that Kuku‐Yalanji people—who have particular socio‐territorial ties to the mission lands—instigated an experiment with the missionaries. Their assumption was that the missionaries held a role that was structurally equivalent to that of ‘majamaja’ in their own system—key focal individuals with religious knowledge, power and achieved status operating at the node of a social network on a particular area of ‘country’. The missionaries failed to live up to this expectation and for this and other reasons, Kuku‐Yalanji left and the mission failed with no lasting Christian impact.

This paper arises out of my more than 40 years personal experience in the Daintree rainforest region of far north Queensland in Australia. Over this time, I have marveled at the starkly different ways in which people that live and visit think about the land, and particularly about the rainforest itself. I present in this paper my ‘reading’ of what different locals have said to me about the landscape and what it means to them. In particular, I focus on Kuku-Yalanji people, the indigenous residents of the area. I also draw for this paper on my reading of texts created by other, non-indigenous parties with interests in the Daintree: early colonial explorers, contemporary land developers, tourist operators and conservationists.

No abstract

No abstract