White Man’s Dreaming by Christine Stevens

White Man’s Dreaming

Killalpaninna Mission 1866-1915

by Christine Stevens

Oxford University Press, 1994, [First Edition], ISBN 019553574X, black and white photographic plates and photographs, coloured endpapers, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, minor rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, no inscriptions, dustjacket shows minor edge and shelf wear with minor rubbing to edges and corners (see photographs)

“The history of the Killalpaninna Mission (1866-1915) is stark and tragic.  White Man’s Dreaming tells how a group of Lutheran missionaries dominated the Diyari Aborigines of the far north of South Australia.  These missionaries – part of the great exodus of Lutherans from Prussia to South Australia after 1838 – were intent on spreading their religious faith to the ‘underprivileged heathen’ of the New World.  With great perseverance, despite heat, drought, floods, disease and despair, the missionaries made their cumbersome way to the desert dwelling Diyari and established the Killalpaninna Mission.
Ironically, having appropriated Aboriginal land and introduced European livestock, the Lutherans came to depend on Aboriginal domestic labour and stockmen,  The Diyari, in turn, forced into an uneasy dependence on the mission for rations that supplanted now polluted water supplies and traditional food sources, moved confusedly between two cultures and two sets of religious beliefs.  The mission became a mere refuge from outer violence and a ration station for the dispossessed people.  One of the leading missionaries, Johann Georg Reuther, reported that mission work was ‘a stony field…full of human bones’.”