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Paper short abstract:

This research contributes to the historical scholarship on Aboriginal missions in Australia through detailed archival analysis which draws on anthropological frameworks and theorists to propose new ways of using archives to analyse the historical construction of spaces and identities on missions.

Paper long abstract:

Through the arrival of the Methodist missionaries to North East Arnhem Land in the early twentieth century, Milingimbi (which was already part of Yolŋu relations with country and kin) was drawn into new and expanding networks of people and places. The years of this mission before the Second World War are moving beyond living memory, although in Milingimbi there remain many who continue to carry the oral histories of the place. However, away from this site, it is predominantly through the written accounts left by missionaries and anthropologists that details of these early years are found. Whilst these records have an important role in representing some aspects, their value remains limited as they do not represent the dynamic experiences of the Yolŋu people whose lives were and still are significantly impacted by colonisation to their lands. My project is to determine the value of accounts left by missionaries and anthropologist in a way that retains the temporality and 'specificities' of histories without reducing the mission to a fixed and determined space, by which the social interactions become unrecognisable. This requires conceptualising the mission in terms of a space shaped through its constituents and in which multiple stories coexist -both known and unknown within the archival record. Such a view, I argue, enables a standpoint to explore the mission space as contextual, contested and configured and to observe what else was going on, amidst the projects and imagined altruism shaping the rhetoric of the official records.