6 - Suffer the children: Wesleyans in the D'Entrecasteaux

Summary

The saving of the children is a special feature of the work in this district. It is costly, but it pays…

(AMMR, 4 March 1907:6)

Why did the Wesleyan mission in New Guinea devote itself with such fervour to saving the children? This chapter offers further reflections on a number of themes I entertained in an earlier essay, ‘A Tropology of the Dobu Mission’ (1980), in which I examined several dominant metaphors of evangelical rhetoric. I concluded as follows:

If in its earliest phase the Mission sought to gain the ownership of the means of social reproduction (‘get hold of the girls’ and ‘rescue the children’), it was ultimately a self-defeating aim. Inspired rhetorical tropes which countermanded the Dobuan familial order in favour of a Mission ideal of Christian kinship, did not, in the long run, spell the death of Dobuan society – for it flourishes still. But they surely did create considerable mischief for a time by setting the children against the parents.

(Young 1980:103)

Here I hope to give greater substance to these claims.

Since we cannot know in precise detail what the family systems of pre-contact New Guinea societies were like we are required to exercise historical and anthropological imagination. There is, however, a great amount of detailed information about early missions provided by themselves and written largely for themselves. Here we are required to exercise also a sociological imagination in discounting prejudices, snaring preconceptions, and generally peering through the screen of mystifications which all religious sects erect, wittingly or not, to protect their particular truths.