9 - Missionary writing in Australia

Summary

… the most persevering and unabating zeal

Situated on the borders of state governmentalities and evangelical concerns, both a ‘man of God’ and a man who frequented the colonial law courts, newspapers, and public forums, Lancelot Threlkeld's position within the colonial culture of early Australia makes him a particularly interesting figure. It is precisely Threlkeld's liminality, I suspect, which led to his estrangement from more conservative religious institutions and individuals. Yet it is a position which he evidently relished and encouraged. This chapter analyses Threlkeld's role in the colonial public sphere, and examines his writing and that of other LMS representatives, both in terms of their perceptions of local Aborigines and their interventions in broader debates about missionary practices, gender issues, and settler colonies.

Threlkeld appears in the colonial archives as an undoubtedly difficult and stubborn man – Ben Champion discusses the ‘officiousness, self-opinionatedness and pessimism that tainted practically the whole of Threlkeld's missionary activities’ – yet his naïve assumption that colonial environments might allow such leeway in its public representatives is intriguing and, somehow, rather endearing. His liminality, and its inherent challenge to the colonial order in New South Wales, was especially evident in his writings. In textual debates surrounding Threlkeld, the LMS, Samuel Marsden, and other colonial and missionary figures, the highly provisional, improvisational nature of colonial missionary work was played out.