Magic lantern slide performances became an important means of communicating across the empire, and during the 1890s British campaigners pleading for the metropolitan waif competed with local missionaries seeking to arouse compassion for Aboriginal people. Their visual and rhetorical strategies sought to secure public sympathy for their very different causes, through a range of emotional effects, with larger implications for imperial identities. The London-based Barnardo’s orphanages successfully raised funds in the Australian colonies through travelling performances aiming to arouse pity for the metropolitan poor by combining slum sensation with documentary force. White settler audiences were asked to administer relief to the waifs of the Mother Country. During these years such performances competed with Australian missionaries such as John Brown Gribble, who travelled widely to tell the story of his mission work and raise funds for his new settlement, Yarrabah, in north Queensland. Gribble was, however, challenged on the grounds of telescopic philanthropy to re-assert a racialist hierarchy and ridicule humanitarianism. This dynamic shows how emotional narratives worked to construct imperial relations, contest national or cosmopolitan world-views, and simultaneously constitute metropolitan and colonial culture.

Violent conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people had ceased across most of the continent, but north-western Western Australia continued to witness clashes, brutal labour practices and sexual exploitation. In 1885, the missionary John Brown Gribble, fresh from a visit to London’s Exeter Hall circle, attempted to establish a mission in the Gascoyne River region. He quickly antagonised the region’s pastoralist interests and a press scandal eventuated, in which the pastoralist lobby sought to ridicule Gribble’s claims for sympathy toward Aboriginal people, and assert their own. Gribble aspired to what is often termed ‘muscular Christianity’, a form of masculinity that linked spiritual belief to more secular values of bravery and heroism, and his hero was African abolitionist and missionary David Livingstone. British anti-slavery sentiment framed Gribble’s notorious 1886 denunciation, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land. Yet the colonial public was sceptical regarding what many considered sensational and excessive. Gribble’s writing is typical of narratives of Christian heroism within a religious literary tradition of persecution, self-sacrifice and redemption that were ultimately modelled upon the life of Jesus Christ himself.