The missions in Australia were different from those in other fields around the world, argue Joanna Cruikshank and Patricia Grimshaw in their new book on white women and Aboriginal missions. In Australia, single and ‘professional’ missionary women were rarer. Instead, women missionaries to Aboriginal people tended to be wives and daughters; the mission was an extension of the home. But, crucially, these missions were also an extension of settler-governments. An ‘entanglement’ between government and missions meant that missions were variously constrained and enabled by settler government agendas. ‘Missionary maternalism’, therefore, emerged both from settler government policies of ‘protection’ as well as Protestant visions for family life.

Rather than a focused study of a denomination, region or subculture as others have done, this book gives a much needed and fresh account of Aboriginal missions in Australia. This alone is an important undertaking. In doing so, its authors bring new intellectual questions to bear – particularly the entanglement of missions with processes of settler-colonisation – on a vital chapter in Australia's Aboriginal and religious history as well as mission history more broadly.

Meticulously researched, the book ranges from the first colonial institutions, which sought to ‘civilise and Christianise’ Aboriginal people, to the remote missions of the 1950s when ‘assimilation’ replaced ‘protection’ as government policy for Aboriginal people. Cruickshank and Grimshaw do this through a series of detailed and often moving investigation of particular missions, their key personalities and their regimes of gender and race. They do not include the maternalist work of white Catholic women religious, though no doubt Catholic experiences were similar. For the authors, the Australian missions were fundamentally ‘maternal institutions’, particularly in their focus on children. White women's role in their surveillance and reform of Aboriginal women made for complex intimacies, even where there were friendships. Any opportunities for Aboriginal women to perform the role of model wives and mothers remained highly circumscribed. As the authors conclude, though white missionaries preached equality, the legacy of the contradictions inherent in their maternalist approach is seen in the inequalities that Indigenous Australians face even today.