Drudges, Shrews, and Unfit Mothers Representations of Papuan Women in the Publications of the London Missionary Society, 1873–1926

Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Social Sciences and Missions Sciences sociales et missions brill.com/ssm

John Barker University of British Columbia [email protected]

Abstract

Among the first Europeans to encounter and settle on the southeastern coast of New Guinea, members of the London Missionary Society contributed a large corpus of publications concerning indigenous peoples from the mid-1870s until the rise of professional anthropology in the 1920s. While these works focus mainly on the activities and concerns of men, women provide a key index of “civilization” relative to the working British middle class from which most missionaries came.This essay provides a survey of the portrayal of women in this literature over three partly overlapping periods, demonstrating a shift from racialist to moral discourses on the status of Papuan women – a shift that reflects transitions in both missionary and anthropological assumptions during this period.

Résumé

Les membres de la London Missionary Society, qui ont été parmi les premiers Euro- péens à atteindre la côte sud-est de la Nouvelle-Guinée et à s’y installer, ont produit un corpus important de publications sur les peuples autochtones, entre le milieu des années 1870 et les années 1920, qui marquent l’essor d’une anthropologie profession- nelle. Ces textes portent principalement sur les activités et les préoccupations des hommes, mais les femmes y sont aussi présentes comme un indice-clé du niveau de «civilisation », évalué par rapport à la classe moyenne laborieuse de Grande-Bretagne dont étaient issus les missionnaires. Cet article analyse la manière dont les femmes sont décrites dans ces écrits durant trois périodes qui se chevauchent en partie. Il montre une évolution d’un discours racialiste à un discours moral sur le statut des femmes papoues – une évolution qui reflète des transitions dans les présupposés à la fois missionnaires et anthropologiques durant cette période.

Keywords missionaries – Papua New Guinea – women

Mots-clés missionnaires – Papouasie Nouvelle-Guinée – femmes

From the onset of the mission to southeastern New Guinea in 1871 to the retirement of a second generation of missionaries in the mid-1920s, members of the London Missionary Society (lms) published more than 80 articles and books on their labours among indigenous Papuans. In an earlier article1 I surveyed this literature to examine how, over a half century, missionary thinking about indigenous Papuan culture and society was mutually conditioned by the neces- sities of maintaining financial and material support from home congregations, changing fashions in anthropological thought, and their direct experiences in the mission field. In this paper, I focus specifically on the representation of women. While the situation of Papuan women was far from a central theme in this literature, it was both a recurrent and crucial element. My claim is that these representations served a dual purpose of justifying missionary interventions and asserting the ethnographic authority of the authors. As thinking shifted on both fronts, so too did portrayals of women.2 Studying indigenous culture was incidental to missionary work during this period. Among the first whites to explore and settle along the southeastern coast of New Guinea, the pioneers were preoccupied with the tasks of establishing friendly relations and setting up bases for future work while their suc- cessors’ days were taken up with administering an ever-growing mission estab- lishment as schools and churches spread along the coast. Once settled, lms missionaries were expected to systematically study local languages and reduce them to writing for purpose of translating the Gospels, hymns, and other religious materials. They lived, however, largely apart from villagers in European

1 Barker (1996). 2 The initial research for this essay was carried out in 1978–1979 as a ma candidate at theVictoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, with the support of a Commonwealth Scholarship. I want to express my gratitude to the staff of Alexander Turnbull Library and my supervisor, Professor Ann Chowning. My thanks as well to Dr. Yannick Fer for his encouragement to return to this material and careful reading and corrections of the manuscript.

Social Sciences andDownloaded Missions from Brill.com09/28/2021 31 (2018) 7–33 01:12:39PM via free access representations of papuan women in the lms publications 9 fashion on mission stations. For the most part, their observations of local customs were far from systematic but gathered as time and interest allowed during patrols through the mission district and by questioning students and converts. Several lms missionaries published short ethnographic articles in anthropological journals and three veteran missionaries compiled their observations into full-length books which served as both memoirs and ethnographies. Most of the missionaries, however, wrote specifically for congregations in their home churches as well as popular audiences enthralled with the exotic romance of the exploration of “savage” lands. In the wake of David Livingstone’s fame as an African explorer, the popular audience for missionary books in this period was impressively large and did much to fix Western notions of indigenous peoples. With the single exception of Edith Turner’s Among Papuan Women (1920), the lms publications were authored by men who devoted most of their attention to the activities of Papuan men. Women remain largely unnoticed and unmentioned except in passages concerning daily work tasks, marriage, and child rearing. That said, there are very few missionary publications that fail to comment on the status of women. In these writings, gender is a key signi- fying domain in which we find considerable tension between representations of otherness and common humanity,3 reflecting a tension between the largely negative portrayal of “heathen” life and the fundamental assertion that the heathen themselves were redeemable.4 Brief and marginal as they tend to be, the descriptions of women’s lives and relationship to their menfolk also reflect changing notions of race and culture from the late Victorian age into the early twentieth century. In the following, I examine three sets of representative texts organized in overlapping chronological order. The first, dating from the 1870s into the early 1890s, concerns the pioneering phase of the missionary encounter during which lms missionaries were frequently the first Europeans to contact the coastal Papuan societies. The second, dating from around 1900 to 1920, focuses on missionary publications intended to inform and raise support from home churches. The final section examines three full-length missionary memoir- ethnographies, published in the mid-1920s. Before proceeding, a couple of clarifications are called for. First, my focus here is on missionary descriptions and characterizations of indigenous Papuan society prior to Christian conversion. Very often missionary publications con- clude with contrasting portraits of Christianizing communities which serve,

3 Comaroff and Comaroff (1991), pp. 105ff. 4 Thomas (1992).

Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:12:39PM via free access 10 barker among other things, to justify missionary interventions. In the case of women, these turn out to be predictable endorsements of (then) conventional notions of Western middleclass domesticity. I reference these representations in con- nection to missionary propaganda where they are the most obvious and rel- evant to understanding the ways missionaries tended to perceive indigenous women but leave a fuller study to the future. Second, I make no effort in what follows to determine the ethnographic accuracy or lack thereof of missionary ethnological observations. I am surveying a diverse literature that ranges from casual observations based upon the briefest of encounters to highly detailed accounts of local communities based upon years of interactions and familiar- ity with local languages.While the historical value of the publications is beyond doubt, accessing their ethnological accuracy is best left to those with expertise in the various communities they cover.

Drudges and Shrews: The Portrayal of Papuan Women in the Pioneering Literature

The New Guinea mission marked the last major endeavor of the London Mis- sionary Society (lms) in the South Pacific.5 The mission had encountered little but disaster in its initial forays into the Society Islands, Tonga and the Mar- quesas in the 1790s. With the conversion of high chiefs like Pomare ii in Tahiti, however, the lms in alliance with Methodist missionaries rapidly won converts across Polynesia. The movement into the Melanesian islands, which lacked such powerful leaders, proved much more difficult. On his initial visit to the New Hebrides in 1839, John Williams and a companion were clubbed down on the beach of Erromango and the lms decided to cede the evangelization of the islands to Scottish-Canadian Presbyterians. A mission on Lifou island enjoyed more success among the locals but came under increasing pressure from the French administration of the penal colony on New Caledonia uncomfortable with the presence of British missionaries, not least the irascible Scottish Rev- erend Samuel Macfarlane. Facing the inevitable, yet ambitious to win souls and fame, Macfarlane petitioned the lms directors to begin a mission into the Tor- res Strait and southeastern New Guinea. In 1870, they agreed.

5 Garrett (1982). Given the richness of the lms archives, it is astonishing that no contemporary historian has published a monograph on its New Guinea mission. The best general source remains Prendergast’s unpublished doctoral dissertation (1968). But see also Lang- more (1989).

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At this time, New Guinea6 was largely terra incognita to Europeans, not least the unsurveyed southeastern coast. The inhabitants had a reputation for bloody fierceness, which worked to dissuade explorers and adventurers alike. From the perspective of the far-way lms directors, a New Guinea mission would be expensive and dangerous. Macfarlane, however, persuaded them that the mission could be done on the cheap without huge costs in cash or lives by relying upon the “Native Agency” to take on the task of setting up schools and churches and evangelizing the New Guineans. The Native Agency had expanded from its small beginnings in a seminary set up by John Williams on Raiatea in the Society Islands to a network of seminaries training Islanders, most themselves recent converts, in the basics of the Christian faith along with rudiments of writing, mathematics, and other subjects. In turn, the “teachers” (“missionary” was reserved for their European supervisors) became the main troops for missionary expansion and consolidation. While often doubtful of the teachers’ grasp of the Faith, missionaries saw several advantages in using them. It was thought that “heathen” Islanders would more easily relate to evangelists who looked like them and lived similar lifestyles and that, in turn, the teachers would more readily learn the local languages. Above all other concerns, teachers were vastly cheaper to place and maintain in the field than Europeans. And, although it was rarely admitted openly, they were also more expendable. Hundreds would perish in the New Guinea expansion, along with their wives and children, primarily from malaria.7 Macfarlane’s idea was to establish a base at Cape York in Australia and the nearby Torres Strait islands, where a pearl fishery had been running for some years and from which Islander teachers could be sent out to various loca- tions along the south coast of New Guinea. From this “sanctuary” – considered safer for Europeans because of the Australian government presence and supposed absence of malaria – the white missionaries would make regular tours of inspection of Christianizing villages while leaving the main task of evangelization to the teachers. In 1871, accompanied by A.W. Murray, previously based in Samoa, Macfarlane dropped off teachers in the Torres Straits. The following year, Murray, accompanied by William Wyatt Gill, another veteran of the lms Polynesian mission, deposited six Cook Island teachers with their wives and one child at Redscar Bay to the west of present-day Port Moresby.

6 Following contemporary uses, I refer to the region in which the lms worked as “New Guinea” for the period between 1871 and 1905 and “Papua” thereafter. I refer to the indigenous pop- ulation alternatively as “New Guineans” and “Papuans”, again following contemporary practice. 7 Barker (2005); Lange (2005); Fife (1998).

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Over the next five years, Macfarlane would make 23 voyages to more than 80 villages, landing teachers in a dozen of them, before retiring to England in 18788. Despite this outpouring of activity and Macfarlane’s self-promotion, the “sanctuary” scheme proved disastrous.9 Although the Redscar Bay party appears to have been well received by the villagers (who, according to oral tra- ditions, at first assumed the Polynesians were returned ancestors), they had arrived during the “famine” season when Motu people were most reliant on sago traded with groups to the west as their own gardens recuperated. There was little food to spare for the newcomers. One man died from an infection and two wives perished in childbirth. The rest of the party succumbed to malaria and starvation until rescued the next May by Captain John Moresby, then mapping the coastline of southeastern New Guinea.10 On that same journey, Moresby navigated into a large sheltered bay he dubbed Fairfax Harbour. The following year, William Lawes moved from his mission on Niue to set up a lms base on the shores of the newly named Port Moresby. He brought some of his own teachers with him along with the survivors of the Redscar Bay mission. In the course of his long career in New Guinea, Lawes would undertake his share of exploration and initial contacts with various indigenous groups, but he is remembered primarily for establishing Port Moresby as the new centre for the mission as well as for his work establishing a nearby seminary.11 James Chalmers, who like Macfarlane came from a working class background in Scot- land, became the lms missionary most associated with exploration in New Guinea – indeed, one of the most famed missionaries of his time. Chalmers transferred to the New Guinea mission in 1877 from Rarotonga, initially setting up his base on the southeastern tip of the island. Modeling himself on David Livingstone, Chalmers built his reputation on reports of making first contact with various groups along the south coast which were published and republished in missionary journals, popular books and biographies. Chalmers was clubbed down along with a companion on Goaribari Island in 1901, thus join- ing the pantheon of missionary martyrs killed and eaten by Pacific Islanders.12 Publications from the early period of the lms New Guinea mission include a handful of systematic ethnological reports, but mostly document the activities of the missionaries themselves, especially their explorations and negotia-

8 Giddney (2017). 9 Fife (1998). 10 Crocombe (1982). 11 King (1909). 12 Lovett (1902).

Social Sciences andDownloaded Missions from Brill.com09/28/2021 31 (2018) 7–33 01:12:39PM via free access representations of papuan women in the lms publications 13 tions to place teachers in local villages. Given how little was known about the region in the 1870s and 1880s, this literature attracted considerable interest well beyond the home churches sponsoring the missions. While its ethnographic value is limited, it is of considerable interest for what it reveals about the missionaries’ working assumptions about the people they encountered and about whom they urgently needed to make sense. Women formed a common touch- stone in these assessments, forming a kind of index of the placement of New Guineans in the moral ranking of “races”, on the one hand, and as a source of fantasies about the exotic otherness of this unexplored land, on the other.

The earliest missionary representations of the native people they encountered were impressionistic, often based upon a few hours of interaction as villages were assessed as possible bases for teachers.The visitors judged the appearance and relative status of men and women as a key marker of their moral state and thus a point of comparison between communities along the coast. On the first visit to Darnley Island in the Torres Strait, in 1871, Macfarlane described the men as “low” but the women even “lower”: “The men were entirely destitute of clothing, and the women had only a scantly girdle of leaves and grass. The women looked exceedingly degraded and down-trodden, and the men only a few removes above them”.13 Across the Torres Strait islands, Murray and Macfarlane found that men were indolent while women acted as servants: “perhaps slaves would be a more appropriate designation. They do all the drudgery and hard work, while the men live at their ease, and work or not as they please”.14 But women were also capable of “unnatural” behaviour, in particular engaging in infanticide. Macfarlane opined, “How humbling the fact thus established by evidence that cannot be gainsaid, that a mother can forget her suckling-child and cease to have compassion on the son of her womb!”.15 In 1872, Gill accompanied Murray on the maiden voyage along the New Guinea coast (Murray had been left in charge of the new venture while Mac- farlane raised funds in England). Gill had resided for 20 years in the Cook Islands, where he had conducted ethnological studies on Polynesian culture which he would later publish in several well-received books. His account of the New Guinea voyage reflects a deeper interest in the nuances of local culture than exhibited by Macfarlane. For instance, he inquired into the reasons

13 Macfarlane (1873), p. 451. 14 Ibid., p. 367. 15 Ibid., p. 469.

Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:12:39PM via free access 14 barker for infanticide on Darnley Island, discovering a custom of killing third and suc- ceeding as well as illegitimate children probably because of food shortages. All the same, Gill like his contemporaries regarded the skin colour and clothing worn by native peoples as key markers of civilization. He wrote of the Papuans he encountered in the Fly Delta region, “They glory in their nakedness, and consider clothing to be fit only for women”.16 Clothing (or the lack thereof) reflected a gross exploitation of women: “Everywhere amongst these dark- skinned Papuans the women do all the hard work, and, in fact, are treated as mere beasts of burden.” The Motu people living in Redscar Bay were different. The skin tone was lighter and women more modestly dressed. Gill identified the Motu as members of the “Malayan” race, who were noted for “the chivalrous treatment of their women.” He noted approvingly that the local people readily accepted gifts of cloth, thus demonstrating “the instinct of shame, which alone elevates them immeasurably above the black aborigines of the south- west coast of New Guinea”.17 Yet the “Malays” differed in at least one respect from Polynesians. One of the missionaries politely requested a sample of pot- ting clay from an old woman. He was “indignantly refused,” from which Gill concluded that the New Guinea “Malayans” were “utterly deficient … in the graceful courtesy natural to most of the Eastern Pacific Islanders”.18 The distinction between the dark-skinned “Papuans” of the west and the light-skinned “Malays” of the east became a staple of early missionary representations from New Guinea. The terminology derived from Alfred Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago (1869), but also reflected a hierarchical distinction between Polynesians and Melanesians that had long currency in European representations of Oceanic peoples.19 While subscribing to the racialist thinking of the day, it is important to appreciate that the missionaries took a monogenetic view of human history based on the biblical story of a common origin of humankind, seeing the differences between the “races” occupying the Pacific Islands as the result of history and environment rather than deriving from sep- arate origins and thus humans as capable of salvation in the eyes of God as any white man.20 Macfarlane proposed that New Guineans were the descendants of Noah’s cursed son, Ham, pointing to what he perceived as evidence of degra- dation in language and society from a higher state of civilization21 (Macfarlane

16 Gill (1876), p. 230. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., p. 249. 19 Thomas (1989). 20 Harries (2005), p. 241. 21 Macfarlane (1888).

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1888). Other lms missionaries showed little interest in such speculation. The notion that New Guineans belonged to two races, however, was accepted without question. In these early works, skin colour, clothing and the status of women are often conflated as indices of civilization. In 1877, “The Ethnology of the Motu” by William Y. Turner, M.D., was read to members of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.22 In what may well be the first systematic ethnography to be published about a New Guinea people, Turner surveyed the physical appearance, moral behaviour, dress, manufacture, tattooing, language, and other features of Motuan society in and around Port Moresby. He identified them as members of the “Malayo-Polynesian” race, an opinion he felt was confirmed by the people themselves, given that “they look down upon the black people as being much inferior to them. For example, Papuan teachers from the Loyalty Islands were looked upon as an inferior class of men, while Malayo-Polynesian teachers from Eastern Polynesia were received and treated as equals.” Turner assessed the Motu as “living on the whole moral lives”.23 Polygamy was rare and infanticide non-existent. Indeed, children were loved and indulged. Men looked upon women as “the weaker vessel,” responsible for much of the heavier daily chores. “The women are however very well able to hold their own and in their mouths their tongues always a most powerful and often a most offensive weapon”.24 Lawes confirmed this assessment in his publications around the same time. He observed that “The position of women among the coast tribes is not so low and degraded as is often the case among barbarous races. They are proud and haughty, have very long tongues and know how to use them; in short, they are able to hold their own and sometimes a little more”.25 He spoke from personal experience, explaining that “Bartering is the women’s department, and well they know how to drive a bargain”.26 As these last passages suggest, the lms missionaries had ambivalent feelings about the greater freedom enjoyed by “Malay” women. Their “Papuan” sisters to the west might be near naked and degraded by their menfolk, but they possessed an “instinctive modesty”.27 In contrast, the lighter-skinned women in the east were often portrayed as shrews, not least in Chalmers’ accounts. Writing of the South Cape area, he claimed that “the instigators of nearly

22 Turner (1877). 23 Ibid., p. 474. 24 Ibid., p. 475. 25 Lawes (1880), pp. 607–608. 26 Ibid., p. 611. 27 Gill (1892), p. 7.

Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:12:39PM via free access 16 barker all quarrels are the women,” providing examples of women inciting men to war, including a foiled attack upon himself.28 While women tended to be shy and keep in the background during his initial contacts, he nevertheless found evidence of their ability to work their wills.

I think women are more respected here than they are in some other heathen lands. They seem to keep fast hold of their own possessions. A man stole an ornament belonging to his wife, and sold it for hoop-iron on board the Bertha [the mission boat]. When he went ashore he was met on the beach by his spouse, who had in the meantime missed her trinket; she assailed him with tongue, stick and stone, and demanded the hoop- iron.29

While the early lms writings tended to portray New Guinea women, to the extent they were noticed at all, as drudges or shrews, in a few instances they served to fuel exotic fantasies. Along with alleged sightings of a monkey tribe and tigers, the missionaries pursued a legend of a “women’s land” related by the Motu and said to exist to the east. Entering Cloudy Bay, Macfarlane was excited by the appearance of women paddling canoes but was unable to explore further. Chalmers heard similar tales

of a woman’s land, a land where only women – perfect Amazons – lived and ruled. These ladies were reported to be excellent tillers of the soil, splendid canoeists in sailing or paddling, and quite able to hold their own against attacks of the sterner sex, who sometimes tried to invade their country … To find so interesting a community was of great moment, and everywhere we went we enquired, but only to be laughed at by the natives; sometimes asked by them, “How do they continue to exist?” But that, too, puzzled us.30

This mystery was solved when Chalmers visited the appropriately named “Ama- zon Bay” where he encountered an island community seemingly composed mainly of women. Their menfolk, he learned, were often away tending gardens on the mainland or at war, giving rise to the myth of the women’s land. During this same period, however, Chalmers claimed to have found a “real Ama-

28 Chalmers (1885), p. 73. 29 Ibid., p. 45. 30 Ibid., pp. 72–73.

Social Sciences andDownloaded Missions from Brill.com09/28/2021 31 (2018) 7–33 01:12:39PM via free access representations of papuan women in the lms publications 17 zon”, a veritable queen more powerful than any male chief he encountered. Kolokoa spent her days residing on a hammock, served by women who fed and carried her and whose quiet commands were honoured by women and men alike.31

Unfit Mothers: Papuan Women in Missionary Propaganda

Lawes and Chalmers both opposed Macfarlane’s “sanctuary” scheme on prac- tical as much as evangelical grounds and it was abandoned upon the latter’s retirement from the mission in 1886. By 1900 the lms had organized the New Guinea mission into twelve districts spread along the Torres Strait islands and south coast from the Fly River delta to the East Cape. Each district was super- vised by a white missionary at a central location where he could make regular visits to a spreading network of village-based “out-stations” where Pacific Islander and, in time, Papuan teachers were responsible for teaching basic skills in reading and writing to children and conducting Christian services. Although the lms was in principle non-denominational, it was organized along Congregationalist lines. In the mission field, this translated into a considerable degree of independence for district missionaries.32 Compared to other missions, which began to arrive in the region from the mid-1880s, the lms missionaries were well-provisioned with European-style prefabricated houses and a relatively generous annual stipend.33 Along with the home for the district missionary and his family, head stations could include a host of additional buildings: churches, schools for advanced students, store-houses, medical clin- ics, and basic industries such as boat-building. Thus both in appearance and in terms of institutional centrality, even the more modest head stations stood out. On a 1916 tour of inspection along the southern coast, the Director of the London Missionary Society wrote, “Amid the wilderness each station is an oasis … you will feel that you have reached a haven for spirit as for body … the place is physically and morally clean”.34 While the lms missionaries were the first outsiders to settle and systematically explore the southeastern coast of New Guinea, they were soon joined by others, including prospectors, planters, explorers and other adventurers. In 1884, Britain and Germany divided eastern New Guinea and nearby islands into

31 Ibid., pp. 189–190. 32 Barker (1979). 33 Langmore (1989). 34 Lenwood (1917), pp. 202–203.

Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:12:39PM via free access 18 barker two colonial possessions (Holland had long claimed western New Guinea as part of its East Indies empire). British New Guinea operated with a shoestring budget, yet under a capable administrator managed to “pacify” much of the coastal region, creating opportunities for a small white community of planters, miners, and other entrepreneurs. While initially wary of a colonial takeover in light of the experience of aboriginal people in Australia, Lawes and Chalmers welcomed and assisted the young colonial administration coming to see it as the best protection for the safety and protection of New Guineans from white commercial interests. In turn, the administration first of British New Guinea and, after 1905, the Australian colony of Papua depended heavily upon the missions for the provision of basic social services and as an indirect pacifying influence within the possession.35 This changing context is reflected in a shift in tone and content in lms missionary writings from the New Guinea field. As Langmore36 notes, “Toward the end of the century, concern for the afterlife of the heathens was largely replaced by a concern to ameliorate the conditions of their life in this world.” We find fuller accounts of social life accompanied by descriptions of mission work and aims. Perhaps because the missionary authors were now stationary, compar- isons between the west “Papuans” and the eastern “Malays” are less prominent as are superficial assessments of level of civilization based upon skin-color, clothing, and so forth. More specifically, women are usually presented as mothers as opposed to drudges and shrews. While these portrayals are more detailed and grounded, they still very much reflect the contemporary assumptions and concerns of missionary authors.The lms missionaries in New Guinea as elsewhere in the colonial world came from backgrounds in which ideals of family and femininity had been dramatically altered accompanying “capitalist transformations in agriculture and gender”.37 To varying degrees, the missionaries’ perceptions of and interference in New Guinean lives were bound up in hegemonic notions of wifely domesticity and modesty, an ideal of Christian civilization in which men provided while women concerned themselves with raising moral children at home – an ideal based on the bedrock of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family. Encased within their districts, the lms missionaries came to different opinions as to the degree to which indigenous culture was compatible with Christian civilization and this in turn coloured their representations of native men and women.

35 Wetherell (1977). 36 Langmore (1989), p. 42. 37 Jolly (1991), p. 31.

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lms missionaries regularly wrote reports to the directors in London which were, in turn, edited and republished in church and mission journals to be read by the congregations that funded missionary outreach. In a few cases, articles were gathered and republished in books and pamphlets, often with Sunday School children in mind – the mix of exoticism, adventure, and piety seen as the perfect gift for young minds. Written in simple English, this form of missionary propaganda provided readers with an intimate view of the supposed realities of New Guinea lives and how the mission was transforming them. In retrospect, they reveal much more about the contemporary assumptions concerning family and gender relations in the industrializing West.

The earliest and best known of these works is Charles Abel’s Savage Life in New Guinea (1902). An authoritarian whose piety was matched by his practi- cality and confidence, Abel built a small missionary kingdom centred on the tiny island of Kwato off the southeastern tip of New Guinea over a forty year period. Arriving in New Guinea in 1890, Abel quickly determined that the only way to break the hold of “heathenism” was by removing native children from their families and raising them within the confines of a mission station under his direct supervision. In that hot house environment, the twin virtues of devo- tion to God and hard work (along with playing cricket, for which Abel had a passion) would cultivate vigorous Christians. Adopting, purchasing and, by his own account, sometimes stealing children, Kwato grew from a small extended family to something of an autonomous state within the colony of Papua, with its own flag, police, anthem, dress code, regulations, and, most remarkably, easy mixing of Papuan and European staffs. Charles and his wife Beatrice provided both an example and enforcement of Christian family life, arranging marriages and dictating the “proper” roles for husbands, wives and children. The most gifted of the Kwato community served as teachers in surrounding villages while others worked in Kwato’s expanding entreprises – a saw mill, boat-building shop, and copra plantations in nearby Milne Bay.38 Savage Life in New Guinea provided the rationale behind Abel’s scheme of radical change. Even by the standards of the day, it is a remarkably ethnocentric diatribe on the evils of the New Guinean in his “natural state”.39 The “Papuan” as Abel describes him – and for Abel the Papuan is definitively a “him” – is lazy, uncultured, vain, dirty, cowardly, and superstitious. Apart from graceful houses and canoes, Papuan culture has no achievements to be admired by

38 Wetherell (1996). 39 Abel (1902), p. 5.

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“civilized” people. Indeed, the only redeeming quality of the Papuan character, in Abel’s telling, is the capacity for hard work. Men generally are lazy, but can work hard for extended periods when need be.Women, on the other hand, bear the heaviest burdens of gardening, cooking, and child care. But women are not entirely without power. “I think, perhaps, the fact that the woman is the bread- winner tends to insure domestic peace.” The Papuan curbs the “instincts of barbarism” not because of consideration of his wife or family but because were he to strike his wife, she would not be able to collect and cook his food.40 In a rare comparative note, Abel mentions that women in western New Guinea do suffer regular beatings from their menfolk. The implication of his description, however, is that the better treatment women enjoy in the east should not be understood as an index of relative civilization. It is clear that “civilized life” for Abel is represented in ideals of middle class British families where the father provides a living and discipline while the mother nurtures their children. Abel asserts this belief throughout the book, but particularly in what must count as the most revolting passage written by any of the lms missionaries:

They have no love. It seems a terrible thing to say of any human beings, but it is true of these people … They have no word corresponding to our great word ‘Love’ … I know of no other animal, except perhaps the duck, which is more careless in attending to its young, than the average Papuan mother. How many of them survive infancy and early childhood is a marvel … I do not mean you to understand that there is no kindness shown by mothers to their children. I mean that their interest never rises to what we know as love. It is a mere animal propensity, compared with the love which reigns in a Christian mother’s heart.41

Elsewhere in the book, Abel notes that mothers and mother’s brothers have a much greater influence over children than fathers. Extended families curb individual initiative in adults but, worse, victimize innocent children. The Papuan “sees his little boys and girls grow up in vicious ways, and does nothing to warn them of, or guard them against, evil. Some of my own converts have confessed to me that their own mothers first led them into vicious ways”.42

40 Ibid., pp. 57–58. 41 Ibid., p. 42. 42 Ibid., p. 43.

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Henry Dauncey’s Papuan Pictures (1913) is more typical of lms writings of this period. Dauncey arrived in New Guinea around the same time as Abel. He was assigned to the Delena District, to the west of Port Moresby, in part to defend the lms domination of the coast from Roman Catholic missionaries who in 1884 had set up a base on nearby Yule Island. Papuan Pictures was a gift book awarded to children who collected funds to support the lms fleet of boats in Oceania and India (the copy I own was originally presented to one Mary Scott who donated 5 shillings/6 pence to the cause). Dauncey’s lovely photographs grace the book. Perhaps, reflecting this interest, the first part of the book is largely taken up with descriptions of material culture and village scenes, while much of the rest is made up of accounts of visits to out-stations and descriptions of missionary work by teachers and Dauncey himself. His aim, Dauncey writes, is “to make the Papuans real to you by stories of their daily lives, their vices and their virtues, their many fears and their few hopes”43 (ibid.: 183). Dauncey’s Papuans, however, are far from the revolting “savages” described by Abel. They are, the author insists, “men and women, and boys and girls who have lives to live” and should not be laughed at “or exploited to put dividends into the pockets of investors in new companies”.44 Women rarely emerge from the background in Papuan Pictures except, ironically, in the photographs in which they prominently feature engaged in various daily tasks. In contrast, Dauncey gives considerable attention to young unmarried males, who he describes as “conceited youth” whose life is dedi- cated to “empty show”.45 He blames this sorry state on parents whose love and indulgence of infants is “carried to excess, and starts the child on the wrong path … and so arises one of the greatest defects in the Papuan character … Of obedience the Papuan knows nothing, unless there is a big stick, or a heavy hand, or the fear of the sorcerer”.46 He provides hints here and there of male exploitation of women-folk, but these are countered by anecdotes of women avenging themselves on abusive husbands, in one case by committing suicide and another by burning the husband’s ornaments. Dauncey was familiar with “Queen Koloka”, who Chalmers had earlier encountered, who is pictured wearing European clothing in the book. Unfortunately, he has little say about this intriguing figure, “the only woman I have known in Papua who is the recognized head of a village. Others may have plenty to say in the management of affairs

43 Dauncey (1913), p. 183. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., p. 20. 46 Ibid., p. 2.

Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:12:39PM via free access 22 barker through their husbands, but Koloka is the undoubted head, recognized by both husband and people, and is strong and wise and rules her people well”.47 Edith Turner’s Among Papuan Women (1920) is the only publication in the lms corpus focused specifically upon women (and the only one written by a woman). Edith Calvert spent ten years as a missionary in China before marrying Robert Lister Turner and moving to the Vatorata seminary near Port Moresby. She had to give up her missionary status to do so (only men were considered fit enough to be missionaries in New Guinea), a reduced status that annoyed her to no end.48 A short pamphlet of 32 pages, Among Papuan Women for the most part presents neutral descriptions on the typical responsibilities and experiences of women, drawing on Turner’s personal observations, interviews with indigenous people, and notes from colleagues elsewhere in Papua. Turner diverges from her male colleagues in one respect: “All the varied work of the village is shared by men and women, each sex having its own particular work. It is neither true nor fair to say that ‘the Papuan man is a lazy beggar, who leaves all the work to his wife’”.49 That is not to say that the marriage relationship is built on affection. “Her husband pays for her, and she is his property. He has as much right to beat her as he has to beat his dog; but, on the other hand, women are of so much importance economically that they are, generally speaking treated with respect”.50 Turner’s primary concern was with women’s relaxed attitudes towards sex.

I once found a small boy and girl, of three and four years of age, playing together in a most indecent fashion, while the girl’s mother (the wife of one of our students, but an absolutely ignorant heathen woman), looked on smiling and unconcerned. She was as much surprised as the children themselves were, when I picked them up and gave each of them a sound whipping.51

Nor are native dances innocent, in Turner’s view. She notes that while both married and unmarried men attend, only unmarried girls, belonging to no one, are allowed to dance. “This fact alone stamps the dance for what it is”.52

47 Ibid., p. 73. 48 Langmore (1989), p. 166. 49 Turner (1920), p. 5. 50 Ibid., p. 18 51 Ibid., p. 21. 52 Ibid.

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While united in their condemnation of Papuan parenting, only Abel advo- cates the radical solution of removing children to a safer environment. Dauncey and Turner, more typically of missionaries of the time, caution that change will come slowly through the moral example of Christian converts living amongst their heathen neighbours. Turner is particularly specific on this matter. While the wives of teachers in training at Vatorata seminary were taught sewing and other “domestic skills”, they were also obliged to work in the gardens “just as they would be if they were living in their own villages”.53 Missionaries, she notes, discourage female converts from wearing Western clothing (apart from dresses on Sundays) and should tolerate the less sinful habits such as women and children smoking since “After all, Papuans have very few luxuries”.54 Of attitudes towards sex, she advises, “it seems hardly fair to speak of the young Papuans as immoral – non-moral is perhaps a more accurate term to use”.55 Change comes slowly, but she insists that it is coming, providing a number of examples. Women, she suggests, are key to this transformation. “As an individual she may be unable to make any offer of service; as a wife she has a tremen- dous influence over her husband’s doings”56 – ironically enough, the situation Mrs. Turner found herself in.

Slaves to Custom: Papuan Women in Missionary Ethnographic Monographs

As noted earlier, a few of the pioneering missionaries published ethnological papers. In the 1890s, metropolitan anthropologists began collaborating directly with the lms missionaries, initially by providing them with questionnaires to aid them in writing up ethnological articles and later as employing them as translators and informants beginning with the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898. A.C. Haddon was particularly solicitous of missionaries. He sponsored J.H. Holmes as a special correspondent for the Royal Anthropological Institute and edited the mission handbook.57 After host- ing Bronislaw Malinowski during his initial fieldwork on Mailu Island, William Saville later attended the anthropologist’s seminar at the London School of

53 Ibid., p. 27. 54 Ibid., p. 10. 55 Ibid., p. 20. 56 Ibid., p. 31. 57 Reid (1978).

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Economics.58 Along with many articles, these collaborations resulted in the publication of three full-length ethnographic monographs by veteran missionaries in the mid-1920s, marking a transition from the era of amateur ethnology to the professional model promoted by Malinowski.59 These works provide far more descriptive detail of indigenous social and ritual life than found in other writings in the lms corpus. Notably, the missionaries tried their best to maintain a non-judgmental stance as expressed by Holmes: “at the cost of disappointment to many old friends, I have deliberately endeavoured to portray the Papuans I have known as they regarded themselves. Their views of life do not lack a philosophy which was intelligible to them. I do not endorse them, neither do I condemn them”.60 Undoubtedly, this neutral- ity was made easier by the universal assumption that indigenous cultures were doomed to disappear beneath the juggernaut of Western “civilization”. Indeed, this is one of the more striking differences between works of missionary propaganda and ethnology from the early twentieth century.The former consistently end with accounts of what the mission is currently doing for the people and speculations about the promises of a Christian future. The missionary ethnographies, in contrast, signal the end of a missionary career: William Saville’s In Unknown New Guinea, for instance, bears the subtitle, “a record of twenty-five years of personal observation & experience amongst the interesting people of an almost unknown part of this vast island.” The monographs differ in another respect. The earlier pioneering and station-centred publications focus respectively upon moral character and family life of Papuans. While these themes are not entirely absent, the missionary ethnographies attempt broad societal portrayals. In part this reflects a wider shift in anthropological practice from the collection of facts gathered in regional surveys to an analytic focus on local societies as functioning wholes. While distinctive, however, the shift to socially-focused studies was compatible with a concurrent shift in missionary emphasis from saving individuals to reforming society. Further, the notion of the “savage” as an unthinking slave to collective “custom” served as a foil to an ideal of the Christian convert as an individual moved by the revealed Truths of the Gospel to lead his or her people from the evil ways of the past.

58 Malinowski and Young (1988). 59 Stocking (1992); Thornton (1983). 60 Holmes (1924), p. 1.

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A few years after his arrival in New Guinea in 1893, Holmes assumed responsi- bility for the largest of the mission districts: stretching from the western border of Dauncey’s Delena district to the Purari delta along the Gulf of Papua. This was a region marked by a flamboyant material culture centred on massive male cult houses and exquisite masks representing ancestors, products of elaborate male initiations performed in cycles lasting decades.61 Based at Orokolo, Holmes traveled widely through the beach and riverine villages. In Savage New Guinea is a compilation of observations taken from across the region surveying everything from daily life to notions of spirits. It is a confusing work from an ethnographic perspective since Holmes frequently mixes observations from different places and times and despite repeated pledges not to pass judge- ment regularly inserts editorials on native morality. The main confusion for the modern reader, however, derives from Holmes’ fantasies about the character of the society. The central contention of the book is that the tribe “was a complete entity: the whole man”.62 Super-chiefs, bred for the purpose, made up the “brains” of the whole while the people made up the “corporate body” who did the bidding of the chiefs and sub-chiefs “for their common good.” The society on the whole was extremely conservative: “The Papuan … of thirty years ago was what his forbears were three hundred years ago. He was aggressive but not progressive. His laws, customs and mental outlook were fundamentally the same as governed his ancestors from time immemorial,” enforced by fear of ancestral spirits.63 Among the Orokolo people (who Holmes calls the “Ipi”) and to a lesser extent among communities on the Purari (the “Namau”), the family was a “sociological replica” of the whole tribe.

Mother was the drudge of the family; father was its chief and supreme head. The former [children] respected, or otherwise; fondled or kicked, as the mood of the moment suggested; the latter they revered because he was a man, counted as a man among the men of his community and as a chief in his own home.64

61 Williams (1940). 62 Holmes (1924), p. 37. In the introduction to his magisterial The Drama of Orokolo, F.E. Williams dismisses most of Holmes’ generalizations, commenting that “As for our respec- tive results, any one might shrink from the task of trying to make them square” (Williams, 1940: xii). 63 Holmes (1924), p. 37. 64 Ibid., p. 69.

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Women in both groups were “bought and sold” by men, but whereas the Ipi were strictly monogamous, the Namau were debauched polygynists whose initiation rituals climaxed in sexual orgies. Indeed, so insistent were the Ipi on monogamy “that the standard of sexual morality of these barbarian mono- gamists was infinitely higher than is known in any civilised land to-day”.65 This was not to say that life for women in either group was easy or pleasurable. A woman found some compensation in motherhood, but as her children grew up she saw subjected to beatings and among the Namau might be speared by her husband.66 Despite this, even with the Namau where women were little better than slaves, they were all the same “domestically a very happy, contented people, and very attached to their home and their hearths”67 as unchanging custom made anything other than the given order unthinkable. E. Baxter Riley wrote a comparable ethnographic survey of the Kiwai people drawing upon his missionary experiences in the Fly River district on the western end of the lms territory.While providing periodic vignettes, AmongPapuan Headhunters generally avoids heavy-handed editorializing or grand generalizations about the character of the society and its people. Much of the book is taken up in descriptions of daily life, material culture, male initiation rites and warfare with the usual focus on men. Riley considers women principally in two contexts: the daily routine and as the audience to ritual performances put on by the men. Of the former, he writes: “The Kiwai women, taken on the whole, are a hard-working and most industrious class of people. From morn till night … they live a life of drudgery. There is little of the joys of pleasure of life that falls to their lot”.68 The only relief women experienced was when they were away from their husbands for a month at a time making new gardens or when their husbands took on additional wives, reducing their work load. In addition, the women were terrorized by the male-based religion.

The lives of the women cannot be considered happy ones. The greatest obstacle to their peace of mind is the haunting fear of the evil spirits which they believe are everywhere around them, and their dread of the sorcerer. They are easily duped by the men-folk, who are constantly devis- ing imaginary ghosts of a malignant character in order to produce a scare. To see the women in tears is a source of much enjoyment to the male members of the community.69

65 Ibid., p. 43. 66 Ibid., p. 74. 67 Ibid., p. 72. 68 Riley (1925), p. 52. 69 Ibid., p. 65.

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As mothers, the women suffered when their sons undertook their initiation. “From this date the son began to grow apart from his mother and sisters. There could not be any confidences between them or any other female in the community in future”.70 Despite their hard lives, Riley found much to admire in the women’s character: “Generally speaking, they are kind, sympathetic, generous, obliging and trustworthy. They are ever ready to help one in trouble”.71 He observed that a Kiwai women would consider any man offering to help carry her load from the gardens “as being an unwarrantable interference with her rights. She would no more tolerate such a thing than a white woman would tolerate her husband taking over the management of the kitchen or laundry”.72 At the conclusion of the book, Riley hints that the deeper psychological purpose of the elaborate ceremonials carried on by the men may have been to impress and convince the women (and thus themselves) of their spiritual reality:

Thus the women and children, spectators at the dance, with their attention pre-adjusted, seeing the pantomimic display by actors similar in height to their recent dead, vainly believed that the objects before them were the real spirits of their loved ones. So great was the impression pro- duced upon their minds that they often said: “That is my child,” or “That is my husband”.73

William Saville’s In Unknown New Guinea differs from the other two lms monographs in two key ways: it is focused upon a single community rather than a region or language group and it is written in the ethnographic present (perhaps influenced by Malinowski, who wrote the Preface). Saville’s district lays to the west of Abel’s, along the far southeastern shores of New Guinea. Like other Austronesian-speaking groups in the east (Turner’s “Malays”), the Mailu did not possess elaborate male initiation rituals. Mailu people, in Saville’s por- trait, live in a state of social tension in which unity is threatened by “continual jealousy between clan and clan, man and man – and still more between woman and woman – which every provocation will cause to burst out into flame”.74 Conformity is rigidly enforced as there is little privacy and gossip tends to keep individuals in line. While the Mailu find temporary unity through participating

70 Ibid., p. 190. 71 Ibid., p. 65. 72 Ibid., p. 54. 73 Ibid., p. 312. 74 Saville (1926), p. 75.

Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:12:39PM via free access 28 barker in rituals and feasts, custom rules. A Mailu “moves as a free man because he is the willing slave of the community’s conscience”.75 Saville states that the division of labour between women and men is about equal. In any case, “A woman brooks no interference from a man in what she considers custom to have marked out as her work”.76 Indeed, the separation between women’s and men’s spheres of life is profound:

Not only is there a professed ignorance on the part of men as regards feminine concerns, but I think it really exists. There is so much secrecy in feminine affairs that one could easily imagine the existence of a feminine club or secret society within our savage community. I doubt whether a husband or a wife gets to know the ‘self’ of the other. Perhaps it is just as well for the husband, for whatever he might say or do would soon become common knowledge among the women.77

In a faint echo of Abel’s condemnation of the Papuan mother, Saville suggests that a Mailu’s expression of affection “is selfish, in that it is a feeling of gladness awakened in the subject only, rather than an attempt to make the object glad”.78 It is only during brief childhood that Mailu girls experience some individual freedom. “In marriage, the girl emerges from the individual state and becomes an integral part of a clumsy unwieldy machine, little suspecting … that she is helping to keep up its motion. The flywheel of custom forbids her getting beyond … its power for the accomplishment of anything new”.79

Discussion

A comparison of the three groupings of lms writings from New Guinea reveals interesting transitions and continuities in the representations of indigenous women. In the earliest travel writings of the pioneer missionaries, women along with race and clothing provide a crude index of moral civilization. Specifically, the authors reference the appearance, activities, and behaviour of women to rank the “Papuans” of the west against the more advanced “Malays” of the east. The intersectionality of gender and race becomes less specific after the turn

75 Ibid., p. 294. 76 Ibid., p. 72. 77 Ibid., p. 76. 78 Ibid., p. 47. 79 Ibid., p. 85.

Social Sciences andDownloaded Missions from Brill.com09/28/2021 31 (2018) 7–33 01:12:39PM via free access representations of papuan women in the lms publications 29 of the century, as missionary authors focus more upon women’s roles as wives and mothers within families.The ethnography-memoirs of the 1920s draw back further to contextualize women’s activities and statuses within whole social systems. This shift clearly reflects changes in anthropological fashion, from the racialist constructions of the mid-nineteen century, through the natural sci- ence “Notes and Queries” documentation of social institutions, towards the view of local communities as self-replicating social systems most exemplified in Saville’s Mailu monograph. This shift no doubt is in part a product of the collaboration between metropolitan anthropologists and several of the lms authors. Yet, as previously noted, it also reflects shifts in the ways missionaries conceived their purpose. Macfarlane and his contemporaries focused on the salvation of the “perishing heathen”, a task they believed could be accom- plished within indigenous society by appealing to the moral character of New Guineans largely through the example and teachings of Pacific Island evangelists. A quarter century later, missionaries tended to conceive of themselves as orchestrating the moral reform of society. The continuities are equally striking. Chief among these is the twinned binary opposition of west/east, “drudges”/“shrews”. There were, of course, real differences in the social makeup of the two types of societies – in particular, eastern societies lacked the elaborate male cults, often associated with headhunting, that provided a centralizing focus in the west. In addition, eastern women enjoyed a larger economic role through the manufacture and trading of pots and, among the matrilineal Massim, the inheritance of land. All the same, the contrast comes across as exaggerated. The gendered division of labour did not differ between the two areas, nor the domination of men in warfare and the organization of public events. Holmes’ opposition of the monogamously moral Ipi against the degenerate immoral Namau appears to echo what seems to have become a paired stereotype dating from the early rumours of the “women’s land”. To these unflattering stereotypes, mission publications of the middle period add a third: unfit mothers. This representation is expressed in its most extreme form by Abel, but is clearly echoed in Dauncey and Turner’s publications, suggesting a widespread conception among the missionaries of the period that mothers utterly failed in their obligations to discipline their children. Sympathetic descriptions of individual women and women in general can be found scattered through the mission publications. The picture of indigenous womanhood is not relentlessly bleak. Still, the sense of New Guinea women conveyed in this literature is singularly dreary and tends to become more negative over time. While the lms writers occasionally refer to women as “slaves” (particularly those in the west), they employ such negative tropes less to argue

Social Sciences and Missions 31 (2018) 7–33 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 01:12:39PM via free access 30 barker for the emancipation of women than as representations of conservatism of “savage” society that stands as the greatest obstacle to Christian salvation. Women, readers are repeatedly informed, do not just accept their servitude, they volubly reject the alternative of males easing female burdens. In such passages, one can detect a feminizing of New Guinea culture that contrasts with the more typical masculine themes of warfare, headhunting, and cannibal- ism. This is particularly accentuated in the accounts of the eastern people, in Dauncey’s ridiculing of male “dandies” and Chalmers’ claims that women drive their menfolk into warfare as well as the many references to women “shrieking” and squabbling. But it is also present in passages concerning the western New Guineans where Chalmers and Macfarlane express admiration for the “manli- ness” of the warriors (if not for their rituals) and Riley suggests that the Kiwai male initiation cults were created mainly to impress the women. Nowhere is it expressed more clearly than in Abel’s volume, where children are to be rescued from their mothers. In short, women represent the conservatism of “savagery” in New Guinea society, mainly passive but actively defended when challenged and fundamental to the continuation of that society. All the same, they are marginal players in the missionary accounts which focus overwhelmingly upon the men. Of course, women were similarly marginalized for decades to come in scholarly anthropological accounts of Melanesian societies. Nearly a half century would pass before the habit of representing women as tokens in a male world came under serious critique,80 soon followed by more radical challenges to West- ern assumptions about gender binaries and gender itself.81 It is not surprising that the missionary literature similarly reflected the values of its largely male authorship. Women in this literature serve as foils for idealizations of Christian motherhood and domesticity, their lives marked by the absence of meaningful labour, morality, and love. Beyond that there was little to be said. Given the primacy they perceived men to hold in New Guinea society, the lms missionaries reflexively looked to men to bring change. They negotiated with males to establish teachers in the villages, recruited males to train as teachers and evangelists, and envisioned males embracing idealized Christian roles as industrious husbands and fathers.Women would follow in time. If Christian- ity was liberation, it was firstly a liberation offered to men to embrace the prac- tical individualism that was foundational to the version of Protestant Chris- tianity the lms missionaries brought to New Guinea. History would yield up a

80 See, e.g., Strathern (1987); Weiner (1976). 81 Errington and Gewertz (1987); Strathern (1988).

Social Sciences andDownloaded Missions from Brill.com09/28/2021 31 (2018) 7–33 01:12:39PM via free access representations of papuan women in the lms publications 31 certain irony. In the lms New Guinea mission, as mission fields elsewhere in much of Melanesia, women proved more immediately receptive to the poten- tialities of the new religion than men.82 In a groundbreaking study based upon fieldwork in Vanuatu, Eriksen83 argues that the local church on Ambrym provided women with a gathering place absent in the indigenous society yet one that they actively enlarged through networks of marriage and kinship. There is, Eriksen suggests, a “silent history” of Christian conversion in Melanesia, largely unnoticed by mission historians and anthropologists alike, in which women grounded the churches in local societies not by breaking with customary ways so much as employing the church as a space within which to enjoy association with other women free from the direct domination of men.84 That New Guinea women might actively make the church their own not as an escape from custom but an addition and accommodation to it seems to have never occurred to the lms missionary authors although it is very likely that process was well underway by the turn of the century.85

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