Mission in humility

Press, 21 October 1978, Page 11

Mission in humility

Reluctant Mission: The Anglican Church in Papua New Guinea, 1891-1942. By David Wetherell. University of Queensland Press. 430 pp., photos, maps, appendices, notes and index. $14.95.

(Reviewed by Jenny Murray) The Anglican Mission to New Guinea occupied some 400 kilometres of the north-eastern coastline, flanked by the Methodists and the Roman Catholics who were already established. Over the half centurv surveyed here, it was staffed by fewer than 200 European .men and women and 46 Melanesian missionaries. The subject, then, may appear to be limited to the specialist, but this is an unusually interesting book. The mission was founded, as many missions have been, by an individual with a compelling conviction that here lay his life’s work. The Anglican Church in Australia did not share this impulse: hence the “reluctance” of the book’s title. As David Wetherell describes it, the reputation the mission gained as “one of the glories of the Anglican communion,” rising to “the highest ideals of asceticism and selfabnegation” arose from its being, at least initially, the most impoverished and poorly organised mission in the Pacific. Poor diet and fever kiiled its founder within a few weeks. For those who followed, a pattern of self denial was ensured by continued neglect from Australia. Yet hardship and suffering took on a spiritual value. Other Protestant missions in the Pacific were

Evangelical in tone: the Anglican Mission to New Guinea was AngloCatholic. It consciously adhered to Franciscan ideals of poverty and humility. Men and women lived on monotonous subsistence diets in bush

huts furnished with packing cases. Exhausted members might recuperate in the spacious residence of the neighbouring Methodists, with its mahogany furniture, marble fire place and silver dinner service. There was a contrast, too, with the lordly dignity of the Polynesian pastors, who brought from their own social background a strong sense of what was fitting, and imposed this on Melanesian villages. Other missions might school their converts in the ways of progress, of economic and social change: not so, the Anglicans. To them the materialism of European life compared poorly with the innocence and simplicity of the Papuan village. Thus the aim was to bring about conversion, but to reduce the effects of Western civilisation. This book deals not only with the missionary ethos and the Papuan response. It also discusses the unsympathetic attitude of much of the European population in New Guinea and reflects critically on the policies of the Australian administrators. “Reluctant Mission” is based on the author’s graduate thesis for the Australian National University. It is a worthwhile contribution to missionary history, readable, and not without its lighter moments. Missionaries as a class tend to be as eccentric as they e heroic.