concerning their religious customs and activities. Of necessity, they needed to
decide what to speak of and what to keep secret, and they needed to decide
how to make sense of what they spoke within what frameworks, whether aware
or not of how this process of constructing some kind of focus or priority or
framework for explanation might change their own perception of what they
did and what they thought or believed. There are those who suspect, for
example, that categories used by the Australian Aboriginals, such as the ‘All-
Father’ or Mother Earth, are constructions that either enabled conversation
with missionaries or were influenced by this contact (Swain 1992). Moreover,
having to explain oneself and one’s beliefs to occupying colonizers does not
generally produce a conducive atmosphere to discussion and explanation.
Not all outsiders were sympathetic or open to what they heard or saw. As
Breward (2001: 4) writes of Australia: ‘There convict beginning and British
cultural blindness made mutual religious learning between Aborigines and
invaders all but impossible’. However, missionaries’ reports and diaries often
speak of savages while at the same time giving excellent detail on daily activities
and paraphernalia related to religion and religious observance. Thus in 1927,
for example, Father Siméon Delmas was able to put together a scholarly
overview of the religion of the Marquis islands from diaries and reports from
the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary of Picpus, Belgium,
who were missionaries to the islands from 1886.
Both government officials and missionaries left a legacy of reports and diaries
that provided information. Captain James Cook (1728–1779) wrote on the
meaning of tabufrom his observations in Tahiti and Hawai’i, and George Grey
(1812–1898), a Governor of New Zealand, wrote in 1855, Polynesian
Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the Maori as Told by Their
Priests and Chiefs(Swain and Trompf 1995: 10–11). Early government officials
often collected items and people and sent them back to Europe; there some of
the items found their way into museums, where they were exhibited for their
religious or cultural significance.
The informal study of religion continued throughout the early colonizing
period. Those who colonized came with a variety of European religious
traditions and in some sense were like the tribes they colonized, needing to
speak to one another at times and try to make sense of each other’s beliefs so
that the new colonies could form some cohesive society, although older rivalries
that led to division in Europe, such as between Catholic and Protestant, carried
over into places such as Australia by those who settled there or were transported
there as convicts (Breward 2001: 18–20). There was, of course, interest in the
study of one’s own religion, more formally in training Christian ministers, with
the establishment eventually of theological colleges.
When universities were first established in Australia in Sydney (1852) and
Melbourne (1853), and in New Zealand in Dunedin (1869), Christchurch220
MAJELLA FRANZMANN