Imagining the Moravian Mission: Space and Surveillance at the Former Ebenezer Mission, Victoria, Southeastern Australia

Abstract

Colonization of Australia was shaped by a culturally specific, imagined geography that entailed a precise conception of what the indigenous landscape and its people were to become. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the southeastern colony of Victoria around 1860, this European worldview was expressed in the creation of didactic landscapes, designed to teach Aboriginal residents how to live like white people. Archaeological investigation of the former Ebenezer Mission, in northwestern Victoria, demonstrates how Moravian missionaries sought to establish a paternalistic relationship with the indigenous people, expressed through spatio-visual organization and embodied practices. This program was successfully inaugurated, as indicated by evidence for the settlement’s landscaping and for the function of the mission-house, especially in its role as hub and contact place, its central and commanding position, its regular extension and rebuilding, and the operation of European systems of domesticity within it. The missionaries’ apparent success in controlling aspects of mission-house operation must be viewed, however, in the context of the uncertainties and difficulties their evangelical program encountered as well as of Aboriginal strategies of mobility and evasion that undermined the spatial apparatus of the reserves.