‘White Already to Harvest’: South Australian Women Missionaries in India1

Abstract

In 1882, the South Australian Baptist Missionary Society sent off its first missionaries to Faridpur in East Bengal. Miss Marie Gilbert and Miss Ellen Arnold were the first of a stream of missionary women who left the young South Australian colony to work in India. Scores of women from other Christian denominations and from other Australian colonies also went to India and indeed to other mission fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with other western women missionaries, these women intended to save souls and to bring India's daughters to Christ, often by means of medical work. But unlike their British sisters, these women came from the edge of empire to intervene in another, but different, colonial site. These missionary ventures coincided with efforts of the Australian settlers to elaborate for themselves an identity separate from and against that of the metropolitan centre. Within these debates, contestations over the meaning of ‘the colonial girl’ and ‘the Australian girl’ played a key role. The article explores why the women were drawn to India rather than to working with Aboriginal people in Australia. It begins to investigate how in seeking to reconstruct Indian womanhood they elaborated for themselves a separate colonial, Australian identity and how much in their missionary endeavours they affirmed an identity as white, Christian and ultimately British.