• 1 Generally, missionaries maintained a skeptical view of imperialism’s motives, although they often (...)
• 2 See in particular, Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Mansions of the Lord: Architecture, Interi (...)
• 3 Of the notable exceptions to this general trend, none is directly concerned with the Australian co (...)
• 4 See Brian Stanley, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History, Princeton, NJ: Princeto (...)
• 5 See, for example, Michael J. Lewis, City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning, Princet (...)
• 6 Julie Willis and Philip Goad, “A Bigger Picture: Reframing Australian Architectural History,” Fabr (...)
• 7 Paul Memmott’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture describes missionary architect (...)

2The influence of Christian missionaries on broader imperial processes has been rigorously interrogated in an extensive body of scholarship.1 The same cannot be said, however, for missionary architecture. It is telling, for example, that arguably the most influential study to explicitly consider the deployment of architecture as a missionary tool—Jean and John Comaroff’s canonical 1990s study of British Nonconformist missionaries in South Africa, Of Revelation and Revolution—was authored by anthropologists.2 Naturally, the Comaroffs’ study emphasizes the effects of architecture on the lived experience of its inhabitants but downplays the systems of knowledge, the cultural traditions, and the modes of production that informed its conception and construction. While historians of architecture are more attuned to the insights that can be offered by the very fabric of the missions, scholarship of this kind nonetheless remains limited in its breadth.3 Where it does exist, this scholarship has tended to focus on the African and North American contexts. In part, the disciplinary dearth of scholarship on this topic stems from a more general tendency of recent decades to treat nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial settings as overwhelmingly secular, if not avowedly anti-religious. As recent studies have argued, however, religious institutions were fundamental in shaping the political and cultural history of European imperialism, both at home in the metropole and throughout the empire more broadly.4 Where histories of architecture have engaged with this latter scholarship, they have prioritized the ecclesiastical architecture of colonial churches, while neglecting missionary architecture.5 This imbalance is difficult to justify. Not only did missionary architecture form part of the wider manifestation of formal religion in imperial settings—in effect, existing on the other end of the same spectrum as the cathedrals and colleges erected in the colonial capitals—but it also contributed most directly to extending the physical limits of empire in real terms. In other words, religious buildings did not merely express a religious function; rather, they constituted a highly varied medium through which imperialism in part articulated itself, inextricably bound up with broader, secular processes of expansion and consolidation. Identifying similar gaps in histories of Australian architecture, Julie Willis and Philip Goad have concluded that the work of “Christian missions and government agencies as they attempted to first solve or treat, understand and then negotiate how best to design for indigenous communities,” forms part of an architectural history in need of recovery.6 Despite the limited attention devoted to such a recovery in their Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, this topic remains largely unexplored.7

• 8 In this paper, “the Queensland Government,” or “the state,” refer either to the Queensland Colonia (...)
• 9 Prior to colonization in 1788, more than five hundred different Indigenous nations, or clan groups (...)

4Queensland was the second-youngest of the Australian colonies, formed after its annexation from New South Wales in 1859. Although a number of predominantly coastal settlements had matured into thoroughly urban environments by the time of Mapoon’s establishment in 1891—especially the capital, Brisbane—the northern districts of the colony of Queensland still remained almost entirely unregulated by the state.8 Conversely, these same districts were among the most densely populated by Aboriginal people who had mostly been able to avoid the ravages of white occupation—racial violence, disease, abduction for labor and/or sex, and loss of Country—throughout the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century.9 However, with the European discovery of the material abundance of Queensland’s tropical north—gold, tin, cedar, grazing pasture, and pearl shell and sea cucumber beds—from the 1870s on, the northern districts of the colony, and Cape York in particular, increasingly became the site of frequent and violent frontier clashes between Aboriginal people and white settlers vying for access and control over the same areas of land.

• 10 Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal-European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier (...)

5As the historian Noel Loos has argued, Queensland’s frontier was a fourfold phenomenon, taking on different forms and accruing in different ways on the grasslands, in the rainforests, around the mines and on the colony’s waterways – its manifestation across these different environments being determined by a consistent “lack of effective governmental control.”10 Indeed, two years after Hey’s arrival in Cape York, the renowned journalist A. G. Stephens clearly expressed his frustration with the state’s approach to frontier governance in the north:

• 12 Carl Lumholtz, Among Cannibals: Account of Four Years Travel in Australia, and of Camp Life with t (...)

Clearly, it was not. On his travels throughout northern Queensland around the time of Stephens’s writing, the Norwegian ethnographer Carl Lumholtz captured the extent of the racial violence on the colony’s frontier, reporting that pastoralists were shooting all Aboriginal men “because they were cattle killers; the women, because they gave birth to cattle killers; and the children, because they would in time become cattle killers.”12 Particularly vicious were the retribution killings carried out by the Queensland Native Mounted Police (NMP), especially where Aboriginal skirmishes had targeted the homesteads of European families. The symbolism of innocence and vulnerability embodied by white women and children fanned the flames of racial hostility. An article in the Cooktown Herald was particularly blunt:

• 14 Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance, op. cit. (note 10), p. 61.
• 15 William Chatfield, letter to the editor, Port Denison Times, March 5, 1881.
• 16 Cited in Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland, Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Pre (...)

6As late as 1889, following the murder of a white pastoralist south of where the Mapoon mission would be established just two years later, three NMP detachments were deployed to mete out the state’s revenge (fig. 3). It was reported that five Aboriginal camps were subsequently “dispersed”: the NMP’s vernacular for state-sanctioned massacre.14 Eventually, even pastoralists themselves began to take issue with the severity of the actions carried out by the NMP. William Chatfield, for example, declared that “we have a duty to perform toward the aborigines (which does not consist solely in administering lead) and I am convinced we shall find that doing that duty will in the long run pay the best.”15 Government officials attacked the NMP’s violent methods, deploring its “cruel, butchering work” as an “inhuman and uncivilised” affair that should be afforded “no sanction, either in civil or military law.”16 The violence precipitated by the NMP, it was proposed, needed to be replaced by a more humane and civilized system of managing Queensland’s Aboriginal population.

• 19 Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, Sydney: unsw Press, 200 (...)
• 20 Nicholas Hey, “Report, to the Convener of Foreign Missions Committee, of the State and Progress of (...)

11Deborah Bird Rose has similarly argued that missionaries’ allusions to emptiness and animality helped the colonial public to imagine a particular type of Aboriginality that bolstered the precepts of evangelisation—namely, “the pristine savage.” She continues, “They imagined this type as an absence—not only the absence of their own European civilisation but an absence of all civilisation: a veritable tabula rasa on which they would inscribe the redemption through their own cultural and colonising practices and through the spiritual authority of Jesus Christ.”19 In 1901, for example, a decade after first arriving, Hey reported that “the Mapoon station is gradually changing from a native camp into a modern village […] The young people especially take pride in their more comfortable dwellings and personal appearance. That cleanliness is next to godliness has proved true here also.”20 Missionaries, Hey implied in these portrayals of Mapoon, could serve as proxies through which the state’s power could be more easily exerted on Queensland’s northern frontier (fig. 4). The dual projects of colonial and ecclesiastical expansion were not easily disentangled.

• 21 Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines, Sydney, Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1989, p. 95.
• 22 On the “economy of violence,” see Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, “A Journey through Forgetting (...)
• 23 Ann Curthoys, “White, British, and European: Historicising Identity in Settler Societies,” in Jane (...)

12As these examples betray, missionaries were adept at playing what Bain Attwood has described as “the politics of expertise.”21 They leveraged this expertise in the form of an assertive humanitarianism and concomitant rejection of racial violence, which in turn provided the conditions for the state’s authoritarian and autocratic regimes of Aboriginal institutionalization to emerge: the frontier violence of the NMP was effectively replaced by an institutional economy of violence.22 As Ann Curthoys has observed, such dynamics are typical of white settler societies, which “generally have liberal and humanitarian traditions and sets of institutions that at times come into direct conflict with racial thinking, action and policy.”23 On Queensland’s northern frontier, this discrepancy was in part reconciled in the figure of the missionary who, as Hey embodies, promoted their expertise as instrumental to the state’s attempts to govern effectively.

• 24 The earlier Moravian missions in the southern colony of Victoria were closely connected to the Que (...)
• 25 See, for example, Peter Vogt, “‘Everywhere at Home’: The Eighteenth-Century Moravian Movement as a (...)
• 26 In Queensland, earlier attempts to establish mission stations had been instructed to follow the au (...)

13In leveraging his missionary expertise within the frontier context of colonial Queensland, Hey drew on a long history of Moravian evangelization. Already by the 1870s, Moravians boasted of a total of seventy thousand converts living in religious settlements throughout Europe, North America, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Asia and the Australian colony of Victoria; a list as diverse in its geography as in the political conditions that prevailed in each context.24 Scholars have variously attributed the Moravians’ widespread recognition and influence to their unique religious culture and social organization; their self-understanding as a transnational theocratic community willing to collaborate with colonial governments; and their systematic approach to establishing religious communities, known as the Moravian settlement model.25 By the late nineteenth century, this model was widely recognized within evangelical circles as paradigmatic.26 An analysis of the Moravian settlement model, and the role played by architecture within it, reveals the status of Mapoon as an outpost in the Moravian world.

• 29 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards A Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia (...)

20The Moravian settlement model was not a template that materialized mission stations in an identical manner, irrespective of local conditions. It did not proffer a step-by-step guide determining precisely how buildings should be constructed. However, it did delineate how the architecture of the mission station could be used as a vehicle for inaugurating and regulating forms of living conducive to the transmission of Christianity. The value of historicizing an architecture of this kind is in the subsequent ability to draw connections between mission stations, their physical organization and the cultural histories that they refracted in discrete and localized ways. To invoke Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the Moravian settlement model “flowed across political boundaries,” becoming transformed through manifold local expressions while also remaining legible enough for the historian to recognize that diffusion, transmission, and variation produced “not separate and comparable, but connected histories.”29 In this way, although the Mapoon mission was established in order to address the discrete frontier conditions that confronted the Queensland Government in the late nineteenth century, it simultaneously also formed part of the long history of the Moravians’ global missionary project. The physical fabric of the Mapoon mission station existed at the intersection of these interests: a hybridization of extra-state missionary architecture and the strategic objectives of the state.

• 30 G. A. Bremner, Johan Lagae and Mercedes Volait, “Intersecting Interests: Developments in Networks (...)
• 31 G.A. Bremner, “Tides That Bind: Waterborne Trade and the Infrastructure Networks of Jardine, Mathe (...)

21That the buildings erected at mission stations such as Mapoon were often rudimentary, provisional, and therefore seemingly incommensurable with the concerns of contemporary metropolitan architects seems to be a factor in the dearth of architectural scholarship on the Australian missions. And yet, while the aesthetic, technical and authorial criteria that are typically used to delineate the disciplinarity of architecture clearly distinguish the buildings prescribed by the Moravian settlement model from the more conventional objects of an architectural historiography of Australia, in keeping with the present discussion it can also be meaningfully argued that—in terms of the actual operations of colonial governance—the building programs of missionaries were as instrumental in their own way in accomplishing the colonial project in material terms than the edifices erected in the colonial capitals. Recently, G. A. Bremner has made a similar argument, offering the term “gray architecture” as a heuristic device encompassing the “somewhat banal and mundane array of structures that facilitated global empire and its myriad connections.”30 In accord with Bremner’s definition, examples of gray architecture might include, but are not limited to, the factories, warehouses, mills, agricultural facilities, roads, bridges, canals, jetties, and fences that far outnumber landmark architecture in the historical record. Bremner argues that due to two factors: their “radical instrumentality,” causing them to fade into the background of a given situation, and the typically indiscernible nature of their authorship, these elements of the built environment have “escaped consideration in the annals of architecture.” Rather than dismissing gray architecture on this basis, however, Bremner suggests we should in fact “recognise and consent to [its] inherently unstable and indeterminate status,” viewing it as a productive basis for theoretical articulation.31 In this sense, it is precisely on the basis of their “grayness” that those buildings, technologies, and settlement models, previously overlooked within architectural historiography, can be approached as evidence of larger systems and processes of imperialism.

• 32 Horace Tozer, Queensland Parliamentary Debates, Brisbane: Edmond Gregory, Government Printer, 1897 (...)
• 33 William Parry-Okeden, Report on the North Queensland Aborigines and Native Police, with Appendices(...)
• 34 Archibald Meston, Report on the Aboriginals of Queensland, Brisbane: Edmund Gregory, Government Pr (...)

22The role played by Mapoon on Queensland’s late-nineteenth-century northern frontier serves as a salient example of Bremner’s argument. As a radically instrumental, and yet carefully planned and finely calibrated site in a larger territory, Mapoon made visible and consolidated colonial control, mediating the government’s claims of ownership and authority in what constituted a highly bureaucratic project of organizational collaboration. According to Queensland’s colonial secretary in 1897, the colony’s northern missions not only functioned as “instruments for distributing food supplies,” but also ostensibly played a role in the government’s regulation of public health by quarantining Aboriginal people from white settlement.32 At the same time, Queensland’s commissioner of police suggested that the number of mission stations in northern Queensland should be increased; he described them as “an auxiliary to the work of the police” that were to be “subsidised by the Government during the continuance of good work” and that should occupy locations “carefully selected and approved by the Government” in order to protect both the strategic and economic interests of the state.33 Meanwhile, according to Archibald Meston—one of two government-appointed “protectors of Aboriginals” in the colony—the work performed by Hey at Mapoon contributed to a wider “system of government” that aided Queensland’s development towards becoming a mature polity within Greater Britain.34 In the eyes of the state, then, the gray architecture of the Moravian settlement model was useful insofar as it could be adapted and redeployed in meeting the objectives of frontier governance.

• 35 John Macarthur has described the importance of the telegraph to foreign investment in Queensland’s (...)
• 36 Armand Mattelart, Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture, [First published as La Comm (...)
• 37 G. A. Bremner, “Tides That Bind: Waterborne Trade and the Infrastructure Networks of Jardine, Math (...)

23These official positions are captured in the map produced by the Queensland Survey Department in 1898 (fig. 2), in which Mapoon is depicted as a nodal “town” alongside a line of newly built fortified telegraph stations, a government outpost on Thursday Island, intercontinental shipping routes and lighthouses, mail supply lines, and the ever-emergent railway network. When viewed collectively as imbricated sites of governance, Mapoon can be understood to have formed part of a regulated zone that accelerated the possibilities for the exchange of information; extraction of commodities by private enterprise and their efficient distribution from northern Queensland to global markets; and, ultimately, investment and taxation.35 Mapoon therefore contributed to generating and securing prosperity for the state, at the same time as it worked to clear this productive territory of an Aboriginal presence, further facilitating foreign investment, trade and settlement. Together, these developments worked to rationalize Queensland’s northern frontier, akin to what Armand Mattelart has described as “a project of mastering space.”36 No particular telegraph station, mission house, jetty, or fence line was decisive; rather, all were subservient to the larger project of colonial development and the economic aspirations it pursued.37

• 38 On the privatization of public violence, see Joseph-Achille Mbembe, “On Private Indirect Governmen (...)

24By drawing on the capital and expertise of Hey and his Moravian colleagues as extra-state agents, the Queensland Government effectively privatized the public violence—the removal of Aboriginal people from their family, community and Country onto isolated mission stations—for which it was ultimately responsible.38 Outsourcing its responsibility in this way, the state ventured to overlook the German affiliations of the Mapoon missionaries—at a time when Germany had become a rival imperial power in the South Pacific—in its attempts to meet the imperatives of frontier governance explored in this paper. In part, this was only possible due to the longstanding reputation of the Herrnhut Moravians as a transnational theocratic community unfettered by nationalist allegiances. As the case of Mapoon therefore reveals, colonial governance not only occurred in the straightforward establishment of systems, technologies, and representations of power, but also in the form of radically instrumental and yet highly bureaucratic architectural settings, embedded in a transnational geography.

• 39 On the closure of Mapoon, see Geoffrey Stephen Wharton, The Day They Burned Mapoon: A Study of the (...)

25By 1919, every Moravian missionary stationed to Queensland had either retired or been refused entry to Australia as a result of the First World War. This included Nicholas Hey, who had been naturalized as an Australian citizen and had assumed a post within a Presbyterian congregation in suburban Sydney. Eventually, the Mapoon mission station was devolved from church to government control before it was demolished and burnt to the ground in 1963 to make way for the widespread mining of bauxite that continues to this day.39 Whether construed as a mechanism in the governance of Queensland’s colonial frontier; as an Australian site in the global territory of Moravian evangelization; as a conduit for German influence in the region; or as a remote community in which Aboriginal people were able—under strictly controlled conditions—to organize outside the hostility and violence of frontier Queensland, Mapoon’s architecture is a constant (fig. 11). The historiographic task therefore becomes to reveal and trace this multiplicity and, in so doing, to demonstrate the significance of Mapoon as a transnational architectural project.

• 40 Ash Amin, “Placing Globalization,” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 14, no. 2, 1997, p. 133. DOI: (...)

26This, however, is not to propose that an architectural history of the Mapoon mission should simply eclipse local conditions in favor of the metanarrative of globalization; rather, it is to imagine globalization as a manifold, in which the competing regimes of the transnational missionary project and the early-twentieth-century rise of the Australian nation-state coexisted as opposite sides of the same coin. As Ash Amin has suggested, beyond the territorial idea of “sequestered spatial logics” in which the local, regional, national, and global are considered mutually exclusive, lies the ability to interrogate the “intermingling of global, distant, and local logics” as irreducible forces shaping a hybridized globalization.40 This intermingling was clearly legible in northern Queensland. Here, between 1891 and 1919, the Queensland Government co-opted the project of Moravian evangelization in order to secure the territory of its frontier districts. This privatization of public violence had an architecture that has remained largely overlooked by historians despite the fact that Mapoon, and other missions like it, were instrumental to Queensland’s political future within the Australian commonwealth and Greater Britain more broadly.