In September 1893, a measles epidemic raged on the Victorian mission of Ramahyuck. At the height of the epidemic, Ellie Hagenauer, the daughter of the missionary managers of Ramahyuck, recorded in her diary how she had visited the homes of the Aboriginal mission residents. ‘Poor little Mary Darby’ she wrote ‘her eyes are very blighted. I washed her face & hands & made her more comfortable. Then washed the Stephens & Moffats. Oh it was dreadful. I think it took a deal of strength from me’.2

The missionary imperative, which drove Europeans like Ellie Hagenauer’s parents to Christianise Aboriginal people, required and indeed affirmed certain kinds of physical and emotional proximity between missionaries and those they evangelised. On missions such as Ramahyuck, Aboriginal and white people lived side-by-side, shared food and drink, and touched each other. They spoke of each other using language that was familial and often affectionate. Such proximity threatened racial boundaries and hierarchies that were central to

86respectable white society, at a time when the nature of racial difference was being widely debated. For white people on and around mission stations, this could produce considerable external and internal tensions.

This chapter explores the anxieties around whiteness and respectability on Ramahyuck mission station in the late 19th century. It focuses particularly on the diaries and personal letters of Ellie Hagenauer, read in the context of the experience of the Hagenauer family and their racialised perspective. Ramahyuck was a significant mission and has received attention from a number of historians, but the papers of Ellie Hagenauer provide a different perspective from the reports to church and government officials that form the basis of most other accounts.3 In their references to whiteness, Ellie’s writings also provide new insights into the mission experience, which had enormous significance for many Aboriginal people in colonial Australia.

The Hagenauer family in Victoria

Ellie was the youngest daughter of Friedrich and Louise Hagenuaer, German Moravian missionaries who founded the Ramahyuck mission in Gippsland in 1863. She was born in 1873, the seventh of eight children.4 The personal writings considered here date largely from the 1890s, when Ellie had completed her final schooling in Melbourne and was living back at the mission. That these papers date from the later years of the Hagenauer family’s time in Victoria is significant in understanding Ellie’s attitude to both whiteness and respectability.

87When the Hagenauers first began their missionary work in Australia their nationality, religious convictions, and association with Aboriginal people meant that they occupied an ambiguous position in settler society. German nationality was not necessarily a barrier to respectability, as of all the non-British migrants to the Australian colonies, Germans appear to have been among the most accepted. They were generally small farmers and labourers of the kind desired by Australian colonial administrations for settlement, they had a reputation for being politically docile and, unlike some European groups such as southern Italians, they seem to have been considered ‘white’.5 From 1849, several large groups of Germans arrived in Victoria, and the Argus commented:

Given their apparent adaptability to British settler culture, Germans were not the target of widespread racism prior to the tensions created by the Boer War. Nonetheless, many German settlers deliberately maintained their language and cultural practices, creating a subculture within settler society. This could result in hostility and some Germans were ostracised or harassed.7

For the Hagenauers, their Moravian convictions created further potential barriers to integration with settler society. The Moravian

88movement was part of the groundswell of European pietism which preempted the evangelical revival of the 18th century.8 Moravian missionaries, mainly from working-class backgrounds, valued hard work and practical skills over scholarly prowess and explicitly disavowed involvement in the politics of the states in which they worked. They aspired to personal devotion to Jesus, humility and a rejection of ‘the world’ and its values. The Moravian missionary handbook claimed:

Moravian missionaries, therefore, were not expected to seek social advancement or become entangled in the affairs of society.

If such factors as nationality and religious conviction militated against the Hagenauers becoming established members of respectable settler society in Victoria, even more significant was their choice to live and work among Aboriginal people. The first Moravian missionaries in Australia had experienced intense opposition from local settlers to their first mission, established at Lake Boga in 1843, and were forced to close it.10 Like other missionaries, they competed with settlers for land and they were accused of potentially politicising Indigenous people.11

Growing up on the mission, the Hagenauer children lived in close proximity to Aboriginal people. They were nursed by young Aboriginal women and, when they reached the age of school attendance, they joined

89the other mission children at the Ramahyuck school.12 For several years, this school was taught by an Aboriginal woman named Bessy Flower, though she was replaced by a white male teacher before Ellie was born. Jessie Mitchell has written about the potential for intimacy between missionary children and Aboriginal people, and such potential certainly existed at Ramahyuck.13 It is difficult to imagine anywhere else in the Australian colonies in the 1870s where Aboriginal and white children were being educated in the same classroom, at one time by an Aboriginal teacher.

In spite of these factors, by the time Ellie Hagenauer began her diary in the 1880s the Hagenauer family had taken significant steps towards integrating with—and even achieving significant status within—settler society. From the outset, missionary work made it impossible for them to remain within a German subculture in Victoria. Physically, their mission was at a distance from the major centres of German settlement. The family had to learn English to deal with colonial officials and to communicate with Aboriginal people. Friedrich Hagenauer had regular contact with representatives of both the Australian Presbyterian and Church of England denominations, who shared oversight of aspects of his missionary work. Though Hagenauer remained a loyal Moravian, in 1869 he was given the full status of an ordained minister by the Presbyterian Church of Victoria.14

Friedrich and Louise Hagenauer also went beyond merely pragmatic engagement with colonial society. Moravian missionaries all over the world traditionally sent their children to be educated at Moravian

90boarding schools in Germany. The Hagenauers followed this practice with their first child, Theo, but he died while away and they chose to educate the rest of their children in Victoria. While the Hagenauer children completed the early years of their education at Ramahyuck mission school alongside the Aboriginal children, for their final years they were sent to boarding school in Melbourne—Presbyterian Ladies College for the girls and Scotch College for the boys.15 The Hagenauer children, educated in English and with only a small number of German acquaintances, appear to have had mixed feelings about their parents’ homeland. In 1898, Ellie wrote with amusement of her younger brother, ‘Hen would not sing the National Anthem he is too much of a Deutscher, it was very funny’.16

During this same period, Friedrich Hagenauer became increasingly involved in the Victorian government’s management of Indigenous affairs. He played a significant role in convincing the Board for Protection of the Aborigines (BPA) to pass the notorious so-called Half-Caste Act, which caused enormous suffering to Aboriginal families forced apart.17 Hagenauer’s active lobbying of the BPA, which will be considered in more detail below, demonstrated his willingness to become involved in the political sphere. This was confirmed when he was appointed Secretary and General Inspector for the BPA in July 1889. In taking on a role within the apparatus of the colonial state, Hagenauer certainly moved well beyond conventional Moravian missionary roles. He also gained a position of some status within settler society.

In the 1880s and 90s, therefore, Ellie Hagenauer was part of a family that was upwardly mobile in social terms. Her years at PLC gave her a significant network among the most respectable members of Victorian settler society. Her diary and letters for this period show that through her father’s new responsibilities in Melbourne she and the rest of the family

91were regularly introduced to influential members of Victoria’s government and churches.18 Increased engagement with respectable white society appears to have heightened Ellie’s consciousness of her whiteness and the tensions inherent in her own position as a member of the community at Ramahyuck.19 This added to the already-complicated and often contradictory attitudes to race which are revealed by the way her parents managed Ramahyuck mission and intervened in debates about government policy in relation to Aboriginal missions.

Race at Ramahyuck

Missionaries such as Friedrich and Louise Hagenauer taught that all people were of ‘one blood’ and equally valuable in the sight of God. Friedrich Hagenauer explicitly criticised those ‘pious Christians who confuse Europeanisation with Christianisation’.20 This belief in the equal spiritual value of human beings was reflected in aspects of life on the mission. Indigenous and non-Indigenous children were educated side-by-side in the Ramahyuck school, which consistently topped the colony in examination results. Indigenous and white Christians worshipped together in the mission church. Of the church at Ramahyuck, Hagenauer wrote:

92Like many missionaries, however, the Hagenauers also believed that the Indigenous people of Australia were culturally inferior and in need of civilisation as well as Christianisation.22 As a result, daily life on the mission was structured in ways that created clear boundaries between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. In his analysis of the construction of Ramahyuck, Bain Attwood has noted that the mission was physically divided between the Aboriginal mission residents’ houses and the ‘mission enclave’ of mission house, church and dormitory.23 Other than the women who worked in the house, Aboriginal mission residents were not usually permitted into the missionaries’ house.24 On special occasions, such as when the Hagenauer family gave a concert in their house, Ellie noted that ‘the natives’ had been allowed into the dining room, or to watch from the verandah.25 Social contact was also racially determined. Meeting a visitor to the mission, Ellie wrote ‘I stretched forth an arm & said “Goodday” thinking he was a halfcaste, I dropped nearly with surprise when I discovered my mistake’.26 Although the visitor looked ‘halfcaste’, he was classified as white and so apparently required a different greeting.

The Hagenauers’ understanding of race and racial hierarchy came more sharply into focus during debates about government policy towards the missions in the early 1880s. As Felicity Jensz has demonstrated,

93Friedrich Hagenauer argued strongly for the adoption of legislation which would force ‘half-caste’ people off the missions.27 His reasoning reveals an understanding of race as a category that was both self-evident and fluid. In his letters regarding the legislation, Hagenauer expressed his conviction that the few remaining ‘full Blacks’ at Ramahyuck would eventually die out. The majority of those living on mission stations such as Ramahyuck were, he argued ‘half-castes’ or ‘half-whites’. Many of these were ‘nearly totally white people’. Such ‘half-whites’, Hagenauer believed, desired and deserved an opportunity for self-sufficiency that was not permitted under existing legislation.28 Hagenauer was critical of the white settlers who fathered illegitimate children with Aboriginal women. Implicit in his argument, however, was the assumption that the white parentage of ‘half-whites’ had instilled in them new qualities—especially the quality of hard work—which was missing in the ‘full Blacks’ at Ramahyuck.

The same understanding emerges in a letter Hagenauer wrote in 1882 regarding a young ‘half-caste’ man who had been brought up on the mission. ‘We feel it a great pity’, he wrote:

Like his arguments to the BPA, this quote reveals Hagenauer’s understanding of race as inherited. A ‘half-caste’ person was innately different from either a ‘white’ or ‘Black’ person.

94Such an understanding reflected the broader racial thinking of the late 19th century, in which social Darwinist arguments were marshalled to provide new grounds for the widespread European assumption that ‘race’, to quote Robert Knox’s famous phrase, was ‘everything’, determining physiology, ability and character.30 Social evolution or ‘developmentalism’ was publicly debated in Melbourne in the 1870s, with the evangelical Anglican Bishop of Melbourne, Charles Perry, a supporter of Ramahyuck, arguing against such theories and for racial unity and equality.31 In addition, Perry questioned the over-emphasis within such theories, on notions of ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’. Civilisation, he pointed out, was no guarantee of spiritual or moral character.32 Though Hagenauer shared Perry’s evangelical theology, Robert Kenny has argued that as social Darwinist thought became pervasive, Hagenauer became more convinced of the deep-rooted differences between races.33

Yet these comments also reveal Hagenauer’s assumption that race was fluid and changeable, not simply innate and immutable. Hagenaeur believed that Charles Foster could become a ‘white man in that sense as generally understood’ or a ‘Blackfellow’. Race, then, was a result not simply of innate characteristics, but also of personal choices and the influence of others. Racial identity might be particularly unstable for those of mixed racial heritage, but this understanding of the changeability of racial identity had potential implications for white people living among Aboriginal people, and vice versa.

Hagenauer’s arguments to the BPA played a significant role in the eventual adoption of ‘An Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria’ in 1886. Under this

95legislation, Aboriginal people identified as ‘half-caste’ were forced off mission stations if they were under the age of 34. The Act separated families and caused immense suffering and disadvantage. Letters written by Aboriginal residents of Ramahyuck and other Victorian missions to the BPA in the years after the Act was passed provide eloquent testimony to this, as separated families sought permission simply to see each other, or requested the most basic necessities as they struggled to survive in settler society.34 Ellie Hagenauer’s accounts of life on the mission and her own responses to it were written primarily in the years after this Act was passed, as it was gradually implemented. Though she does not mention the Act, the debates over racial identity which accompanied it, and in which her father participated, form the background to her references to whiteness.

Respectable whiteness at Ramahyuck

Ellie’s complicated response to her position at Ramahyuck emerges in accounts she wrote of her interactions with both Aboriginal and white people at Ramahyuck. In July 1894, she recorded in her diary an argument with Mr Hasting, a man who had been helping on the mission. During breakfast, she lost her temper and told Mr Hasting to ‘be quiet’. ‘I shall not put up with his nonsense any longer’ she wrote. ‘He shall not run down the natives or the Moravians in my presence’.35

Ellie’s defensiveness about ‘Moravians’ and ‘natives’ is evidence of both her sense of identification with these groups and her awareness that such identification was open to criticism. To be a Moravian was to embrace a piety that was conservative by the standards of polite Melbourne society. Ellie did not attend the local races or other local social events so as not to become ‘worldly’, and noted that the daughter of

96another Moravian missionary was sent to stay at Ramahyuck ‘that she may see that inmates of a Mission house do not go to balls & dances etc’.36 This conservatism could create embarrassment for Ellie: she noted that while shopping in Melbourne, her father told the shop assistant ‘not to put a male & female doll in one box as it was not decent. She thought him a country bumpkin’.37

While being a Moravian posed certain social challenges for Ellie, however, being associated with Aboriginal people was far more threatening to respectability. As noted, on the mission, proximity to Aboriginal people was both a pragmatic necessity and a religious duty for the missionaries and their family. Ellie’s daily life, as recorded in her diary, could involve theological discussions with Aboriginal Christians, sharing domestic tasks with her former nurse, or having her hair washed by one of the young women on the mission.38 Physical care of sick mission residents was a regular duty. After visiting one Aboriginal man, Ellie wrote:

As this quote suggests, Ellie saw a willingness by her mother to physically care for mission residents as a sign of ‘nobility’. This perception was not necessarily based on assumptions about racial difference, but her comments demonstrate that such contact was weighted with all kinds of meanings that could and apparently often did have more to do with powerful tropes of maternalism and condescension than of anything like emotional intimacy on an egalitarian footing. Nonetheless, such close

97contact between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal was unusual and Ellie could display a profound sense of internal unease about living so close to the racial boundaries.

This unease is obvious in Ellie’s anxieties about the opinions of others as well as her own prejudices. She confided to her diary her anger at a visitor who accused her of eavesdropping. ‘I’m savage with Mrs Harm. She thinks evidently I try to listen when she talks to Mr Hardie in the study … I must say I do have some honorable feelings tho’ I do live amongst the blacks’.40 It is not entirely obvious how ironic Ellie was being in this comment, but it clearly communicates her awareness of a common perception that living ‘amongst the blacks’ could threaten those ‘honorable’ qualities that respectable white people shared. In judging herself, however, ‘native’ qualities could also serve for Ellie as a minimum standard against which her own behaviour could be measured. On one occasion, she wrote in her diary ‘Tonight I am consumed with remorse for allowing my temper to get the better of me & for not entering into a joke even as well as a native girl’.41 In both incidents, though whiteness is not mentioned, it is implicitly defined in contrast to the inferior qualities of ‘blacks’ or ‘a native girl’.

This anxiety about preserving the qualities of whiteness while living ‘amongst the blacks’ emerges not only in comments about Ellie’s own behaviour and reputation, but in her concern over the behaviour of those white people associated with her family and the mission. Her brothers, who lived on the mission for part of this time, were subject to scrutiny. She complained of one brother: ‘August is not at all sociable but sits playing draughts with the blacks in the old house’.42 Another brother, Johannes, who was later appointed manager of the mission, also spent significant amounts of time with the Aboriginal men who laboured on the mission. On one occasion, when a fire threatened the mission, Ellie

98dedicated several diary entries to complaining about ‘such laziness as is shewn [sic] by Joh & our native men’. She claimed that ‘Mother had a great work to make Joh go—& at last when they did go they sat on our boundary fence & waited for the fire to come … Such laziness!!!’43 In this account, Johannes, who associated with the ‘native men’, was seen to share the quality of laziness, a vice which was repeatedly attributed to Aborigines by settlers, by her father and elsewhere by Ellie.44

Most acute, however, was Ellie’s concern that proximity between white and Aboriginal people not produce an intimacy that she considered inappropriate. She wrote a very critical note in her diary regarding a neighbour who had visited Ramahyuck:

Though she later added an apologetic note—‘Sorry I got scotty and wrote this’—it was clearly the hostility towards Mrs Hooper rather than the principle of guarding against the ‘black boy’ of which she repented.

Even more explicit, however, were her statements regarding one of the mission schoolteachers, Miss Seymour. Throughout the 1880s and 90s, the mission school was staffed by a series of school teachers employed by the Victorian government. These teachers lived on the mission and had some authority over mission residents, but were not necessarily in sympathy with the missionaries’ faith or their methods of managing the mission. Ellie’s diaries make it clear that this could produce

99situations of significant conflict between the missionaries, the school teacher and the mission residents.46

In early 1898, Miss Seymour was appointed to the mission school and initially appeared to get on well with the Hagenauers. As the year progressed, however, Ellie made a number of increasingly critical comments in her diary and letters regarding the new teacher. In October 1898, writing to her fiancé in Western Australia, Ellie criticised Miss Seymour for getting involved in ‘the blacks’ gossip’ though ‘she means well’.47 In early November, she wrote in her diary ‘Miss Seymour in the miserables. I simply can’t understand her at all, allowing herself to get entangled with the blacks’.48 Three weeks later, these vague references crystallised:

Haines Cameron was the son of Bessy Flower, the Aboriginal woman who had taught at the Ramahyuck school before Ellie’s birth.

Ellie’s reaction to the revelation of Miss Seymour’s behaviour, and in particular her ‘connection’ with Cameron, is revealing of her complicated understanding of the relationship between whiteness and respectability. Miss Seymour’s actions are criticised not as an offence to religious principles—there is no suggestion that she and Cameron have had sexual relations—but as incompatible with being ‘a lady’. Though Ellie interacted

100with Aboriginal people every day of her life on the mission, she clearly distinguished between such interaction and becoming ‘entangled with the blacks’. Intimacy with Aboriginal people, as represented by becoming involved with ‘the blacks’ gossip’ or worse, a romantic relationship, was unacceptable for a respectable white woman, or ‘lady’. Miss Seymour’s offence was clearly heightened, in Ellie’s eyes, by the fact that the unrespectable ‘white larrikins’ of the local town were using this information to mock the white ‘ladies’ at Ramahyuck. For Ellie, respectable whiteness was a vulnerable quality. It could be threatened, and thus to some extent was defined, by both unrespectable white people and by those identified as non-white.

Ellie’s response to the incident with Miss Seymour makes clear how powerful was her desire to be integrated with respectable white society. This desire existed in conscious tension with her loyalty to her family and religious convictions. As she lamented to her dairy in September 1897:

Three years later, Ellie’s desire to ‘live among white people’ was granted when she moved to Western Australia with her husband and became a respected member of the upper echelons of settler society in Perth.51 In keeping with her desire to ‘go to meetings and take an interest in church affairs’, she was an office-holder in the Women’s Service Guild and the Australian Federation of Women Voters, and an active member of Trinity Congregational Church, the League of Nations Union, the YWCA and the boards of a number of state schools.52 She visited Ramahyuck

101regularly and maintained an affectionate correspondence with Emily Stephens, the Aboriginal woman who had been her nurse.53

Whiteness, Ellie Hagenauer and missions

Reading Ellie Hagenauer’s diaries and letters, her personal anxieties about whiteness are obvious. Whiteness was not ‘everything’ for Ellie, rather it was a central but fraught aspect of her self-understanding, which related in complicated ways to her religious faith, her loyalty to her family, her relationships with individual Indigenous people, and her desire for respectability and sociability. Her proximity to Aboriginal people clearly had the potential to threaten her status as a respectable white woman. However, it also allowed her to construct this status in relation to Aboriginal people, whether through the ‘nobility’ of nursing Aborigines during sickness, or by defining her own qualities of ‘honour’ in contrast to the qualities with which she imbued Aboriginal people. Though she was defensive of ‘the natives’ and had affectionate relationships with a number of Aboriginal people on the mission, she clearly believed that such relationships should involve an emotional distance that echoed the distance separating her family’s home from those of Aboriginal mission residents. To violate this principle through inappropriate intimacy was to lower one’s status as ‘a lady’. Nonetheless, as the incident with Miss Seymour and Haines Cameron demonstrates, both white and Aboriginal people might choose to cross this distance.

Beyond the specific historical experience of Ellie Hagenauer and those who lived at Ramahyuck, can anything broader be gathered from these texts and their context? Ellie’s opinions cannot be taken as representative of missionaries as a whole: though she was certainly influenced by her parents, she herself was not a missionary. Focusing on whiteness in her writings does, however, provide some significant new insights into life on missions, where race was defined in ways that had a

102huge impact on Aboriginal residents—whether through the everyday demarcation of racial divisions or through devastating impositions like the Half-Caste Act.54 In particular, it highlights the diversity of whiteness on and around a mission. Mission histories often focus primarily on the actions of one white man or couple. By contrast, Ellie’s writings demonstrate that a variety of white people were involved in mission life at any time, such as an assistant like Mr Hastings, the adult children of missionaries like Ellie and her brothers, visitors to the mission like Mrs Harm or Mrs Hooper and schoolteachers like Miss Seymour. As Ellie’s accounts of these people show, different white people on missions related to Aboriginal people in quite different ways, from the apparent contempt of Mr Hastings to the ‘entanglement’ of Miss Seymour. Such an insight helps guard against the tendency to generalise about all white people on missions as ‘missionaries’, and then to further generalise about their attitudes to race. On missions, as elsewhere in settler-colonial Australia, whiteness was a diverse construct, though one which uniformly held the potential of power and privilege for those who claimed it.