Despite promising Leanne that the last thing I was here to do was rake up dirt, I couldn’t resist sounding out the views of the whites of Areyonga on the usefulness of missionary Christianity in general and the influence of the last pastor, the Reverend Kalleske, in particular. Unfortunately everyone I spoke to was circumspect, so I was able to piece together only a rough impression of his long pastocracy. He had been a stern shepherd, often the only believable authority figure in Areyonga, and therefore the only one able convincingly to administer discipline. That somebody needed to assume such a role was undeniable, but wouldn’t it have been better for the Aborigines to go in ultimate fear of one of their own? Where were the tribal elders? And what chance had they of reasserting themselves when the autocracy of the church was so entrenched?

I was reading C. D. Rowley’s powerful book, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, while I was in Areyonga, and it was clear from that that the moral and legislative listlessness that prevailed here was the common experience of artificially stable communities. ‘. . . the Aboriginal, once he had sat down, quickly lost the power to do more than supplementary hunting, if only because the processes of hard socialization in which the Aboriginal personality was formed were so rapidly lost in circumstances where autonomy for the process was lost. It was not lost because of some special tyranny in the white “boss”. As the history of the best-intentioned of the missions suggests, human kindness which stabilized the nomads in a dependent imitation or a dependent mendicancy had the same effect in the end.’ Though Rowley also had thoughts towards a solution which were those exactly of the whites we met in Areyonga. ‘Perhaps the answer lay in opportunities for stablization in situations where leadership and decision making for change rested within the Aboriginal society, the whites at the point of contact offering assistance and advice on request.’

There was a more specific grouse against the reign of Pastor Kalleske also. That part of the church service which was not read in English he invariably gave in Aranda, that being the language in standard use at Hermannsburg Mission where Pastor Kalleske had his strongest connections. But the people of Areyonga were Pitjantjatjara not Aranda, and it was in Pitjantjatjara – their own language – that the teachers at Areyonga School were endeavouring to make their charges literate. With so many other obstacles in their way they felt that they could have done without this one.

It was no longer the case that those working for the secular betterment of the Aborigines could believe that they were allies with those working for the spiritual.