'Formerly used primarily for propagandist aims, missionary writings have, over the last decades, increasingly been analysed by secular scholars to gain new social, political, anthropological and cultural insights. Missionaries were some of the first Europeans to travel through Indigenous lands. They were often the first to settle for any length of time among Indigenous peoples, hoping to convert them to Christianity. As in various other British colonial spaces, many of the Protestant missionaries engaged in such work in Australia were German, and they wrote copiously about their work, keeping private diaries and journals as well as informing both local supporters and home committees about their activities. Yet missionary texts also circulated beyond religious circles, informing and influencing broader secular and scientific debates. This chapter examines a selection of German language texts produced by two different religious groups, the Moravians (known in German as Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine) and Lutherans, in the 1860s, at a time when both groups planned, established and then disbanded missions to the Diyari (also Dieri) people, in the interior of Australia. It will show how German-language missionary texts were also mediated into broader religious, as well as secular and scientific settings, so as to further several agendas, including the legitimisation of colonial expansion into the interior of Australia. In the process, German writers engaged with ideas about German identity, as well as drawing on British imperialist thought, and ideas of scientific advancement.' (Publication abstract)
