Of all the characters I’ve read about from Newcastle’s early colonial history, one of the most interesting is the remarkable missionary, Lancelot Threlkeld.

Lancelot Threlkeld wanted to be a stage actor, but he became a missionary instead. This remarkable character established the first mission to Australian Aboriginals, at Lake Macquarie, near Newcastle, in 1825. And although the mission itself can scarcely be rated as having been a success, it enabled Threlkeld to leave a precious legacy to future generations.

Threlkeld set out to learn the language of the people he planned to preach to and convert – just as he had done in Tahiti during the seven years he worked there. Because the language was a spoken language only, he was obliged to try to render its unfamiliar sounds using the English alphabet. With the help of the Aboriginal people at Lake Macquarie – particularly the man known as Biraban or M’Gill – Threlkeld ended up producing a gospel of St Luke and a remarkable complete written grammar of the tongue.

By the time he arrived at the secondary penal settlement of Newcastle, it had been operating for 20 years. The people he came to live and work with at his mission had already suffered greatly under severe pressure from the mostly hostile or indifferent white invaders who had occupied their territories. Although Threlkeld never presumed to assign the indigenous people of Newcastle and Lake Macquarie a formal collective name, in later years these people and the language he recorded became known as “Awabakal”.

Threlkeld published his works mostly in pamphlet form over a span of years. In the 1890s, when these were long out of print and perhaps largely forgotten, Maitland schoolmaster John Fraser republished them – with many of his own elaborations, comments and alterations – in a book that also included other attempts at codifying Aboriginal languages from different parts of NSW. One of Fraser’s inventions was the name “Awabakal”, which he created from words recorded in Threlkeld’s lexicon and which was intended to mean “people of the flat surface” – referring to Lake Macquarie. The people among whom Threlkeld worked never referred to themselves by this name.

Threlkeld had a rocky relationship with the London Missionary Society (LMS), the organisation that sent him to the South Seas. When this relationship irretrievably broke down he fought to maintain his mission work but so many obstacles stood in the way of its success he finally resigned himself to its failure. He remained determined to complete his linguistic projects, however, and this – plus his voluminous correspondence and reminiscences – provide a unique and very valuable window into many aspects of colonial life, the most important being the situation of the indigenous people he had been assigned to work among.

Failed actor

Lancelot Edward Threlkeld was born in London in 1788 and when he was about seven years old his parents sent him to live with an aunt who undertook to raise him and cover the costs of his education. This aunt decided to send him on a sea voyage with another relative to the “East Indies” (now called Indonesia) but after a few days aboard ship he was injured in a fall and his voyage was aborted. His aunt then died and her will directed that he be apprenticed to his choice of trade. After a time he decided he would prefer to go on the stage as an actor, so he bought out what remained of his apprenticeship and went seeking work with various circuses and theatres.

He married Martha Goss in 1808 and, since he couldn’t get regular theatre work, tried his hand at business – at which he managed to lose “a good deal of property”. He persevered with his theatre ambitions until finally forced by his lack of success to give them up altogether. Still aged 19, and not yet old enough to take full control of the estate his aunt had left him, he moved in with Martha’s family. While with them he was converted to evangelical Christianity and became assistant to an itinerant preacher. In those roles he began to consider a career as a missionary.

Martha didn’t share her husband’s enthusiasm for the idea of travelling to distant parts of the world to evangelise people on the fringes of Britain’s empire but by 1813 Lancelot had talked her into it and they went to London under the auspices of the London Missionary Society for training: he as a teacher and she as a midwife. The plan was originally to send the pair to Africa but the society decided instead to send them to Tahiti, in the South Seas. Threlkeld was given some rudimentary training in medicine and surgery and this delayed the couple’s departure for some time.

Threlkeld didn’t want to go to the South Seas. He thought it was an insignificant field for missionary work and he protested repeatedly to the board of the LMS, to no avail. He and Martha, along with another missionary couple, were shipped aboard a convict transport – the Atlas – arriving at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on March 21, 1816. Martha had given birth aboard ship, and both she and the infant became ill with a fever at Rio, prompting Lancelot to unilaterally decide not to go back aboard for the next leg of the journey to Tahiti. The directors of the missionary society were angered by this, and wrote him a stern letter telling him he should have gone aboard, that the baby would have died in any case, and the baby’s illness was a “flimsy pretext” for staying at Rio. The child did die, and Threlkeld never forgot nor forgave the society for its callousness.

Death in Rio

At Rio Threlkeld was welcomed by the small English Protestant community and he tried to persuade the LMS to let him stay there. It refused and he was ordered aboard the ship Harriet in January 1817, arriving in Hobart in March. There he had his first experience of the way white settlers regarded the Indigenous people, writing that one man he met boasted to him of “shooting the blacks like birds off the branches of the trees on which they had climbed for refuge”. The Europeans, he stated, regarded the Aboriginals as nothing other than “a race of monkeys”.

The Threlkelds and other missionary families went to Sydney, where they met the society’s agent, the Rev. Samuel Marsden, before leaving on the ship Active to Tahiti, via New Zealand. When they arrived in November 1817 they were shocked. Stories they’d heard of the great success of the missionary work in Tahiti had been exaggerated, and the older missionaries already on the islands were deeply embittered against the LMS and its neglect of their welfare. Nor were the older missionaries happy to see the newcomers and serious feuding soon broke out. Threlkeld was especially vocal in resisting efforts to have him exercise his limited skills in medicine, asserting that he had been sent to preach the gospel.

Feuding with both the old guard at Tahiti and with the board of directors of the LMS back in London, Threlkeld found himself accused of being extravagant with the society’s funds, a charge he flatly rejected. Most, if not all, of the other missionaries appear to have shared his view that the society was too tight with its money and had little idea of the hardships faced by the workers in the field.

On March 1824 Martha Threlkeld died, on the island of Raiatea, leaving a son and three daughters, the youngest just six months old. Leaving his girls in care on the islands, Threlkeld headed to Sydney, planning to go back to England to find another wife to bring back to the Pacific. While in New South Wales he met and married Sarah Arndell. Before they could head back to the islands, Threlkeld was called to discuss plans for a mission to Indigenous people in the colony of New South Wales. A story had been circulated that the indigenous population of the Moreton Bay district was extremely large, that the people there lived in built villages and, as such, were ripe for missionary conversion. He was, he records in his reminiscences, to be given free passage to Moreton Bay, have a house built for him and his family and be granted access to government stores and other indulgences. Other needs were supposed to have been provided by the LMS.

It quickly turned out that the stories about Moreton Bay had been exaggerated so the Governor withdrew his offers of support. The idea of a mission to Aborigines in New South Wales had taken hold, however, and it was resolved that one would be established at “Reid’s Mistake” (Lake Macquarie) with the entire expense to be borne by the LMS. The Government promised to set aside 10,000 acres for the purpose and the Threlkelds travelled to Newcastle to check out possible mission locations. Their arrival coincided with torrential rain and a severe flood on the Hunter River. They managed a couple of excursions to the lake over the following days but couldn’t decide on a site for their proposed house.

The Aboriginal people who frequented Newcastle at that time had been told of the arrival of “one who had come down amongst them to seek to do them good”. They held a dance, presumably by way of welcome, and Threlkeld was told that, when the mission was built at the lake he could expect about 300 Aboriginal people to assemble there. Threlkeld described Newcastle as having “more the appearance of a deserted village than anything else”. The military commandant of the convict settlement at Newcastle gave the Threlkelds the use of the vacant “government cottage” until they had a house built at the lake, and the missionary left Sydney to take up his position on May 7, 1825.

Commenting on the convict system in the colony, Threlkeld remarked that: “The Society of New South Wales is a most strange motly one, a half Slave sort of system where every man is a jailer and his servant does his work under the dread of the lash.”

Impressions of Newcastle

When the Threlkelds arrived at Newcastle and moved into the government cottage, their goods were brought up from Sydney aboard the small sailing vessel, Eclipse. After all their belongings (except some “trifling ironwork belonging to a dray”) had been landed, convicts began loading the vessel with a cargo of coal for Sydney. While the crew of the Eclipse was below decks, the convicts locked the hatches and commandeered the vessel. They put the crew ashore in a boat and sailed out of sight. It was a salutary introduction to the notorious colonial outpost.

Threlkeld was now 37 years old. In his seven years as a South Seas missionary he had seen and experienced much. He was, however, mortified by the behaviour of the overwhelmingly male population of the penal settlement. Drunkenness and violence were common, and the Indigenous people who frequented the area were often victimised, with women and girls relentlessly pursued for sexual exploitation. Rum, flour, tobacco and other less coveted items were traded from the whites to the blacks in return for chores, errands and other favours, including sexual. As was the case in Sydney, Aboriginal people came and went more or less at will and were very often completely naked. Threlkeld found this, and the perceived lack of hygiene among the blacks, confronting.

In a letter to the LMS, Threlkeld described his first impressions:

“. . . the females wander about, through towns, or among the more scattered residences of the settlers, completely naked, often intoxicated, and even when furnished with articles of clothing, indifferent as to using them for the purposes of decency. The men, naked, fierce, cruel to their wives, frequently involved in quarrels ending in blood, in the open streets vehemently pursuing any object that will procure them spirits, and when under its influence uttering forth oaths the most horrid, and obscene expressions the most disgusting. The very children partake of these deplorable evils, and boys not seven years old have been seen staggering under the effects of liquor! Often are the Aborigines most shamefully ill-used by those who pride themselves on the difference of complexion; and there are stubborn facts in existence, when the poor Aborigines have been forced to give up their hard obtained provisions to their more powerful white neighbours, or personal maltreatment would be the consequence of denial. The girls and women have been taken from their camps at night, shrieking, and muskets have been presented to intimidate, and their heads have borne the marks of the butt-end in preventing the interference of the males.

Two prisoners, night stockkeepers, were in the habit of visiting the native camp at night and one of them – an African black – amused himself by sharpening sticks like skewers and sticking them up in the ground around the native camp . . . That very man not long after was seen compelling a woman to accompany him by beating her with a stick.

The Aboriginal people moved their camp and set up within the yard of the Government cottage when the Threlkelds moved in. Finding some of their habits and behaviour somewhat confronting at times, he put up a borrowed tent in which to hold meetings with the people, rather than allowing them access to his house, as he had done in the islands.

The Native camp which surrounded our habitations gave a cheerfulness to the scene at night in consequence of the number of fires kept up by the families at the front of their respective sleeping places, which were mere erections of boughs of trees, or sheets of bark placed upright supported by stakes. The blacks chose our place of residence for their new encampment they having been so frequently molested by many of the prisoners of the crown who perambulated the settlement in the night for purposes that would not bear the light of day.

The Threlkelds were invited to a “ball and supper”, at which about 40 of the Aboriginal people performed a variety of dances and provided a feast of kangaroo, wallaby and fish. The Threlkelds retired from the event at about midnight. Threlkeld wrote that he was fortunate to find about four or five of the local people could speak broken English.

By the middle of 1826 the Threlkelds were ready to move to their new home, freshly built by a contractor, at Lake Macquarie. The location of the 10,000 acre government reservation was known in the native tongue as Bahtabah. The land stretched from the entrance of Lake Macquarie to a line north of present-day Belmont. Threlkeld explained to the LMS that the long delay in moving from Newcastle was due to the slow progress of the contractor and to other difficulties including getting experienced agricultural workers who could help the mission grow its own food. Moving to the new establishment was a tough job, with transport by water considered the best option for their furniture and belongings. The Aboriginal people moved first, knowing the Threlkelds were soon to follow.

Their presence is much missed as they were our guard by night. The Blacks have been often enquiring how long before we move and now they are going to our new residence knowing we also shall soon follow. We have had to cut down trees and clear a way through the wilderness of a range of mountains to allow for a team of bullocks and dray to carry out provision &c. Twice have they been, and after once upsetting and destroying much of the load, have accomplished the task. Hitherto the place was considered inaccessible even on horse back, and thrice have I been thrown from the horse with other common accidents in finding out the present road.

Legal fiction

Threlkeld and his family soon won the trust of the people, on whose behalf he often wrote to the authorities, deploring the bad treatment the Aborigines were receiving and urging measures to reduce the harm being done. Once he had become reasonably proficient in the language, the colonial government repeatedly called on him to appear in courts of law to act as an intermediary. M’Gill often accompanied him on these assignments.

The court appearances and jail visits – which took him to Sydney and other settlements, often for extended periods – demonstrated some of the terrible disadvantages that colonial law and “justice” systems imposed on the Aborigines. One of the most obvious was the refusal of the courts to accept any evidence from black people, on the basis that they were not baptised Christians and could therefore not be sworn in on the bible. Threlkeld protested often against this situation, where the courts insisted that the black people were subject to the law and entitled to its protection, but in the same breath refused them any voice in proceedings. This had not been the case in Tahiti, he pointed out, where other measures than oaths were taken to encourage honest testimony and penalise perjury.

Without rectifying this fault in the law, he repeatedly explained, Indigenous people had no chance of real justice:

Under present circumstances the guilty escape and human justice can only announce the law as it exists, which bars the door of Equity against the Blacks and leaves them to public vengeance or to the private revenge of injured Europeans which, steady to its purpose, will surely, secretly, and speedily annihilate the Aborigines from the face of this land.

It remains to be seen whether this age of intellect will provide a suitable remedy in some specific enactment, or, suffer year after year, the Aborigines to be frittered away from the land by private vengeance for injuries publicly sustained, the which injuries the executive cannot punish, but by the horrors of Martial Law!

No man, who comes to this colony and has ground and cattle and corn, can dispassionately view the subject of the blacks, their interest says annihilate the race. I do expect there will be a great destruction among them.

In response to the glaring legal problem, Colonial legislation was drafted to permit evidence from blacks without an oath, but this proposed law was disallowed by the Crown. Threlkeld was mortified:

The royal disallowance of the ‘Act to allow the Aborigines of New South Wales to be Received as Competent Witnesses in Criminal Cases’ has been gazetted, and thus leaves them without any hope of redress, exposed to the violence of any one, excepting proof can be obtained from white witnesses, which is most easily avoided in this Colony. I had apprised them of the expected piece of justice to the aborigines: I am now perfectly at a loss to describe to them their position. Christian laws will hang the aborigines for violence done to Christians, but Christian laws will not protect them from the aggressions of nominal Christians.

As Threlkeld observed, the law courts could do nothing to help Aboriginal people unless they had a willing white witness. And as he also observed, it was common for such witnesses to be intimidated, shamed and harassed by their white fellows to the point where they declined to appear or changed their testimony.

Death and disease

So many factors were at work against the Aborigines that Threlkeld’s mission never had much chance of success. Epidemics swept through the population at intervals and though these affected black and white alike, they tended to hit the black population harder. In 1837 Threlkeld estimated that about 60 Aboriginal people had been buried at the mission site, mostly killed by epidemic disease. That was a big number, considering the drastically reduced population he found when he first arrived in the area. In 1828 he described an episode of sickness:

Also in 1828, asked to produce a return of the Aboriginal people at Lake Macquarie, Threlkeld listed only 24 men, 26 women, 10 boys and four girls as members of “Old Jackey’s Tribe”, noting that:

There is no proper name for a tribe, all the persons returned are related to him by birth or marriage and therefore congregate together as one family for defence, assistance &c. This group’s “usual place of resort” was defined as:

Newcastle and Lake Macquarie. The land bounded by S. Reid’s Mistake the entrance to Lake Macquarie. N by Newcastle and Hunter’s River, W by the Five Islands on the head of Lake Macquarie 10 miles W of our station. This boundary, about 14 miles N and S, by 13 E and W, is considered as their own land.

[Nine years later Threlkeld wrote that “not 34” of the 64 people he listed in his 1828 return were still alive.]

The mission’s lack of success was due to many factors. For a start the soil wasn’t very fertile and it was hard to grow enough food to make the place self-sufficient. This meant constant claims on the resources of the LMS, which did not appreciate the drain on its funds. Any time a good crop was raised, Aboriginal groups from other areas raided the place and carried the corn away. In February 1829 Threlkeld complained:

Several Blacks from the other side, and from the Sugar loaf mountain, have been stealing our indian corn, now ripe, many bushels have been taken away. A stockman met 19 natives loaded with cobs of corn, taken from us.

An expectation that the mission population would be increased by the arrival of a large number of Port Stephens Blacks was dashed because the AA Co which was established there actually treated the Aboriginal people in its area comparatively well, inclining them to stay in their own district.

Trouble with the horse police

Another problem Threlkeld faced was that having a fixed population of Aboriginal people at the mission made them an easy target for the “horse police” – the mounted police charged with protecting whites and settlers. These police were at times inclined to the principle of collective punishment for crimes and alleged crimes, and were not always very particular about establishing the identity of Black people they took away for punishment. They often meted out summary punishments and Threlkeld reported cases of violent executions. If it was rumoured that the horse police were on their way, the Blacks often decamped and tried to hide in the bush. He tried to get the Government to adopt a more intelligent policy:

I would submit the propriety of an arrangement being made that no Blacks should be forcibly taken away from this place, but by warrant on a specific charge, and that the Military or Civil powers be not allowed to scour this place, and put to the route such Aborigines as may be induced to reside peaceably with me. Without some such provision is made respecting the Blacks our residence will become the most insecure for them, and the most subject to interruption whenever any charge is preferred against the Aborigines, and the very purpose for which this place was chosen, namely as a place of protection for them, be completely frustrated.

Yet another frustration was the colonial government’s insistence on making its annual presentation of blankets and “slops” (cheap clothing) to Aboriginal people at Newcastle and Maitland, instead of allowing Threlkeld to do the distribution at his mission. As he pointed out, this:

draws off the natives many weeks before the period appointed lest they should be amongst the number of those who are usually disappointed in consequence of the paucity of the donation. The evil of enticing them to towns where drunkenness and prostitution are the certain consequences might be avoided by appointing this station for these districts as the depot for such donations as the Government may think just to bestow on the Natural Lords of that soil now sold for the benefit alone of Europeans.

Drink and prostitution

Ultimately, the mission life that Threlkeld tried to create was simply not appealing to most of the Blacks, who preferred to gravitate to Newcastle, with all its dangers and temptations.

Newcastle has attractions for drunkenness and prostitution, which the promise of land and every encouragement to labour for their own advantage at this station, cannot at present overcome.

Of eight native children, boys, whom we have attempted to teach the alphabet of their own language, only two remain, but now, about three weeks since the commencement, not one is left; they are all with their friends at Newcastle, where drunkenness is as common with the black boys, 7 or 8 years old, as prostitution is with the other sex of the same age.

Threlkeld’s commentary on the unfolding tragedy he was witnessing varies between deep compassion for the victims – coupled with anger at those most involved in the destruction – and a typical religious viewpoint which held that the Blacks, in their ignorant state, were sadly being swept aside by the dominant and God-blessed British civilisation.

In a colony where men – prisoners, soldiers and settlers – greatly outnumbered women, Aboriginal women and girls were relentlessly exploited. As traditional marriage customs broke down with the destruction of the tribes, women were at risk from males both Black and white. Venereal disease was rife. Threlkeld noted that:

The official return from one district gives only two women to twenty eight men, two boys and no girls! The continued ill-treatment and frequent slaughter of the Black women can only be deplored, perhaps, without remedy.

He kept up a barrage of correspondence in many directions. Some of it related to church and colonial politics and rivalries. But much was aimed at trying to improve things for the Aboriginal people. He noted that Black people received little or no health care:

Their state is most deplorable when in sickness, and many, I feel persuaded, perish from want, in the midst of this civilized Christian people, who are the possessors of their land and the involuntary destroyers of their food.

He suggested possible systems of compensating Aboriginal people, funding this through a levy on land grants to whites. He insisted that Aborigines and whites had equal intellectual capabilities and that it was the job of the whites to make opportunities available to the blacks, who had been systematically robbed of their land, their livelihood and their culture.

The existence, as a people, and means of existence, of the Aborigines of New South Wales, have become translated into the hands of His Majesty the King of Great Britain, who could in Parliament, prevent their speedy extinction and induce them to become protectors to the Emigrants, by appropriating a moiety of the quit-rents and sales of their former hunting and fishing districts, from which they are dispossessed by the British Crown to the purpose of rationing the Tribes within the line of demarcation merely with a few slops and portion of Indian Corn!

Another of his ideas was to provide education to Aboriginal people, then give them work and “as the educated boys and girls marry, portions of land should be apportioned to them”.

Threlkeld documented many instances of violence and murder committed against (and by) Aboriginal people. These accounts were often contested by white settlers and their allies, and he defended himself by saying he reported the allegations to avoid being complicit by silence and it was not his job to investigate the details of the allegations he reported. Some settlers were kind to the Aboriginal people and their stations became places of refuge in times of danger. Others were “dreaded on account of the barbarity and violence inflicted on the Aborigines”.

The LMS, already unhappy about the high cost of the mission, withdrew its support in 1829 when it became clear that the goal of evangelising was not being met. The dispute between Threlkeld and the LMS was a public one. The LMS accused the missionary of being a spendthrift, while he in turn accused the LMS of being stingy. Many people backed Threlkeld. It was plain that the LMS was remote from the situation on the ground in New South Wales and equally plain that Threlkeld was genuinely interested in the welfare of the Aboriginal people. Because of the nature of the original land grant, neither Threlkeld nor the LMS had title to it, so on its abandonment it reverted to the Crown. The buildings were demolished in 1833.

Off to Ebenezer

Threlkeld was able to persuade the Government to let him take up a smaller grant of land on the other side of the lake near present-day Toronto – he called it Ebenezer – where he persisted in his missionary efforts, mostly at his own expense.

In his eighth annual report, written at Ebenezer in 1838, Threlkeld wrote that the colonists with most complaints against the Blacks were the graziers who occupied large tracts of land and who lost stock to Aboriginal hunters. This problem had been created by colonial policy, which encouraged large scale grazing.

Nor can the Aborigines be absolutely condemned for their resistance, they being placed by Britons precisely in a similar position as ancient Britons were, who acted upon the same principles of resistance to all-conquering Rome, whose claim to the British Isles was as just and right in principle as that of Great Britain is to New South Wales. But heathen Rome had her laws of war and peace, and would have blushed at the cold-hearted, bloody massacres of the Aborigines in this Colony by men called Christians, and at those who could boast of their exploits in “popping off a black the moment he appeared”, without regard to his innocence or guilt.

Between 1832 and 1838, he wrote, 15 Europeans had been killed by Aborigines. Meanwhile:

A secret hostile process has been encouraged and carried on against the Blacks by a party of lawless Europeans, until it gained confidence, and unblushingly and openly appeared, to the loss of upwards of five hundred Aborigines within the last two years!! including the numerous massacres of men, women and children.

As a nation we have placed ourselves in a position that has compelled the Aborigines to become our neighbours, and we have worked ill towards our neighbours, because we, the many, dispossess the few Blacks of their rights of birth, which convey to them a certain district, in which they seek and obtain their means of subsistence. Our might deprives them of his right, without remuneration: and immigration, so beneficial to us as a colony in increasing our population, decreases in an incalculable ratio, our neighbours as a people by taking away the common hereditary privileges which they have possessed from time immemorial. The place of their birth is sold to the highest bidder; but the Aborigines are not included in the purchase; that would be slavery! They are excluded from the soil, being found generally prejudicial to the pecuniary interests of the purchaser, and that exclusion works their death!

Threlkeld condemned the pseudo-science of “phrenology”: “the fashionable philosophy of the day, speculating on the intellectual powers of the Aborigines, as manifested in the Bumps of the Brain”.

The miserable attempt to deduce from such a science, falsely so called, that these Black human beings, “have an innate deficiency of intellect rendering them incapable of instruction” would arrive at the natural conclusion that it would be useless to attempt it, and consequently, the Blacks being but a part and parcel of the brute creation . . . there can be no responsibility attached to their destruction, more than there is the extirpation of any other animal whose presence is obnoxious to the possessor of the soil.

Convict slavery

The convict system, with its de facto slavery, had also harmed the Aboriginal people:

The transportation system has operated powerfully against the amelioration and civilisation of the Blacks, arising in part from the Convicts monopolising the female Aborigines; nor has the moral influence of that system which, because A robs B, C shall have A’s work without wages, tended to inculcate in the minds of the colonists the equitable divine principle that “the workman is worthy of his hire”. Many who have attempted to employ the Blacks have expected the services to be performed for a mere trifle, else their services wold exceed in expense convict labor; and because the Aborigines loved not our hard labor for labor’s sake, they have been reputed lazy and disinclined to work!

Threlkeld proposed that the British Government fund a “Melioration Institution” “for bettering the condition of the Tribes of Aborigines in Australia in compensation for their land sold to, or occupied by, Colonists of New South Wales”.

As for his missionary work, Threlkeld confessed that over time, fewer Aboriginal people appeared at Ebenezer.

The survivors of the tribe of the lake have taken up their abode for the present at Newcastle, leaving at this place not a single resident tribe; and we are only now occasionally visited by the small remnant of the inhabitants of the Lake.

At this Lake when the mission was first established, the numbers were exceedingly overrated and were considered much larger than after experience justified. The hundreds of the Blacks were soon found to diminish into tens. No Mission in the annals of modern missionary history ever had a more pleasing prospect of success than this had for the first two years, in which many of the Blacks were employed at labor, sometimes to the amount of sixty daily; several lads were learning to read and write, in their own language, but the expenses necessary for their employment and the supporting of so large an establishment was considered by the London Missionary Society as encroaching on the claims of other heathens, much more numerous than these, together with the disappointment of pecuniary aid at the commencement of the Mission by the local government of this colony, led to an alteration, under false principles of economy, which never be overcome, and death in various shapes carried off the tribes until there is barely the name of a few tribes left in existence in these parts.

Writing in 1840 he urged the government to make some provision for accommodation for the remnant Aboriginal population.

Threlkeld’s main focus, in relation to the Aboriginal people, became the codification of the language. He also set his mind to the exploitation of the coal seam he found at Ebenezer, with a view to securing his own large family’s comfort and security.

He later wrote that he closed the mission finally on December 31, 1841, “solely from the sad fact that the Aborigines themselves had then become almost extinct, for I had actually outlived a very large majority of those with whom I had been associated for seventeen years”.

Threlkeld and his family moved to Sydney after the mission at Ebenezer was closed, although the coalmining he began at the site continued for some time after. He remained very active in church affairs. His wife, Sarah, died in 1853 and Threlkeld himself followed on October 9, 1859.

Much of the information in this blog post comes from the two volume Australian Reminiscences & Papers of Lancelot Threlkeld, edited by Niel Gunson (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1974).

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