The Warangesda Aboriginal Mission is a heritage-listed former Australian Aboriginal mission site at Warangesda, Darlington Point, Murrumbidgee Council, New South Wales, Australia. The mission was designed and built between 1880 and 1926. It is also known as Warangesda Aboriginal Mission and Station, Warangesda Mission, Warangesda Aboriginal Station, and Warrangesda. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 9 July 2010. The Naden (Lydia Naden) family as well as Florence (Cot) Johnson also lived at Warangesda.
History Pre-European Aboriginal land use Stone tools found on the ground during farming activities at Warangesda suggest that the pre-European area of Warangesda was not so much a permanent camp, as an area visited for seasonal foraging and occasional ceremonies. The grass lands of the Riverina contained native cereals and plants with fruit or nuts that could be gathered by hand. Small portable grindstones were part of the basic equipment carried by Wiradjuri women along with their babies and young children. Larger game animals such as kangaroos were hunted by the men, roasted in an earth oven, formed by a shallow hole in the ground, containing ash and charcoal. Sometimes the hole was lined with stones or lumps of clay, or was dug straight out of an old clay termite mound. Traces of one Aboriginal oven were found near the Aboriginal hut area, suggesting that some aspects of traditional life continued into the mission period.
Colonial frontier: and consolidation of pastoralism 1841 -1880 By 1832 the first settler had arrived at Wiradjuri Land near Darlington Point and within a year the Murrumbidgee River frontage between Wagga and Darlington Point was fully occupied by Irish settlers. European colonial farmers occupied and sub-divided the land, displacing Wiradjuri hunter-gatherers and establishing Darlington Point as a small town. This had a direct impact upon the lives of Aboriginal people affecting their food sources, introducing disease and alcoholism and decimating their population.
Relations between the Wiradjuri and Irish settlers appeared to be good at first, but during the severe drought of 1838 these relations had deteriorated to the extent that white men formed armed posses to attack Aborigines.(Eyre 1965 (1832-59): 175). Wiradjuri reacted by mounting a guerrilla type resistance against the settlers. In 1841, posses of settlers trapped a Wiradjuri group on an island in the Murrumbidgee River (Massacre Island) in which an unknown number of Wiradjuri were massacred. This massacre marked the end of organised Aboriginal resistance in the region.WLC 1980
White settlers then weathered the 1840s depression, and drought. Increased stress on food resources began to force Wiradjuri into a steadily tightening net of dependence and poverty. At stations they received uneven treatment. This ranged from being welcomed as cheap labour to being shot on sight. The Government officials (Crown Lands Commissioners) also had various attitudes to Aboriginal people, ranging from compassion to hostility.
The 1850s brought a flood of people into NSW for gold and creating a booming market for meat, and when gold rushes dissipated, a source of cheap labour for the squatters. Rising wool prices in England brought increasing prosperity to sheep farmers. Many Wiradjuri were becoming dependent on the stations in winter, following traditional hunting and gathering mainly in spring.Elkin 1951: 164 - 186 From 1861, the Free Selection Acts brought thousands of new settlers into Wiradjuri country.
Rev. John Gribble's Warangesda Mission (1879-1884) Congregational, Methodist and later Anglican missionary, John Brown Gribble, founded the mission settlement to give Aboriginal people a permanent home. Warangesda was set up after the model of Maloga and earlier mission settlements, as an attempt to create a managed farming community out of the local Aboriginal population. By the 1870s, the Wiradjuri lived in groups of several related families as in traditional times, but some were able to work for settlers, taking government and station handouts when necessary. Men were paid wages for shearing, rabbiting (after 1880 when rabbits spread to the Riverina) or harvesting; women taking in washing and mending or working as domestics. More and more their lives circled the stations. It was in this historical setting, that Gribble travelled into the Riverina in 1878, encountering Wiradjuri people living in hunger and prostitution. Imprinted on Gribble's mind was his earliest childhood recollection of becoming separated from his mother. He was found by an Aboriginal woman who cared for him at camp and returned him home. This event came to assume a special significance for him in later life when he was reaching a decision about his destiny for missionary work. A mission in this context is defined as an Aboriginal settlement wholly organised by a missionary or missionary organisation. In the Wiradjuri language region, there have only been two missions. The first was the Wellington Valley Mission (including Rev Watson's continuation of the mission at Apsley and Blake's Fall). The only other subsequent mission in the Wiradjuri region was Warangesda, during the 1879 to 1884 period.
Gribble, a miner who became a missionary, was deeply affected by his observation of the exploitation of Aboriginal women in the Riverina of NSW in the early 1870s. This led him to set up a dormitory for women and their children at Warangesda or "Camp of Mercy" mission on the floodplain of the Murrumbidgee River. To the amazement of his friends, Gribble decided to leave his comfortable posting at Jerilderie and in 1880 arrived at a parcel of land on the Murrumbidgee whose lease had been revoked. Despite local opposition, he was granted the reserve, given permission to establish a government school for Aboriginal children, and paid a government teacher's salary.Gribble 1886: 39 The name for the mission was chosen around the fireside one evening, combining "Warang" the Wiradjuri word for "camp" and "esda", the last part of the scriptural "Bethesda" (Hebrew meaning "house of mercy").Halse, C. 1996, Gribble L. 1993
There was local opposition to the mission. Once a station hand rode in, waving a stirrup iron and threatening to kill anyone who came near him, and gave Gribble a fortnight to close the mission. On another occasion, a case of gin was sent in to get the women drunk.Gribble 1886:41, 42 Whereas Gribble saw the mission as a way of protecting Aboriginal women from 'the white man's horrible passions' (which resulted in) ...traffic in the bodies and souls of the poor blacks'.Gribble 1886: 43
By the end of 1880, Gribble was able to write a newspaper article describing the mission. At that stage, seven houses had been built inside the ten-acre mission settlement, enclosed by a post and rail fence. There were 42 Aboriginal residents, of which two-thirds were said to attend the school. All of the building work had been done by the Aboriginal men. A 19th-century illustration shows the Warangesda mission at this stage. Other huts for Aboriginal families may also have been built which could have been spaced some distance from the main clearing within the original reserve. The locations of such buildings are unable to be inferred although they may have been some further to the north where there is a widely dispersed artefact scatter of domestic refuse.
Over the following two years, the mission became well established, the basis of its layout of the next 40 years up to its closure in 1924 was set. Gribble described the mission layout up to the building of the mission church in 1882:Gribble 1886 40
A separate girls dormitory was set up at Warangesda by 1883 and was first supervised by Mrs. Gribble as a home to mothers with their young children, single women, and girls. Although there was a school at Warangesda, the dormitory followed the institutional model of its time, and taught housekeeping skills to the girls to prepare them for respectable employment in menial duties at nearby stations. It also housed them separately in a building which included a dining room and kitchen as well as the dormitory room. Girls were brought in from many places and kept under supervision of dormitory matrons as well as Mrs. Gribble or the wives of later managers. Over its forty five years of operation, the people at Warangesda came to form a unified community, so that after the mission's closure, smaller communities were able to be formed nearby at Darlington Point and at the Narrandera Sandhills. The sedentary nature of mission life and other European ways such as yeomen farming, European dress and Christian belief, were underpinned by the continuing substratum of Aboriginal culture. There are hints in the historical record of the persistence of an enduring Aboriginal subculture at Warangesda.
One year the manager noted that two men arrived on the mission, after which '"the Aborigines had a Dance."Diary May 1892 The following year both the manager and Rev. Nobbs of Whitton agreed to send twenty five men to Hay to hold a corroboree in aid of the Hay Hospital.Diary May 1893 Aboriginal ceremony was seen as posing no direct threat to the Mission's objectives and looked on as pure performance rather than as a vehicle for the expression of Aboriginal culture. According to local lore, trees were marked near the infant burials at Warangesda. Some hunting and gathering continued to supplement shop bought foods.
During the mission period the desired, the most civilising method of subsistence was seen to be small scale farming.Goodall 1982: 34 Yet continuing shortages of food supplies necessitated the occasional use of Aboriginal hunting and fishing knowledge. One recorded occasion when the mission ran out of meat, Aboriginal men were sent out on a hunt and returned in the evening with a kangaroo. The next two day hunting expedition returned with six kangaroos although it seemed a non-event to the manager who added: "Nothing important to note'".Diary July 1887 Gribble himself recorded one occasion when traditional fishing methods were used whereby "half a ton of fish" were speared in a downstream pool.
Gribble's diaries give the impression that while there was no lack of goodwill, the mutual incomprehension between the two cultures gave limited results. Gribble had set up the mission on the normal model of its time. The retaining of management in white hands, the assimilation in church and school and the removal of children to dormitories away from parental influence, were standard methods employed by conservative settlement missionaries, such as Gribble.