Transporting Concepts of ‘Native’ Land as Birthright between Fiji and Australia’s North

Abstract

This article focuses on the experiences at two Methodist communities in the Pacific and their assertions of sovereignty from the 1920s to the 1960s. It explores the connections between two nodes of the Methodist Mission – Fiji and Australia’s Northern Territory – through one missionary, Kolinio Saukuru. While there were moments of great political mobilisation at each site, efforts to assert Indigenous land ownership and autonomy were hampered by persistent racialized views of the ‘native’ amongst missionaries and the colonial state. This article engages with questions emerging from the histories of colonial missions, particularly whether missions aligned with colonial administrations on strategies of governance. However, it also points to the need to think beyond national boundaries when studying mission histories. An examination of the Methodist Overseas Mission using a transnational framework illuminates a network of Indigenous people who worked to protect what some missionaries and anthropologists considered an Indigenous ‘birthright’: the land. This study therefore expands on the existing historiography of colonial missions, of Indigenous labour, and of land rights activism in Fiji and Australia’s north.