The life of campaigning Aboriginal missioner, the Rev Ernest Gribble, is one of the most remarkable stories in the often sorry 215-year history of contact between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

So much so that David Marr, Australia’s leading critic of Christianity, was moved to write on the dustjacket of this new biography of Gribble, “What a story! A man who made hell in the name of heaven but in the late 1920s forced his country to acknowledge one of the last great massacres of black Australians.”

All Christians have a duty to familiarise themselves with the history of Aboriginal missions. The lessons run very deep for gospel proclamation in this country today – for Christians have much to be proud of and much to be ashamed of in the way this work was conducted. An excellent starting point is John Harris’ One Blood, a history of Aboriginal contact with Christianity published in the early 1990s.

This pride and shame collide in the story of Ernest Gribble. The virtually self-trained priest carved a thriving Aboriginal community out of the North Queensland jungle at Yarrabah near Cairns and later became the much-loved pastor of a blossoming church of 1,000 grown from scratch among Aboriginals exiled to the ‘penal colony’ of Palm Island. But in the 1920s he became famous for exposing two separate massacres of Aboriginals by police near his mission west of Wyndham in WA. The most notorious saw the killing of somewhere between 30 and 300 Aboriginal men, women and children and Gribble’s courageous stand, which saw him otracised from the white community, resulted in a Royal Commission.

Despite these achievements, Gribble was virtually ignorant of Aboriginal law and language. His methods were often extraordinarily culturally insensitive and laced with an authoritarian streak. He even horsewhipped men that he accused of sexually exploiting women.

This new biography by Christine Halse, professor of history at the University of Western Sydney, has its flaws. Yet Halse brilliantly uses history to unpack the key indigenous policy issues that must be addressed today. For this reason it will undoubtedly have an impact on debate about the ‘stolen generation’, reconciliation, an apology and the need to create healthy, non-dependant Aboriginal communities.

As the title A Terribly Wild Man suggests, this is a less than sympathetic biography that takes a critical stance towards Aboriginal mission work. This not only leads to errors of ommission but errors of fact such as not checking the current name of ABM. (Halse calls it the Australian Board of Missions refering to its operations today. It has changed its name to the Anglican Board of Missions – Australia.)

This is indeed unfortunate because Halse makes some very good points about the Anglican Church’s role as an agent of British imperialism. Yet these claims are undermined because she has a poor understanding of theology. Halse says Gribble’s emphasis on the ‘civilising’ effect of daily work and his antagonism towards Aboriginal tribal marriage practices was a result of his ‘puritan’ upbringing which led to his adult belief that ‘moral virtue was the prerequisite for spiritual salvation and a place in God’s eternal heavenly kingdom’. But such a view is a complete anathema to puritan theology with its emphasis on justification by faith. Whether Gribble held this view is not clear, but it certainly was not the result of his evangelical upbringing.

Throughout, Halse very confusingly uses the terms ‘puritan’, ‘evangelical’ and ‘evangelism’ as inter-changeable pejoratives. She does not seem to understand that you don’t have to be an ‘evangelical’ to run an evangelistic mission. This confusion about Gribble’s ‘puritan’ theology ends up downplaying any genuine love he may have had for Aboriginal people.

The focus of this elegantly written biography is very much on the sociological and psychological factors that drove Ernest to build the Anglican missions at Yarrabah and Forest River. The pioneering mission work of his father, John ‘JB’ Gribble at Waragesda in south-west NSW is of interest only to show how growing up in this ‘puritan’ (read ‘authoritarian’) environment effected Ernest. It seems strange to me that Prof Halse does not give equal weight to the empathy that Ernest would undoubtedly have developed for Aboriginal people growing up playing with them.

Added to this downplaying of Gribble’s genuine love for Aboriginal people as a motivation for the mission, a crucial flaw of the work is its failure to address the wider social context. Both Ernest and his father were driven by the desire to protect Aboriginal people from white exploitation. As Gribble’s own life so dramatically reveals, the bottom line is that Aboriginal people were being killed by white settlers.

Halse makes much of Gribble’s role as a ‘pioneer’ of the child ‘stealing’ practices that became enshrined in the government’s ‘stolen generation’ policy. Likewise, she inteprets Gribble’s attempts to instill a self-esteem boosting work ethic among the mission dwellers as an oppressive example of British imperialism. This is not a balanced analysis. She does not adequately address the terrible living conditions of Aboriginal people in fringe camps at the time, rife with substance abuse, exploitation and sexual abuse of child orphans, and how this impacted on Gribble’s view that he had to ‘protect’ these children.

Such a wider anlaysis really cuts to the heart of both current debate about the stolen generation and what policies government’s should employ to deal with the social collapse among Aboriginal communities today.