This book offers a comparative, historical account of the complicated roles played by white women on Christian missions throughout Aboriginal Australia between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In so doing, the book contributes to the growing historical interest in the work of white women in mission encounters, both in Australia and in other settler contexts. To build their depiction of mission life and mission women, Cruickshank and Grimshaw rely on sources authored by women, such as letters, biographies, and diaries, and by men, such as mission and church documents. The book is ambitious in scope, covering several Protestant mission organizations in five states over the course of roughly 140 years (1810s–1950s). This broad-based approach does not, however, come at the expense of historical or place-based specificity. Cruickshank and Grimshaw offer intimate and vivid portrayals of everyday mission life, including detailed accounts of the personal histories of individual white women as well as a number of Aboriginal women with whom these white women interacted.

Cruickshank and Grimshaw take up the concept of “maternal institutions” from Nancy Lutkehaus (“Missionary Maternalism: Gendered Images of the Holy Spirit Sisters in Colonial New Guinea,” in Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Mission Discourse and Practice, ed. Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy Lutkehaus [University of Michigan Press, 1999], 207–239) to argue that missions in Aboriginal Australia can be understood as “maternal institutions” that were “dedicated to the care and cultural transformation of children, enforced by government power exercised through protective legislation and police.” Precisely because so much of governmental and missionary attention focused on the removal of Aboriginal children, white women, more so than white men, “were crucial to the operations of such institutions” (128). A central theme that runs throughout the book is that white women were positioned as “mothers” by the church, the government, and sometimes by Aboriginal people, both in relation to Aboriginal children and to Aboriginal adults. In this role, white women were confronted with a profound set of “maternal contradictions.” On the one hand, they sought to “protect” and “nurture” Aboriginal people, especially children (2). On the other hand, they took part “in the traumatic destruction of Aboriginal cultures and families” (179). Within these broad trends, Cruickshank and Grimshaw highlight the particular approaches of Protestant missions, which were by no means the same. For example, while older, denominational missions required formal training and education of their missionaries, evangelical “faith missions” only required “personal calling” (108) and “evangelical zeal” (107), thus opening up more room for women to be recognized “as missionaries in their own right” (122).

The book's six chapters draw out the specifics of mission developments within an overarching chronological frame. Chapter 1 explores missionary efforts in early colonial New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on residential missions during the 1860s to the early 1900s, Moravian missionaries in Victoria (chapter 2), and Presbyterian missions in Northern Queensland (chapter 3). In both of these chapters, considerable attention is devoted to the lives of individual women: white women and Aboriginal women as mothers and daughters (chapter 2), and white women as missionary widows and sisters (chapter 3). Chapters 4 and 5 address the rise and implications of faith missions in New South Wales, Western Australia, and Victoria during the 1890s to the 1930s, with particular attention to the roles of single women (chapter 4) and to Aboriginal people's use of faith mission language and networks to advance their political aims (chapter 5). Chapter 6 returns to denominational missions and to Northern Queensland but moves forward in time by examining the mission work of a Presbyterian missionary wife between the 1930s and 1950s, the period just before the official governmental shift to policies of assimilation.

One of the book's greatest achievements is its attention to Aboriginal agency. Cruickshank and Grimshaw describe Aboriginal resistance to missionary policy and organized activism, as well as more intimate ways that individual Aboriginal people, especially Aboriginal women, asserted their influence and autonomy. For example, it was not always white women who took on the roles of “mothers” in mission encounters. Cruickshank and Grimshaw present cases where Aboriginal women positioned themselves as “mothers” to individual white women, thus resisting “the hierarchies of settler colonialism” (179).

In the conclusion, and throughout the book, Cruickshank and Grimshaw place the Australian example within the international context, arguing that Australia can be distinguished from other Protestant mission fields. First, single women came late to the mission encounter in Australia compared with elsewhere, in part because denominational missions, with their focus on mission reserves, did not establish separate missionary institutions (e.g., training colleges) that required the labor of professional women. Second, missions in Australia “were particularly constrained by the agendas of settler governments” (177); governments depended on missions to carry out their polices of “protection,” and without funding from European mission societies or from settlers, missions relied on governments for financial support.

This is an engaging and clearly written book that moves adeptly between broad scale trends in missionary encounters and fine-grained details of everyday mission life. The book will undoubtably be of great value to both academic and general readers interested in women's history, in mission history, and in the lives of Aboriginal people during the protection era.