Why Australia Had No Slavery, Part II: The North-West

In 1838, the NSW Legislative Council’s Committee on the Aborigines Question, held an inquiry on the possible establishment of a protectorate for the Aboriginal people of the colony. Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld, who ran a mission at Lake Macquarie under the auspices of the London Missionary Society, made a submission to the inquiry advocating what he regarded as best practice for a protectorate at the time. “I am of opinion, that it would be much more beneficial, if an establishment could be formed on the Moravian principle.”

The Moravian Church was formed in Bohemia in the early eighteenth century as part of the movement for the revival of German Protestantism called Pietism. Its adherents became missionaries to the slaves and the Indians of North America and by mid-century a Moravian Church had been firmly established in the New World. In the early nineteenth century, Moravian missionaries from both America and Germany established themselves in the Pacific islands. They…