Christina SMITH

SMITH, CHRISTINA (b. Glen Lyon, Scotland c. 1813; d. Mt Gambier, SA, 28 April 1893). Teacher of Aborigines.

Born of pious Scottish farming stock, Christina Stewart (née Menzies) was twenty-five when she emigrated to Australia with two brothers and her infant son, Duncan, following the death of her husband, Finlay, after only four years of marriage. Arriving at Port Philip on the David Clarke on 23 June 1839, Christina worked firstly as a nurse and then as a housekeeper before marrying James Smith (b. 13 April 1796) on 19 Oct 1841. Son of a clergyman, Smith was currently teaching at the Collins St Congregational School, having emigrated from Garlieston, Scotland, in 1840.

The wretchedness of Aborigines near Melbourne moved Christina Smith deeply and she 'yearned to be used by God as a means of reclaiming them'. This opportunity came when she and James travelled to Rivoli Bay in the lower south east of SA where, from Jan 1845, James was post-master and acted as an agent for the SA Company. Here Christina Smith ministered to 'the miserable remnant of the once numerous and powerful Booandik' whose territory ranged from the mouth of the Glenelg River to Beachport, while simultaneously recording their characteristics, customs, habits, language and legends. In 1854 the Smith family moved to Mt Gambier to work a small farm, where they continued to nurture Aboriginal orphans and taught adults of mixed race in a night school opened in 1855. In 'a wilderness of a place' and 'the furnace of her affliction', Christina Smith again manifested her faith and fortitude, despite her frail physique, rearing six more children; working at physically demanding jobs, including picking up fleeces on nearby sheep runs; and trekking with only two Aboriginal guides into unfriendly territory at Mt Schank to welcome a newly-arrived and isolated European family.

Despite her grief at James's death on 4 Jan 1860, Christina toiled on and achieved what had been their long-held dream in 1865, when, with funding of five shillings per child from Bp Short, Anglican bishop of Adelaide, she established, on cheaply-rented land, a school and home for Aboriginal children. Attached to nearby churches, Christina Smith's students learned simple prayers, hymns and religious exercises based on Scriptural truths, and finally left her school literate and prepared for service and marriage locally, proof of her claims that it was an erroneous belief that Aborigines were 'too low intellectually or morally to be Christianised or civilised'. Because of an epidemic and the drying up of former support, by the end of 1867, only four students, now supported by local charity, remained.

Christina Smith's thirty-five years of labour culminated in her most lasting ministry to the Booandiks when, in 1880, she published her ethnographic The Booandik Tribe of South Australian Aborigines, first scholarly account of the rites of passage, songs and language of the Bungandidj people, together with poignant memoirs of several of their prominent members whom she had befriended.

H Carthew, Rivoli Bay (Rendelsham, 1974); J M Berger, Beachport and the Rivoli Bay District of the south-east of South Australia (Adelaide, 1978); South-Eastern Star 2 May 1893

LEITH MACGILLIVRAY