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| Present day St James Church |
This is the present day church. It has a seafaring flavour. The furniture is all handmade from Red Cedar.
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| The lecten in the shape of the bow of a boat, symbolising the' Coming of the Light.' |
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| A very impressive cruxification painting on bark by Australian artist Ray Crooke. |
This painting was done in about 1954 and was originally in the Old Site church, photo below.
A painting by this artist recently sold on Thursday Is for $114,000. This one was restored in about 1976 when it was moved to the new church.
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| A painting of the old church which hangs in the new church. |
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This church was built at the Old Site in 6 weeks by the local people with local materials. The roof and walls were of bark. The roof was replaced with corrugated iron in the 1970's.
My dad built that church with the local community, including the children. We returned in 1990 and shot this family video, enjoy. It explains everything. http://youtu.be/c37f3WVPeFw
ReplyDelete"In the fifty-year period prior to the establishment of the Anglican Mission in 1924, Lockhart River people were in contact with Torres Strait Islander people, along with Japanese, Chinese, Papuans and Europeans. Many of the Lockhart River men participated in the harvesting of bêche-de-mer, trochus shell and pearl shell, and on land they worked in the sandalwood industry. Labour exploitation was common during this era.
The Anglican Mission’s first site was at the ‘Waterhole’ in Lloyd Bay, some 40 kilometres south of Lockhart River community’s present site. This original mission location is referred to by community people today as ‘Old Site’. The mission was disbanded during the Second World War.
During the 1950s, the Lockhart River Anglican Mission cooperated with the trade union movement to counter the exploitation of the Indigenous people (see Kylie Tennant’s Speak You So Gently of 1959 and John Warby’s You-Me Mates Eh! of 1999). Lockhart River is proud of its history of enterprising innovation, as Johnson Chippendale, Mayor of the Lockhart River Aboriginal Shire Council, advises in the Lockhart River Community Plan 2004–2008. He writes in that publication:
In 1954, our ancestors at ‘Old Site’ were the first in Australia to create an Aboriginal Cooperative for trochus shell, pearl shell and bêche-de-mer which created self-employment for the men of the community. Now, many years on, we are again following in their footsteps by creating a fishing company – Puchiwu Fishing Company Pty Ltd – to offer self-employment for the people of Lockhart River and enable them to have real jobs and develop more skills.
In 1967, the Anglican Mission handed over governance of the community to the Queensland Government and a decision was made to transfer the community in 1971 to its new location near Quintel Beach, which became known as ‘New Site’. Attempts by the government to relocate the entire population of Lockhart River to Bamaga on the northern tip of the Cape met strong resistance from the community." (which is why our mission house was burnt, to discourage the people from returning.) Extract from
http://www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au/docs/OurWayEducationKit.pdf