Promoting adaptative education for the Wongutha people: the influence of Anglo-American ideas for 'Native Education' in interwar Australia

The question of ‘native’ education became urgent in interwar Britain in the context of imperial expansion in Africa. Simultaneously, debates concerning black education were central to a global pan-African nationalist movement demanding black rights and liberation. In this context, education became a site of competing ideas regarding black accommodation and rights. Missionaries drew connections between educating ‘black Africa’ and ‘negro America’ as adaptive education became part of a new civilising mission in Africa. This article explores the application of these ideas at Mt Margaret, a Protestant mission in Western Australia, in the interwar period. Drawing on missionary accounts it shows how their endeavours to promote adaptive education for Wongutha people were shaped by developments in the empire, particularly the Phelps Stokes Commissions in Africa. We see the transnational reach of this Anglo- American exchange and its vernacularisation in a settler colonial context where adaptive education was about building Indigenous citizens. ^{1 1} Throughout this paper I put the word ‘native’ in speech marks to denaturalise the term. In the western imaginary the term was associated with the othering of Indigenous people, operating to deflect their humanity and underscore the development of policies and practices targeting them. It has been necessary to reproduce this language here as the topic is ‘native education’ as articulated at the time.