George Taplin explains yet erodes Ngarrindjeri culture, also educates, at mission south of Adelaide from 1859
George Taplin (left) and (second from left in the top row with assistant John Ophel in 1878) with a group at Point McLeay mission beside Lake Alexandrina in South Australia in 1878. Bottom: Mission students outside the Point McLeay school built by Taplin.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
George Taplin who started the Port McLeay mission at Raukkan, the ancient campsite on Lake Alexandrina south of Adelaide, was a contradiction who illuminated Ngarrindjeri culture and tried to eliminate it.
Taplin, born in 1831 at Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, England, went to live at 12 with his maternal grandfather in Andover, Hampshire, and was educated at a local private school. Taplin’s father died when he was 14 and in 1842 he became a solicitor's clerk at Andover.
A committed Congregationalist, from 15, Taplin wanted to be an overseas missionary and arrived in Adelaide on the Anna Maria in 1849 and worked as a labourer and as a lawyer's clerk. In 1851, he was recruited to the South Australian Congregational ministry by Thomas Quinton Stow. Taplin lived with Stow, studying and working in the garden for his board and lodging. In 1853, at Adelaide's Payneham, he married Martha Burnell, a servant of Stow's who also wanted to do missionary work.
Taplin and his wife went to Currency Creek and later to Port Elliot on the Fleurieu Peninsula where Taplin opened a school in 1854. The South Australian central board of education took over the school but he remained as teacher until 1859. That year, the Aborigines Friends Association appointed him as their first missionary-teacher at a salary of £200 to work in the lower Murray districts. He chose a mission site on the shores of Lake Alexandrina at the traditional camping ground called Raukkan (The ancient way), known to Europeans as Point McLeay.
Taplin began his mission to the Narrinyeri (Ngarrindjeri), the confederacy of 18 tribes who previously owned the country around the lower Murray lakes. He met immediate opposition from pastoralist and parliamentarian (and future premier) John Baker who leased the cattle station in the area taken by mission land. In 1860, Taplin and the Aborigines Friends Association faced a Legislative Council select committee organised by Baker, ostensibly into Aboriginal affairs but heavily slanted towards the Point McLeay mission.
Taplin weathered the inquiry and worked on vigorously, teaching, building, proselytising, establishing farming, dispensing government rations and acting as a mechanic and district physician at the mission. Later he gained a teaching assistant. Taplin was ordained by the Congregational Church in 1868 so he could administer sacraments and solemnise marriages. Next year, the chapel, regularly used, was completed and opened.
Keenly interested in Ngarrindjeri culture and society, Taplin learned their language, used it in preaching, and translated and published Bible tracts. He published invaluable anthropological studies much superior to contemporary work on South Australian Aboriginal people. His papers on philology and ethnology were acclaimed in Australia and abroad. His most important books were: The Narrinyeri (Adelaide, 1874), with a second enlarged edition in 1878 and included next year in Native Tribes of South Australia, edited by J. D. Woods; and The Folklore, Manners, Customs, and Languages of the South Australian Aborigines (1879), that he edited.
Despite his sympathy with the people and their traditions, Taplin took the contemporary view that Christianity and Europeanisation should be adopted and Ngarrindjeri civilisation abandoned. He helped undermine Ngarrindjeri government and social structure, further weakened traditional discipline and morale within the confederacy and was strongly opposed by conservative tribal members.
Taplin was credited with stopping the Ngarrindjeri being dispossessed and persecuted, and by helping them become literate and numerate and to learn trade skills, enabling them to survive and flourish briefly in European society. Taplin died of heart disease at Raukkan in 1879 and was buried in the village cemetery. His son Frederick William succeeded him as mission superintendent.