Flynn of the Inland is remembered as a missionary who called Aborigines ‘damned, dirty niggers’ and refused to have them treated by his hospitals and Flying Doctor Service. The ‘niggers’ remark is compelling, powerful and repugnant, but is it true? What were John Flynn’s own views on race? To ask this question implies a broader inquiry into what it means to be ‘racist’ and how we might own, or disown, our racially charged past. Flynn was born in the 1880s and died in 1951. His lifespan encompassed the shift from brutal colonialism to paternal assimilation. It is difficult to ‘place’ him in the context of his time, and to understand what it means to judge his attitudes from the perspective of our own time.
In 1972 Charles Duguid published Doctor and the Aborigines, a memoir of his years of Aboriginal missionary work. He recalled a conversation from the 1930s in which Flynn asked Duguid why he was ‘wasting his time on those damned, dirty niggers’. A year later Sir Mark Oliphant (who wrote a foreword to Duguid’s book) said in a speech that he had been shocked to realise that Flynn ‘refused absolutely to have anything to do with Aborigines and thought they should be allowed to die out as rapidly as possible’. Despite frantic efforts by Flynn’s successors within the church to retrieve his reputation, this has stood as a thorough—and eminently quotable—condemnation of Flynn’s racism, reproduced in both popular and scholarly writing on the history of the Inland.
When Dr Duguid first attacked Flynn in the early 1930s, he was aiming at a very large target. In 1932, Ion Idriess had published his runaway bestseller Flynn of the Inland. Flynn married around this time, and a friend wrote of his fame: ‘no engagement other than that of royalty could have caused such a stir’. Flynn referred ironically to the Idriess story as ‘my mythic self’. He was a hero to a Depression-weary nation. In his philanthropic work for the outback he performed a great service for the metropolis: he crystallised an image of Australia as a pioneering nation, whose frontier vitality was undiminished.
In 1912 Flynn had travelled through the Northern Territory, producing a report for the Presbyterian Church on the welfare needs of white settlers, and eventually setting up the Australian Inland Mission (AIM) as an organisation devoted to those needs. Aboriginal missions were separately administered and, remarkably, were administered