The title says it all, really. Bishop’s biography of Annie Lock, missionary to Aboriginal people in many parts of Australia, is no hagiography. The book’s title comes from a comment made by a man seeking a job at Tennant Creek telegraph station, refusing to return to Annie’s nearby mission. As an aside, the notes for that reference claim that the ‘cabbage’ referred to may have been kohlrabi, so his reaction on the food front may seem justified.

Bishop’s biography follows a young South Australian woman who completed her missionary training course in Adelaide, and then began her lifetime work with Aboriginal people in La Perouse in 1903. Annie worked without stipend but had faith that her God would provide. She was a tireless advocate for Aboriginal people’s best interests, but only as she defined them. Across Australia she worked in children’s homes, on government reserves and mission stations, and on her own. Some saw her as a heroine, a dynamo, a ‘good fella missus’, but others found her bossy, idiosyncratic and a crank.

Bishop first encountered Annie Lock for a master’s thesis in 1991, expanding it into a book 30 years later. Annie was a whistleblower who publicised the Coniston massacres by police in Central Australia in 1928, following the murder of a white dingo scalper. An inquiry found her partly to blame, as ‘a woman missionary living among naked blacks, thus lowering their respect for the whites’.

Annie Lock was an enigma to many people, and a thorn in the side of many government officials. Equally admired and detested, she had courage and determination, sympathy and caring, but her absolute faith in God was accompanied by stubbornness and a patronising conviction of her culture’s superiority and an assumption that she had (God-given) authority over Aboriginal people.

The accounts of her work around Australia, written for mission newsletters with her own eccentric spelling, have been brought to life in this biography. It is also a part-history of well-meaning Australian missionary efforts among indigenous people, such efforts proving as contradictory as Annie Lock’s reputation.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville