Lancelot Threlkeld, Biraban, and the colonial Bible in Australia

This essay provides an intimate history of one attempt to create a Bible on the remote reaches of the Australian frontier; it concerns a working partnership which fused to create it, and the power of the book which long outlived its creators. Like many similar efforts to translate the Bible into minor languages, it was a failure in the terms understood by mission societies of the day: it produced no conversions, supported no ongoing Christian community, and did not appear in print until the language concerned had become extinct. What this study reveals is something new, for despite the inadequacies of the translation effort, the hostility and violence of the frontier in which the translation work proceeded, and the despair and death of those who created it, it generated a unique colonial artifact which has its own history and which prospered after the collapse of the mission and the passing of the colonial frontier.