[WESTERN AUSTRALIA] School children and missionaries, Badjaling, Feb. 1931.

Photographic glass magic lantern slide with hand colouring, 82 x 82 mm (mount); the black paper border has a manuscript caption in white ink in the lower margin: ‘School children and missionaries, Badjaling, Feb. 1931’, and the initials ‘W. H. M.‘ in the upper margin; in fine condition.

This is an early and quite possibly unique image of the Badjaling Mission school, situated approximately 155 km east of Perth, in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region. The group portrait shows 27 Noongar (Nyungar) children and three mission school teachers, including (at top right) Mary Belshaw (1879–1960) and May McRidge (1882–1943), who had founded the Badjaling Mission in 1929/30.

The photographer is identified on the mount by the initials ‘W. H. M.’. This is almost certainly Walter Henry Mathews, publicity officer for the United Aborigines Mission.

Mary Belshaw was an Irish weaver who arrived in Australia in 1913. She worked as a Protestant missionary among Aboriginal communities in Western Australia from 1915 until 1953. She is buried alongside her co-worker at Badjaling, May McRidge, a Uniting Church missionary; a memorial stone erected in 1986 by the Noongar community commemorates both women, as well as the members of almost 40 Noongar families who lived at the mission across several decades.

The SLWA holds an important archive of family photographs, the Badjaling/Winmar collection of photographs, which document life at the mission from the 1920s to the 1960s.

‘In the late 1920s missionaries Miss Mary Belshaw and Miss May McRidge travelled to visit friends on the property known as Dendaring near Quairading, W.A. Noticing that many children were not receiving an education, they started a school and religious services. Their success encouraged them to look for a place nearby to continue their mission and in the 1930s they moved to Badjaling.’ (SLWA, Badjaling/Winmar collection of photographs – the 1920s, part one. BA1400/1-23).