St Clair Mission, located in Carrowbrook between Muswellbrook and Singleton, was an Aboriginal mission that was established by Reverend JS White in 1893. In the late 1890s Retta Dixon, a Baptist missionary, moved to the Mission. In 1905 she formed the Aborigines Inland Mission and took formal control of St Clair. She established the Singleton Children's Home on St Clair in the same year. St Clair operated until 1918 when it was taken over by the Aborigines Protection Board and renamed Mount Olive Reserve. The missionaries were forced out in 1920 and the reserve and the Home were closed in 1923.
Sources used to compile this entry: 'Our Aim newsletters', in Aborigines' Inland Mission newsletters, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1907-1961, http://aiatsis.gov.au/collections/collections-online/digitised-collections/aborigines-inland-mission-newsletters/our-aim-newsletters; Brett-Vickers, Christine, 'A missionary in the family : George and Jennie Smith and Aboriginal people, New South Wales 1890-1920', PhD thesis, School of History, LaTrobe University, 2007; Gray, Anna, St Clair Mission, Australian Museum, Australian Museum, 2010. Also available at https://web.archive.org/web/20171021052801/http://australianmuseum.net.au/St-Clair-Mission/; Parry, Naomi, 'Such a longing': black and white children in welfare in New South Wales and Tasmania, 1880-1940, Department of History, University of New South Wales, 2007, 361 pp, http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/40786; Radi, Heather, 'Long, Margaret Jane (Retta) (1878-1956)', in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/long-margaret-jane-retta-10857; Email correspondence from Dr Christine Brett-Vickers, 21-22 January 2013 and 15 May 2014.
Prepared by: Naomi Parry
Created: 10 May 2013, Last modified: 20 June 2014