Qualla: Mona Mona Aboriginal Mission

Mona Mona Aboriginal Mission: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. Some places carry a grief that the quiet of the bush only deepens. Near Kuranda, in the rainforest country of the Djabugay, the locality of Mona Mona holds the remains of a mission that opened around 1913 and the memory of the people who were brought there with no say in the matter. To name it honestly: in 1913 Aboriginal families, many of them Djabugay, were rounded up and forcibly taken to this Seventh-day Adventist mission, removed from the country their ancestors had held since the time of bulurru.

Image: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mona Mona Aboriginal Mission: Gathered In

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. Mona Mona belonged to an era when governments and churches across Australia gathered Aboriginal people onto missions and reserves, severing them from their land, their movement, and often their families, under laws that treated entire peoples as wards of the state. The forced rem...

Image: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mona Mona Aboriginal Mission: Lives Inside the Boundary

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. It would be a mistake to reduce Mona Mona only to its injustice, because real lives were lived inside it. Children were born and grew up here. Photographs from 1959 and 1960 show the main street and the mission school, ordinary scenes of an extraordinary confinement. Families mad...

Image: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mona Mona Aboriginal Mission: Closed and Scattered

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the mid-twentieth century the mission was failing. The soil had worn out, costs were climbing, and the growing city of Cairns needed water; a plan was raised to dam Flaggy Creek, which ran through the mission land and would have drowned the houses. In 1962 the decision came do...

Image: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mona Mona Aboriginal Mission: The Return

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. But the story does not end in scattering. The dam that justified the closure was never built. And the people of Mona Mona never truly let the place go. Over the decades, descendants and former residents found their way back, building houses again on the old mission land, and in 2...

Image: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0