Pirlangimpi

Garden Point Mission on Melville Island, NT

In 1939 the newly established Native Affairs Branch started negotiations with various missions to assume responsibility for those children considered to be "half-caste" (part-Aboriginal) currently in the government reserves at Kahlin Compound in Darwin and The Bungalow in Alice Springs. It was decided that a Catholic mission would be established at Garden Point for these children.[6]

Garden Point Mission (aka Melville Island Mission, Our Lady of Victories Mission, Pirlangimpi and Catholic Mission Melville Island[6]) was founded by the Roman Catholic Missionaries of the Sacred Heart as a home for mixed-blood children, both local part-Japanese and those removed (stolen) from their families in other parts of the Northern Territory.[7] The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart looked after the boys and the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart took care of the girls. Dormitories for boys and girls were completed by 1941, with the boys brought in first to help with the building work. There were 15 girls brought from the mainland, and another 14 transferred from the Bathurst Island Mission, all between 18 months and 14 years old. A school for children between 5 and 17 was established.[6]

In 1942, after Darwin had been bombed, 41 children (mostly girls) were evacuated to Carrieton, South Australia, being returned in 1945–6.[6]

Children of Aboriginal people suffering from leprosy at East Arm and Channel Island Leprosariums were brought to the mission from the 1930s to the 1960s, and other children were despatched there by the Welfare Branch.[6]

The mission lease was not renewed in 1967, leading to the closure of the mission school in 1968, with the last of the children taken back to the mainland in 1969.[6]

Australian Rules football was introduced by Brother John Pye of the Catholic mission.[8] Three Norm Smith Medalists – Maurice Rioli, Michael Long and Cyril Rioli – were raised at the mission at Pirlangimpi.[9]

Marjorie Liddy, who grew up on the mission, provided an image that was widely used in Pope Benedict XVI's visit to World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney.[10]

Garden Point Mission was mentioned in the Bringing Them Home Report (1997), the result of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families.[6] Stories of sexual abuse of boys, and trauma suffered by the children as a result of being removed from their families, emerged later, and in November 2021 the Commonwealth Government and the two churches involved issued a formal apology to the people affected. A class action was settled privately.[11]