Ernest Gribble

Ernest Gribble (23 November 1868 – 18 October 1957) was an Australian missionary. Though considered to be temperamentally unsuited to his vocation, he became a strong advocate for better treatment of Australian aborigines, saving whose 'remnants' he considered part of his mission.

He was born at Chilwell in Geelong in 1868, the son of John Brown and Mary Gribble (née Bulmer), and the eldest of 9 children. His father was a Methodist and then Congregational Union, and finally Anglican missionary, who disturbed by the systematic injustices visited on aborigines as he had observed them in Jerilderie and elsewhere, wrote A Plea for the Aborigines of New South Wales, and established the Warangesda Mission on the Murrumbidgee river (1880). Ernest showed, despite excelling in sports, less than mediocre academic abilities during his schooling at The King's School, Parramatta. Dissuaded from following a military career, he joined his father in an attempt, which soon failed, to set up a mission at Gascoyne River in Western Australia.

Invited to work in Carnarvon, Western Australia, Gribble's father was ostracized by settlers for his protests at the abuses of Aboriginal workers. He opened a mission at Yarrabah, and fell ill, and called on his son Ernest, who had accepted a curacy at Tumbarumba in New South Wales for financial reasons, to take over the Mission in his stead. His father died soon afterwards, and Ernest seems to have been driven by guilt and remorse in pursuing his father's footsteps. Ordained an Anglican priest in 1899, he went on to succeed in converting many local aborigines, and one, James Noble, became the first Aboriginal to be ordained deacon. He showed little comprehension of Aboriginal culture, failing to learn even elementary words of the local language at Yarrabah, which he eventually left in 1909, after suffering a breakdown from overwork according to Harris, from guilt over having a child with an Aboriginal woman in 1908, a year after he separated from his wife Emilie Julie Wriede.

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