The Seventh-day Adventist Church is a Christian Church that follows the beliefs described by the Holy Scriptures. It originated in the United States, spread to Europe and as a result of the Church’s missionary work, came to Australia in 1885. The first Seventh-day Adventists came to Queensland around 1890.
Seventh-day Adventist Missionaries in Australia were part of a world-wide expansion of the Church’s missionary work in the late nineteenth century.
The Church’s first interaction with Aboriginal people in Queensland was in 1910 when Miss Ruth Cozens, who taught at the Murgon Seventh-day Adventist school, extended her work to include Sunday School lessons for the children at the Barambah Aboriginal Settlement.
In 1913 the Queensland Government gave the Church a grant of about 1600 hectares of land and permission to establish the Mona Mona mission for Aborigines at Kuranda, inland from Cairns.