faith and place

The word in our midst CFP

2011-03-11T07:36:00.003+11:00

The word in our midst:

dialogues between Christianity and history

A conference hosted by the Evangelical History Association

Friday 22 July 2011, Macquarie University, Sydney

Christianity is fundamentally concerned with logos. Its history and significance is inextricably tied up with the spoken, written and incarnate word. ‘The word was God’ and ‘the word was made flesh’ are among its central theological claims.

Historians, like theologians, deal with and in words. Particularly since the linguistic turn, they have embraced language a subject of inquiry and self-consciously reconsidered the nature and meanings of texts. This has exciting implications for the historical study of Christianity and the markedly Biblicist movement of evangelicalism.

In the four hundredth year of the King James translation of the Bible, the EHA dedicates its annual conference to the word in Christianity and history. It invites proposals for papers on all aspects of the relationship between word, God and history. We particularly welcome papers that engage with the following themes:

The translation, propagation and interpretation of the Bible
Sermons as sources and texts
Language, literature and Christianity
Biblicism and evangelicalism
Christian voices in history
Christ in Australian culture and society
Christian concepts informing society and politics in general

In preparation for a revised and expanded edition of the Australian Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, the EHA also invites short biographical papers for a special ‘1000 words on a person’ stream.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Dr Meredith Lake (meredithelake[at]gmail[dot]com) by Friday 6 May 2011.

The word in our midst is open to scholars associated with theological colleges as well as universities. Students doing original research in history are especially welcome to contribute. The conference is also open to those who wish to attend without giving a paper.

Further details and registration options are available at http://www.evangelicalhistory.org/

Reflections on Sufjan and Sydney

2011-01-28T20:52:00.018+11:00

I'm a relatively recent convert to the music of Sufjan Stevens - J bought me Songs for Christmas in 2009 and my appreciation has grown rapidly from there. I love his combination of earnest Christian discipleship with musical and lyrical eloquence, irrepressible creativity and shockingly honest, deeply human vulnerability.

His show at the Opera House last night was out-of-this-world amazing. One freaking genuis, backed by ten mad musicians and a massive screen of weird space-theme imagery transporting the whole audience to another dimension.

Sufjan explained the inspiriation for his latest album, The Age of Adz, and had me rivetted. He talked about the self-proclaimed prophet Royal Robertson - an American artist whose poster-board creations have a decidedly futuristic, comic-book look, and reflect Robertson's deep interest in numerology, the Book of Revelation and the apocalypse more generally. Sufjan discussed this stuff very seriously, emphasising Robertson's significance to his own recent thinking and repeating Robertson's 'prophet' epithet without a hint of either irony or scepticism.

The audience didn't know what to make of it. Sydneysiders aren't exactly famous for being comfortable with spiritual topics, and most Christians in this big bad city wouldn't be caught dead admitting an openness to this kind of thing. I mean, what kind of Christian gets guidance from a crazy like Robertson? Or indeed from anything other than a sermon and bible studies? Sufjan sure wouldn't pass muster as a Sydney Anglican.

I'm being a little facetious. But Sufjan did make me think about religious culture in this city, and particularly the flavour of its church communities. Christians in Sydney tend to have a seige mentality: the world out there is not simply corrupt, it's a threat. It has to be resisted, rejected, called to repentence. Historian Stuart Piggin suggests this mentality is a legacy of our convict origins: the Anglican church was on the back foot from the very first moments of British settlement.

Don't hear me say that this mentality is utterly without value. But it often leads to a world-denying defensiveness, an almost fearful refusal to acknowledge - let alone engage with - other ways of seeing things. Even within the community of Christians, there is often a felt need to defend one's own orthodoxy. People certainly don't go round saying 'Hey, this random prophet artist guy from the trailer park is really inspiring' - or at least, not in my hearing :-)

Such fear, such defensiveness, is deeply troubling. I am no theologian,but surely we - Christians - have lost something crucial if we bunker down so tightly that we are no longer life affirming, if we lose the ability to ask real, potentially heretical questions and go on a bit of a journey. I'd be interested to know what you think.

(Sufjan, unsurprisingly, recently said some fascinating things about his own journey as a Christian, and what the whole deal means to him. Thanks for the ref, Richard).

P.S. Mr Stevens' encore from the Opera House last night - Chicago - is already on youtube here. There are also plenty of vids from earlier (north american) shows from the Age of Adz tour, if you care to go looking for them.

Pics: taken from my seat! couldn't fit the other eight band members into the top one (SS is top left).

Here we go again

2011-01-25T11:16:00.005+11:00

Yep, it's THAT public holiday tomorrow.

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting higher than usual sales of flag-design junk in the lead up. If you were still hoping to get some flag-themed beer coasters, you've probably left your run too late.

I'm planning to spend Invasion Day at lunch with a couple of latin scholars and a physicist, followed by a Hottest 100 BBQ with a different (music-inclined) set of nerds.

When the time comes to reflect more seriously on the whole national identity thing, perhaps I will have a look at an enticing new title to emerge from the history bunch at Sydney uni. Unknown Nation co-author James Curran said the repeated but unresolved discussion of identity every Anzac and Australia day was one of his inspirations."We were interested in locating the nerve centre of this problem, which came with the breaking of ties with Britain in the 1960s."

According to Curran and Ward, the sudden disappearance of the familiar co-ordinates of the British world, cast Australians into the realm of the unknown. "The task of remodelling the national image touched every aspect of Australian life where identifiably British ideas, habits and symbols - from foreign relations to the national anthem - had grown obsolete. But how to celebrate Australia's past achievements and future aspirations became a source of public controversy as community leaders struggled to find the appropriate language and rhetoric to invoke a new era." If you're keen, google books has the introduction here.

Sculpture by the sea

2010-11-09T13:28:00.009+11:00

Newtown, oh Newtown

2010-10-23T16:11:00.004+11:00

Lisa Pryor gets it so right.

The only thing that makes me sad is that I can't really afford to live here anymore. After four rented flats in six and a half years, it looks as though I'll be pushing the pram around Summer Hill for a while instead. At least its still the inner west :-)

A national saint?

2010-10-18T08:58:00.006+11:00

It's an interesting example of Australian parochialism, that our media virtually ignored the five other people canonised with Mary Mackillop in Rome over the weekend. Canada, for example, also received a new saint: Brother Andre Bessett. He is Canada's 11th saint, but the first Canadian born male saint. (As historian Robin McLachlan commented, 'the rise of so many Canadians to sainthood was assisted by some very helpful First Nations folk: 8 of the first 10 were martyrs and didn't require miracles for canonisation.')

Its also startling that the media coverage of MacKillop's life, legacy and canonisation has been so saturating. As a rough measure of the difference in quantity of response, Google searches on "Mary MacKillop" and "Andre Bessette" reveal ten times as many hits for Mary. Even discounting all the Mary MacKillop schools and similar, it is a remarkable difference.

A Canadian now living in Australia, Dr McLachlan speculates that 'there is a very wide and generous embracing of Mary MacKillop by the Australian people, when compared with the subdued Canadian response to Brother Andre. Perhaps the differing responses reflects the place of Mary and Alfred in the nationalism of their respective countries? Mary's story touches on some well established themes in the Australian national mythology, as in bush and battlers, while Alfred - by all accounts a very decent chap - has a story that sits squarely on the fracture line in Canadian nationalism, namely the divide between English and French speaking Canadians...'

McLachlan's suggestion reminds me of what our unbelieving* prime minister, Julia Gillard, said about Mackillop during the election campaign:

Mary MacKillop was a pioneering woman who embodied the very best of our values and the best of the Australian spirit. Hers was a life of devotion and sacrifice. But also a life of adventure, determination and resilience. This is a saint who rides horseback for days under the searing Australian sun, just to visit a few isolated Sisters, who has grit under her fingernails and sweat on her brow. Her life resounds with stories that are at once inspiring, challenging and sometimes even just a little amusing. In many ways, Mary MacKillop embodies the spirit of Australian egalitarianism.

Gilliard firmly located Mackillop in a nationalist tradition of pioneering the bush, sticking by your mates, valuing the fair go - a tradition which, by the way, typcially leaves little room for Christian faith. It will be interesting to see if, as the attention occassioned by the canonisation dies down, Mackillop endures as a national icon - and if so, how much her story will be made to fit exisiting narratives about national identity, or come to redefine it.

Pic: from the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart wesbite, via The Wild Reed.
* Gilliard usually describes herself as of no belief - but I have also her her characterised by others as a post- nonconformist, in recognition of her Welsh origins and sunday school education in the Baptist church.

September update

2010-09-28T13:18:00.009+10:00

What I'm...

Watching - The Trail of Genghis Khan, a 6 part doco by Australian adventurer Tim Cope (pictured), who spent three years riding a horse 10,000 kms from the old Mongol capital of Karakorum to the Danube river in Hungary - via western Mongolia, Kazakhstan, southern Russia and the Ukraine. I'm fascinated by these parts of the world. Makes me want to go travelling again.

Listening to - Sarah Blasko's As Day Follows Night, with bonus live CD, a gift for my 30th recently; Picnic Playground, a compliation of very groovy kids songs about food from world music label Putumayo - Jemima and I like dancing around the house to it.

Writing - the last section of the history of Hammond Care. Hopefully the day when it's finished is not too far away!

Reading - nothing, actually, but my current list of books I'm looking forward to includes Robert Kenny's award winning The Lamb Enters the Dreaming. The bookclub book I'm meant to get stuck into soon is The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. And then there was my new years resolution about Moby Dick...

Thinking about - what the future might look like for me personally and the world more generally; Joel away in Europe with school kids; the meaning of 'fear God' (the beginning of wisdom).

Enjoying - getting to know my sister in law better; watching Jemima learning to talk and experiencing new things; getting fit in preparation for my first fun run; drinking coffee on the deck in the afternoons after the builders across the street finish their jackhammering. I love spring.

Jemima again

2010-09-03T13:26:00.003+10:00

Aboriginal Newtown

2010-07-28T17:40:00.004+10:00

Over the next two weeks, my little church will be exploring issues to do with Aboriginal relations and reconcilliation. I'm responsible for the historical content of our meetings, and thought I'd post some interesting facts about the aboriginal history of the very place where cottage church actually meets.

1. The Newtown area was part of the land of the Cadigal band of the Eora people, who ranged across the entire area from the southern shores of Sydney Harbour to Botany Bay in the south-east and Petersham in the west. It was through the land management methods of the aboriginal people that the extensive grasslands of predominantly Kangaroo Grass, commented upon by officers of the first fleet, were maintained as ideal breeding grounds for kangaroos.

2. King Street follows an ancient Aboriginal track that branched out from the main western track (now Parramatta Road), and continued all the way to the coastal plains around Botany Bay. According to the colonial diarist Watkin Tench, when Europeans arrived in Sydney it was possible to walk easily all the way from Sydney Cove to Botany Bay in a few hours, through a grassy and lightly-wooded area that Tench described as being like English parkland. The predominant grass of the area was Kangaroo Grass, of which a substantial remnant continues to exist within Camperdown Cemetery.

3. Speaking of Camperdown cemetery, this was the final resting place of several Aborigines. One we know about was called Tommy, an eleven year old boy who died of bronchitis in the Sydney Infirmary. He was buried in a section of the Cemetery now located outside the wall. A sandstone obelisk erected in 1944 by the Rangers League of NSW, remembers Tommy and three other Aborigines buried there - Mogo, William Perry and Mandelina. There’s also a memorial to Mogo in Newtown park, under a tree on the Courthouse hotel side.

Pic: heritage listed kangaroo grass at Camperdown cemetery, a matter of meters from where my church meets.

Australian religious history: the in thing

2010-07-14T19:36:00.007+10:00

Plenty of good scholars still manage to marginalise the religious aspect of life in their accounts of Australia's history, but if the Australian Historical Association's 2010 conference is anything to go by, religious history is fast becoming the in thing.

Last week's program gave lively testimony to just how popular religious topics and themes are among researchers at the moment. The first keynote address, by Patricia Grimshaw, concerned women missionaries to Australian Aborigines; another keynote by the internationally renowned Andrew Porter, on 'Evangelical Visions and Colonial Realities,' concluded with a plea for historians to take the Bible far more seriously as a source of their subjects' inspiration. There were sessions on religious topics dotted across the program as a whole - I personally heard papers on various aspects of Australian missionary history, the role of religion in recent federal politics, and the attitudes of colonial anglican clergymen to the end of convict transportation.... All very stimulating.

If you'd like to taste some of the fruit of this recent flowering yourself, its not too late. The EHA's Divining the Past conference is next week! I'm thrilled that three very distinguished historians have agreed to participate in the 'Dialogues between Christianity and History' panel session:

Dr Geoff Oddie, formerly of Sydney University and author of several works on South Asia, including Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism (2006)

Associate Professor Anne O'Brien, present head of history at UNSW and author of God's Willing Workers: Women and Religion in Australia (2005)

Associate Professor Stuart Piggin, head of the Centre for Christian Thought and Experience at Macquarie University and author of Evangelical History in Australia (1996)

Each of these scholars will share their personal reflections on how shifts in the theory and practice of history over, say, the last thirty years, have changed and/or challenged the researching and writing of religious history. If you're interested, check out the EHA's website for registration information.

'A life-long devotion to the Protestant cause'

2010-06-28T11:12:00.004+10:00

I just discovered that my daughter shares a birthday with an evangelical Anglican land rights activist...

RICHARD SADLEIR (1794-1889), naval officer, schoolmaster and pamphleteer, was born on 6 May 1794 at Cork, Ireland, the fourth son of James Sadleir, who became a landowner and manufacturer near Bandon. Sadleir was educated privately and at Bandon Classical School. His earliest aspiration was for the church (he had a life-long devotion to the Protestant cause) but in February 1808 he joined the navy. He served on the European, African and American Stations and was promoted lieutenant on 21 May 1819; his only other advancement was as commander on the retired list on 9 April 1875. Sadleir became interested in the colonies when he was on duty on the American Lakes and on his return to Ireland in 1821 he was concerned in emigration schemes to Canada.

In 1825 Sadleir went to New South Wales and on the recommendation of Archdeacon Thomas Scott undertook an official tour to investigate the condition of the Aboriginals and their relations with the settlers. Sadleir's study was long and thorough, and his concern for the natives remained active. He gave evidence on the subject before a Legislative Council committee in 1838 and, late in life, published a short book on the Aborigines of Australia (Sydney, 1883). In 1826, having £1000 of capital, he was granted 2650 acres (1072 ha) in the Hunter River valley.

Sadleir was not a rich man and his interests were religious and educational rather than agricultural. In October 1826 he was appointed a catechist for the Church of England in the Upper Hunter and ministered there for more than two years. Twenty years later he considered securing ordination from Bishop Charles Perry of Melbourne but this intention was frustrated. Sadleir became master of the Male Orphan School at Liverpool in succession to Rev. Robert Cartwright, whose daughter Ann (1810-1870) he married in December 1829. He remained there until 1851 and exercised an effective, if highly individual, mastership.

When Sadleir's official duties came to an end he took an active part in political controversy, contested unsuccessfully the constituency of St Vincent in the first elections under responsible government, and was elected in the radical interest for the Lower Hunter in 1861. His parliamentary career ended in 1864 but he continued to write on the land laws and constitutional reform for another twenty years. He produced a steady stream of pamphlets, petitions and articles on topics ranging from railway extension and the city water supply to the homoeopathic system of medicine and the production of non-combustible light; he wrote against Henry George on single tax and Bishop William Grant Broughton on baptismal regeneration. He sent more letters to newspaper editors than anyone else of his time.

Religious matters were the object of Sadleir's constant concern. He was an ardent Evangelical and an opponent of what he considered to be clerical autocracy. As joint secretary of the Church of England Constitution Defence Association in 1852, he organized with skill and some success a lay protest movement against Bishop Broughton's plan for colonial church government. He argued against Tractarianism in the 1840s and Anglo-Catholicism in the 1880s. His convictions, though expressed with a singular lack of moderation, were sincere and often coherent.

Sadleir's later activities were not solely polemical. He was energetic in local affairs as a justice of the peace, member of denominational school boards and mayor of Liverpool. Church administration took much of his time and so did charitable and philanthropic work. He remained vigorous in debate and action and quick to espouse new causes until his death at Liverpool on 6 March 1889.

[Text from K. J. Cable, 'Sadleir, Richard (1794 - 1889)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 2, Melbourne Uni Press, 1967, p. 414.]

Evangelicalism in the churches

2010-06-27T10:22:00.005+10:00

'Evangelicalism in the churches' is one of six major themes to be explored at the Evangelical History Association's Divining the Past conference on July 23.

Rowland Ward will analyse four Presbyterian heretics from the twentieth century.
John Macintosh will examine three principals of the influential Moore Theological College in Sydney.
And Stuart Piggin's paper will engage with the very topical issue of Peter Jensen's (pictured) leadership of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney.

'Most of the many recent studies of Sydney evangelical Anglicanism have been written by critical outsiders,' Piggin says. One of the assumptions of this literature is that 'politics usually damages the church.'

Dr Piggin's contribution to Divining the Past will probe this idea by exploring the contrasting leadership styles of Harry Goodhew (1993-2001) and Peter Jensen (2001 to date). Their styles 'reflect not only two different personalities but different understandings of the nature of evangelicalism. These are reflected in the major challenges and debates of the two episcopates. For Goodhew these included: parish growth, the expansion of low-fee schools, the development of a sexual abuse protocol, the push for lay presidency, and the push against the ordination of women and a new prayer book. In Jensen it has included ‘The Mission’, the Boyer Lectures, the ‘Masord Discord,’ and GAFCON.'

Conference registration is now open - all the details are on the EHA's homepage.

Two lovely Sundays

2010-06-21T19:22:00.008+10:00

Jemima and I have spent some quality girl time together the last two Sundays. The first week we spent aaages feeding stale bread to birds in Victoria Park. Jemima absolutely loved it - even though I wouldn't let her step into the pond to pat the ducks!

Yesterday, we caught the free ferry to Cockatoo Island to get a little dose of kulcha - thanks to my friend's father who, as honorary auditor for the Biennale of Sydney, wrangled a tour of some of the exhibits led by the BoS CEO. I really enjoyed the visit - for both the site and the installations. Jemima was most interested in waving at other people and chasing birds.

Sydney real estate, colonial style

2010-06-16T19:22:00.004+10:00

When the first British colonists of Australia disembarked from their ships, some dragged saws and axes ashore to clear a space to erect their tents. Governor Phillip had no need of such things - befitting a man of his station, he had brought with him a prefabriacted house.

In subsequent years, colonists built a more substantial home for their vice regal representative. It was added to again and again, until finally demolished and replaced by the current Government House.

An interesting article in today's paper reports the completion of a model of the original government house. It's now on display at the Museum of Sydney - and apparently makes its creator, Wallace and Gromit artist Lesley Osborne, rather proud.

Pic: Government House NSW, 1791, by William Bradley [NLA]

A blast from the past

2010-06-10T20:17:00.005+10:00

I've been revisiting material from my Phd thesis this week in preparation for a couple of upcoming conferences. The exercise has reminded me of two important things I had begun to forget since submitting the thing two years ago:

how very interesting I find Australian colonial history and historiography; and
how difficult it is to use words to order thoughts and pin down ideas.

I wonder if writing will ever get easier?

Land - a compelling issue V

2010-05-21T21:28:00.004+10:00

For Christians, too, the issue of land can be hard to grasp. Our spiritual identity is rooted in a person, not a place. We follow a king whose kingdom is not of this world. Our citizenship is in heaven, rather than an earthly promised land. This side of the cross, ours can seem a pretty placeless faith.

Still, the gospel of Jesus enables us to engage with the issue of land in several positive ways. It enables us, as people who know both the seriousness of sin and the freedom of forgiveness, to acknowledge the terrible wrong done to Aboriginal people and repent of our part in it. It allows us to admit our failures as stewards of creation and seek God’s help in living more responsibly. And it frees us to let go of the Great Australian Dream and leave our culture of land greed. Christians don’t need to feel the kind of anger and anxiety that made Pauline Hanson ask, ‘well, where the hell do I go’ if this land belongs to the Aborigines? The good news of Jesus means we can entrust ourselves to the God of love and grace, confident that he will meet our needs. We can get on with loving our neighbours - those people we encounter in all the various places and locations in which we go about our activities.

[here endeth the series]
Pic: Morrisons bushwalking in the Snowies [JM]

Land - a compelling issue IV

2010-05-20T12:30:00.002+10:00

It is hard, perhaps impossible, for non-indigenous Australians to understand the full meaning of land to its original inhabitants. The white people who first turned up in 1788 came from a very different place with very different ideas. They assumed the land was theirs to adapt and own. They dispossessed its Aboriginal custodians, disregarding their culture and claims. And while they imagined themselves as ‘men of the land’ - droving cattle, shearing sheep, eating damper and drinking billy tea - they in fact established one of the most urban societies in the world.

Today their descendents, along with subsequent migrants, tend to live in suburban homes in one or other of the coastal cities. We commute fair distances to desk jobs in the CBD, to earn money to spend on the fruits of industrialised agriculture overseas. We pick products off supermarket shelves and cook them up on appliances powered by gas or electricity. In our spare time, we chat with disembodied Facebook friends and dream of our next holiday overseas. We don’t think or live locally, or know our environment intimately. We are quite removed from the land as a culture and society.

Land - a compelling issue III

2010-05-18T11:55:00.005+10:00

For most of human history, land has been a crucial part of how people and communities have understood themselves, their relationship to others, even their relationship to God. Think of the ancient Israelites, as described in the Old Testament. They knew what it was like to be oppressed and homeless, to wander in the wilderness, to be exiled to a foreign country. They also knew what it was like to enjoy God’s blessing in the promised land of Canaan - even as they looked forward to that ‘better country’, the heavenly city ‘whose builder and maker is God.’ [Heb 11:10,16] In peace and war, whether they moved around or settled down, the Israelites’ sense of themselves and their relationship to God was intimately bound up with their experience of the land.

Closer to home, Aboriginal people also relate their identity and spirituality to the land. Over a period of more than 40,000 years, indigenous Australians have developed a unique and all-encompassing sense of belonging to country. For Aboriginal people, land is not so much an object to possess as something to be part of and belong to. It is a source of personal identity not in the mere sense of being from this or that place, but in the very intimate sense of kin identification with particular sites and the plants and animals that exist on them. Land defines an individual’s relationship to economic resources, to past history, to customary knowledge and religious practice. Traditionally, it forms the physical and symbolic basis of every significant aspect of Aboriginal life.

Pic: one of more than 450 Ice Age human footprints at Lake Mungo in Western New South Wales

Land - a compelling issue II

2010-05-16T08:19:00.002+10:00

Why is land such a compelling issue in this country? The answer lies partly in the nature of land itself, in what land actually is.

At its simplest, land is ‘the part of the earth’s surface that is not covered by water.’ Like water, land is a basic part of the physical world we live in. And like water, it stirs up an array of issues to do with environmental management and access to natural resources. How can the land be used in ways that are sustainable for the environment? How, at the same time, can it be used in ways that are sustaining for its creatures - including people? In many parts of the world, the practical ways people answer such questions can mean the difference between starvation and sustainability, between poverty and plenty.

But land is not just a physical thing. It’s not just a basic natural resource like air or water is. Land is important to us because its connected to everything we do as communities, cultures and societies. We live on it, look at it, work in it, eat from it. We travel across it and settle down on it, creating boundaries and thoroughfares to distinguish ourselves from others and mark out our own identities. Whether it’s the white picket fence between the footpath and front yard, the invisible line between one postcode and the next, or the formal border between one nation and its neighbour, people divide up land in ways that mark some places as home, and others as foreign territory. We make the land into a collection of places, with names and meanings basically distinguished from one another by human activities. Land, in other words, is fundamentally about culture as well as nature.

Land - a compelling issue

2010-05-14T12:45:00.002+10:00

You don’t have to flick past the first page of the newspaper to see that land is a hot topic in today’s Australia. Every time a boatload of asylum seekers reaches the coast, there’s renewed debate about who is allowed to enter ‘our land’ and on what conditions. Whenever interest rates go up, or there’s new data on housing affordability, land hits the headlines again. It’s outrageous, isn’t it, that its so hard these days to secure a little piece of the country? But the millions of mortgage holders among us testify to the enduring power of the Great Australian Dream. Many of us still crave a quarter acre block with a house and backyard for the kids.

Beneath the headlines, land features in some of our most complicated moral and political issues. One is the environmental issue of sustainability - how should the land be managed, physically and economically, in the face of soil erosion, water shortages, the effects of mining and logging? Another is the question of land rights for Australia’s indigenous people. For decades now, this issue has provoked an extraordinary array of reactions - from moral outrage and radical activism, to guilt and defensive self justification. Land rights for Aboriginal people is perhaps the most difficult and divisive land question in Australian society and history.

Note: this is the first section of an article I'm currently writing for TEAR Australia's Target magazine. More will follow soon - but please share your thoughts, suggestions, feedback.
Pic: a boat arrives at Christmas Island [SMH]

www.evangelicalhistory.org

2010-05-13T20:20:00.003+10:00

I'm very proud to announce the launch of the new EHA website: http://www.evangelicalhistory.org/

It's been quite a bit of work, but it looks great (thanks Paul!) Usefully, the site contains all the details for the upcoming Divining the Past conference. Its shaping up to be a great event, with sessions on such themes as Christianity and intellectuals, evangelicalism and social concern...

The new EHA site also gives full text access to loads of academic articles from the EHA's journal, Lucas: an Evangelical History Review. So if you're looking for scholarly sources on the history of evangelicalism in Australia ...

Why not add it to your favourites bar now?

Happy birthday Jemima

2010-05-04T21:00:00.004+10:00

Well, it's a year this week since Jemima was born. Praise God for her continued growth and good health, for the great gift she has been to me. The learning curve has been steep and there have been many challenges in embarking into parenthood, but she has certainly been a source of deep joy and delight to me.

She has changed so quickly, there have been little patches of grief as stages have come and gone. What happened to my newborn? But each new phase has also been wonderous. I love how she toddles around the house now, just because she can. I love that she tries to talk to me, constantly babbling away with real intent, though the only few words i understand are daddy, no no no and bye bye. And I love that she waves goodbye to Max when he gets back into his boat and leaves the Wild Things behind. (We have to read that book at least once a day at the moment). It's amazing to see her delight in simple, quite pointless things - like getting the lime juice out of the fridge, pulling off her socks, or having a swing.

So thank you Jemima for an amazing year - and to Joel for being a much appreciated partner in life and parenting.

War won, influence lost

2010-04-29T13:41:00.003+10:00

Do you think the churches have been influential in shaping Australian culture and society?

It's fairly common, in the scholarly literature, to see the twentieth century as a period of declining clerical influence and indeed of increasing marginalisation of Christian practices and values. The rising challenges of biblical criticism during the early decades of the century, as well as the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, are among the key points in this narrative.

What impact did the First World War have on the place of the church in Australian society? A complex question, obviously, but I was interested to read this week of one Protestant cleric's lament:

It is surely a matter for profound regret that when the churches of the land have agreed in judgement on a moral question affecting national affairs, and have declared their judgement in a form so public and in terms so impressive, that this has not arrested and influenced public opinion in a higher degree than is proved to be the case.

The theological interpretation that many Protestant leaders gave to the conflict - their declarations that the war had divine significance as a means for purging and purifying the nation - was not embraced by the majority of the Australian people. Protestant leaders were left high and dry by the two failed conscription campaigns, and wound up, on the threshold of the 1920s, with much reduced authority on social and political matters in the public sphere.

Pic: Chaplain E. N. Merrinton leading troops in communion, Gallipoli [AWM]

Church leaders on WW1

2010-04-28T13:55:00.008+10:00

In preparing tonight's lecture on the churches in World War One, I've come across some startling pronouncements by Australian church leaders on the significance of the conflict.

The Melbourne Anglican Henry Lowther Clark led a service of intercession on the first Sunday of the war, preaching on the text ‘be still and know that I am God.’ He emphasised that God was in control and that the believer should not be unduly concerned. ‘These days will bring their own blessing,’ he said, optimistically. ‘They will teach very many, better than they know it now, the value of religion.’

Henry Howard, an Adelaide Methodist, announced that ‘any discipline, whether of war or pestilence, of famine or fire, or drought or flood, that can break down our trust in the material and strengthen our faith in the spiritual ... is a discipline that should be welcomed and acquiesced in rather than deplored.’ He also spoke of the ‘intemperance, uncleanness, mutual distrust, commercial dishonesty, political chicanery’ that war would help reform.

A Presbyterian from Victoria, W. H. Cooper, wrote in early 1915: ‘if in this awful sacrifice of the nations we emerge unchastened, having made only pecuniary sacrifice, there is danger of over-weening pride and boastfulness, but if with the brave fighters from the British Isles and Canada and India our soldiers mingle their blood ... then sacrifice will hallow all our Australian life.’

Disturbing examples of the dangers of looking to the state and its activities as a source of moral and spiritual renewal. And sad examples, i think, of declaring to quickly and confidently what God's purposes are, when he acts in post-biblical history.

Source: Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War ch2

Anzac day thoughts

2010-04-25T20:22:00.007+10:00

For me, Anzac day is not a day for attending a dawn service or participating in a march (in a relative's place). It's not even a day for watching a hyped-up football match or playing two-up in the pub.*

Call me unAustralian, but on Anzac day I tend to think about the horrifying extent of war in the world, our appaling inability to live at peace with one another, our failure to resolve so many conflicts without resorting to force.

I also think about sacrifice and the terrible costliness of peace. Again, this may be unAustralian, but I don't mean the Anzacs - I'm not at all sure that they gave their lives to a prefectly just cause. Rather, as a Christian, I think about the sacrifice of Jesus - the perfect one who laid down his life for us, to put an end to our war with God and establish peace.

Anzac day in Australia has significant religious overtones, which i might get time to blog about later in the week. But the Christian hope is not in gallant soldiers, or the blokey cult of mateship. It is not in armies, or governments, or the negotiation of international treaties. The Christian hope is in Jesus, God’s just and righteous king - who humbly gave himself up so that we might know peace.

Pic: the grave of my great uncle George Best, no.1 squadron A.F.C, killed near Amiens, France, 12 April 1918.
* I admit, however, to eating anzac biscuits.

Two of my loves combined

2010-04-20T11:17:00.003+10:00

Community Gardeners in Woolloomooloo have pulled of something that makes this gardener very envious - they've grown, picked, stripped, roasted and drunk their very own coffee!

The whole process was done locally. With, like, zero carbon footprint. Who would have thought it was possible for people of inner city Sydney to combine community gardening with coffee drinking so intimately.

Check out the full article in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Our community garden at the Cottage, by the way, is going pretty well. We recently completed the construction of a frog pond (with fountain) - from a donated bath tub and spare stone from the cemetery. We are still waiting for frogs to move in, but our next project is already underway - a nice big chook shed for our three resident producers of organic Newtown eggs.

Pic: Toby Smith of Toby's Estate, joins members of the Woolloomooloo community garden to enjoy their locally grown coffee. By Fiona Morris, SMH.

Only a few days to go...

2010-03-22T20:56:00.010+11:00

...until abstracts are due for the Divining the Past conference! If you're thinking about it, now's the time to just throw one in. Here's mine - an extrapolation of some ideas from my PhD thesis.

Work and the Limits of Evangelical Humanitarianism

Scholars have emphasised the importance of humanitarianism to British evangelical thinking on settler colonialism, especially around the time of the Select Committee on Aborigines in British Settlements (1835-7). This paper argues that another strand of evangelical ethics, concerning diligent work and industry, could be similarly significant. It examines the Protestant work values that Samuel Marsden applied to indigenous people in New South Wales and New Zealand, and evaluates their role in his conspicuous refusal to support new missionary ventures among the Aborigines.

Reverend Marsden was well connected to British humanitarians including Wilberforce, Buxton and the heads of various missionary societies - who brought his correspondence concerning New Zealand before the Select Committee. But his views on industry and idleness ensured that his ideas diverged sharply from theirs when it came to the Christianisation and civilisation of Aboriginal people. Marsden’s colonial career suggest that evangelical notions of work must complicate our understanding of the relationships between evangelicalism, humanitarianism and settler colonialism.

In unrelated news:

Jemima has a new tooth, and shed lots of tears at childcare today.
I am quite enjoying having a *fraction* more time to research and write the Hammond care history (due to the abovementioned half day of child care).

Despite knowing very little about the subject, I'm giving a lecture on sectarianism in colonial society tomorrow. Argh! An intersting question, though - does religion tend more to unite people or divide them?

Pic: taken by my friend Liz, posted especially for Jemima's nanna and grandad overseas

Body art

2010-03-11T14:42:00.005+11:00

Jonathan Edwards on Australia

2010-03-04T14:44:00.003+11:00

I'm two weeks in to my course now, which explains my absense from blogging. But in preparing my first lecture I came across this very interesting passage, written by that towering figure in North American Christian history, Jonathan Edwards.

Reflecting on a verse from Isaiah - ‘and the isles shall wait for his law’ - in 1724, he said:

'What is peculiarly glorious in it, is the gospelizing the new and before unknown world, that which is so remote, so unknown, where the devil had reigned quietly from the beginning of the world, which is larger - taking in America, Terra Ausralis Incognita, Hollandia Nova, and all those yet undiscovered tracts of land - is far greater than the old world. I say, that this new world should all worship the God of Israel, whose worship was then confined to so narrow a land, is wonderful and glorious!’

Edwards links God (and indeed the devil) to particular places. A very interesting way of imagining this country prior to its European occupation.

Jemima...

2010-02-07T15:07:00.005+11:00

climbing on the couch

helping with the washing
hanging out with mum.

Divining the Past conference: call for papers

2010-01-30T20:51:00.005+11:00

Divining the Past:

Dialogues between Christianity and history

A conference hosted by the Evangelical History Association

Friday 23 July 2010

Macquarie University, Sydney

Divining the Past is a conference dedicated to the exploration of relationships between Christianity and History. How has the Christian tradition informed the theory and practice of history? How important is history to the belief and expression of Christianity? And how have Christian people, groups, movements, ideas and experiences been significant in past centuries? The conference aims to bring together a variety of perspectives on these questions. It is open to scholars associated with theological colleges as well as universities. Students doing original research in history are especially encouraged to participate.

The EHA invites proposals for papers on any aspect of the relationship between Christianity and History. We particularly welcome papers with an historiographical or theoretical focus, or that engage with the following topics:

Religion and politics
The church in society
Evangelicalism in Australia
Christianity in ancient history
Christianity and universities

The program will feature a panel on the theoretical and methodological links between Christianity and the discipline of history.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Dr Meredith Lake - meredithelake[at]gmail[dot]com - by 31 March 2010.

Pic: John Wesley preaching

Questions about Australian Christianity

2010-01-28T17:48:00.003+11:00

It's a real challenge to set course readings and design appropriate assessment tasks. I think I've decided to offer my students a choice of just four questions for their major essay:

Q1. The Reverend Richard Denney described early colonial Australia as ‘the most godless place under heaven’? To what extent was he right?

Q2. ‘The only hope that can reasonably be entertained either of the Aborigines’ gradual elevation in the scale of humanity, or even of their continued existence in contact with European civilisation, depends on their being brought under the powerful influence of Christianity through the efforts of Christian Missionaries’ - Rev John Dunmore Lang, 1847. How did missionaries try to bring Aborigines under the influence of Christianity, and with what consequences?

Q3. ‘Humbly relying on Almighty God’? Evaluate the public place of Christianity in the newly federated nation

Q4. ‘The purpose of the church is not to be socially agreeable; it is to speak robustly to the state on behalf of those who cannot speak effectively for themselves’ - Kevin Rudd, 2007. How successfully have Australian churches fulfilled this role, and why? Answer with reference to one or more of the following: the industrial strikes of the 1890s; the depression of the 1930s; the arrival of post-war refugees; reconciliation with Aborigines.

Patriotism for profit

2010-01-22T09:20:00.003+11:00

Maude Wordsworth James was an enthusiastic ''patriot''. Her contribution to Australian nationalism was the promotion of ''cooee'' as a patriotic symbol. One night in 1907, sleepless with family money worries, inspiration hit. She would sell the cooee as a national souvenir - patriotism for profit.

James designed cooee jewellery, wrote sentimental cooee songs, made up atrocious cooee jokes. She wanted all homes to have a cooee corner filled with her knick-knacks, including a cuckoo clock with a spear-carrying Aborigine emerging to ''cooee'' the time.

She did quite nicely from her enterprise. But she went too far, registering ''cooee'' as a trademark, patenting jewellery designs and copyrighting songs. She felt she owned the cooee. When the Heidelberg district volunteers' farewell social committee struck cooee medallions in 1916 she demanded royalties...

Read more from cultural historians Richard White and Melissa Harper on how national emblems can be a handy marketing prop, a means of identifying one's heritage - and a cause of impassioned debate!

Christianity in Australia - the bare essentials?

2010-01-19T22:01:00.005+11:00

Well, its just been confirmed. In case I didn't already have enough to do, I'm going to be teaching a new survey course on the history of Christianity in Australia course at Wesley Institute this semester. I'm excited by the opportunity to put together my own course for the first time, but a bit daunted by the work involved (especially given my other projects).

Anyway, here's the briefest of outlines. Is there anything you think I really should cover that I haven't made room for? Would would you like a course on the hsitory of chirstianity in Australia to explore? Suggestions and comments very welcome!

Introduction (week 1): Religious background to 1788

Unit one (weeks 2 to 5): Faith and colonial foundations
- colonising the country
- convicts and chaplains
- mission to Aborigines
- sectarianism in colonial society

Unit two (weeks 6 to 9): Church and nation
- legislating morals
- religion and federal politics
- Christians and the first world war
- charity and the challenges of the Depression

Unit three: (weeks 10 to 12): Christianity in contemporary Australia
- world war two and post-war migration
- unity and adversity
- seeking justice

Course conclusion (week 13): is Australia a Christian nation today?

Pic: the old church at Silverton, NSW

Summer fun

2010-01-06T14:38:00.005+11:00

The beach is for grumps...

... but the baby pool is lots of fun.

Jemima was rightly worried by the score during Australia's second innings yesterday.

Resolutions

2010-01-02T10:25:00.007+11:00

I have two new year's resolutions.

The first is to run the City to Surf this August. I quite enjoy running - and even got into quite a routine with it in the months leading up to the completion of my PhD, and again after Jemima's birth. But I've never been in any kind of fun run before, or run anything like as far as 14 kilometres. It will take some real training - which, of course, I intend to start 'later.'

My second resolution is to read Moby Dick. It's been on my list for a while and I think 2010 is the year for it. But perhaps there is a darker flipside to this one - if I read something huge like Moby Dick, there's no way I will have time to even think about reading parenting books.

Adele Horin has a great article in today's paper that says what I've been suspecting for a while: Despite the gurus, there is no instruction manual for parents.

Jemima isn't quite eight months old, but its amazing how much conflicting advice and suggestions has been stirred up at each of her new stages. Should you breastfeed them on demand, or at certain intervals? When should you introduce solid food and what should you allow them to eat? Is controlled crying ok or something from the devil?

So far, we've found ourselves adhereing to the 'whatever works' school of parenting. This means we more or less let Jemima eat whatever she likes of what we're having. It means we pick her up every time she crys. It means I still feed her quite often (like, 7 times a day). And it means that we rock her to sleep in our arms in the evenings as well as during the day. We don't really have a daily routine, but just try and go about our lives.

I find it stressful, sometimes, to be constantly making decisions about what is the best thing to do for her, at any given moment of the day. And I wonder how sustainable what we are doing actually is - i mean, Jemima's getting heavy and we won't be able to rock her to sleep in our arms forever! I often want someone to just tell me what to do.

So far, though, I've refrained from reading parenting books. Not because I think I know (I know I don't!) And not because I never will in future (the day will no doubt come when I have the time and inclination to do a bit of research relating to my prime occupation!) But since the baby hasn't read the books either, as my own mum says, I figure its ok to just amble through the early stages trying to figure out what suits my particular kid.

Thanks, Adele Horin, for your insight and for making me feel a bit better about this!

2009 in review: personal

2009-12-27T14:41:00.007+11:00

It's been a big year for me, in personal terms. In February, St Stephen's Newtown sent me and a bunch of others to start a new, low-key gathering that's become known as Cottage Church. As autumn descended, Joel and I moved down the hill from Newtown to Camperdown. He took up rugby again, and I made my first foray into community gardening. In June, I finally graduated with my PhD in Australian colonial history - five and a half years after I first began writing! In august, I put my hand up to help out with the Evangelical History Association. And through pretty much the whole year I've tried to plough on with writing (journal articles, bibles talks for the cottage and, of course, the book on history of the Christian NGO, Hammond Care).

It wont surprise you that the hands-down highlight was becoming a parent in May. Since we welcomed Jemima to the world, we've watched her grown and change incredibly. When we first met her, she could suckle - and that was basically it. In just seven months, she's more than doubled in weight, grown about 30 percent in height, and learned a million new things. She's learned to smile, to recognise her family, to wave, to babble, to blow rasberries, to pick things up, to pass things from hand to hand, to give sloppy kisses, to chew, to feed herself finger-food, to say 'yum yum,' 'dad dad' and 'mum mum', to roll, to sit, to stand, to crawl, and even to take steps while holding our fingers. She is a great delight to us, one for whom we praise God.

Best wishes for a happy new year - and thanks for reading.

2009 in review: movies

2009-12-12T15:22:00.005+11:00

... And now for the films I watched this year (mainly on DVD), in the order that I most enjoyed them:

1. Doubt - an utterly absorbing film about suggestion and certainty, with a searing script brought to life by two of my favourite actors, Philllip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Riveting. In my opinion, the priest didn't do it. But then, I know others who concluded very differently.

2. Mary and Max - a wonderful claymation that ultiamtely succeeds because of the strength of its characters. A moving tale about loneliness and friendship well worth seeing.

3. Out of Africa - I watched this classic for the first time during the early stages of my labour, and didn't actually get to see the end until Jemima and I had come home from hospital! I suspect it will always have a special place with me :-)

4. Tulpan - this is a Kazakh film about a sheep herder who wants to find a wife. The problem is, there is only one girl on the steppe within a day's drive of his yurt, and she doesn't like him! A bit slow-moving, but at times a beautiful and extraordinary film.

5. Slumdog Millionaire - I found this a disturbing film, behind the facade of a feel-good story.

6. Rachel Getting Married - Anne Hathaway plays the screwball sister really well, and there are enough laughs to offset the tension of the harrowing family discussions.

7. In Bruges - another highly enjoyable dark comedy, but just a little too violent for me to start raving about it to everybody.

8. The Dark Knight - another excellent film that I found a bit scary! I know, I'm a wimp. But I'm still sad about Heath Ledger dying, so I had to see it.

9. Walk the Line

10. Wall-E

11. Up!

12. About a Boy

13. Kung Fu Panda

14. Romulus, my Father

15. America Beauty

2009 in review: books

2009-12-07T09:12:00.007+11:00

2009 has been a good year for me, bookwise. One reason is that I've been part of a really fun book club, which has not only kept me reading but ensured I've encountered new titles and authors. A second reason is that Joel and I have unlimited access to our friend and landlord's personal library. Byron and Jess sure left a wonderful array of novels for us to choose from!

So anyway, here's a list of the books I read over this last year, in the order that I most enjoyed reading them:

1. An Imaginary Life - David Malouf

2. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

3. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

4. Breath - Tim Winton

5. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemmingway

6. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

7. The Spare Room - Helen Garner

8. The Road - Cormac McCathy

9. Eucalyptus - Murray Bail

10. Wanting - Richard Flanagan

11. Notes from the Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

12. At the Waters Edge - Pradeep Jeganathan

13. I, Robot - Isaac Asimov

14. Rules of Attraction - Bret Easton Ellis

Any suggestions for what to read over 2010?

The immorality of inaction

2009-12-01T20:28:00.003+11:00

'The poorest nations are the most vulnerable to climate change, and unlike us do not have the wealth to adapt to the changes already occurring... Australians live by an ethic of ''do what you like if you do not hurt anyone else''. Well, our Western lifestyles - without a price on carbon - are hurting others. This, in its essence, is the moral case for action.'

- Tim Costello, Our carbon footprint already treads on the most vulnerable, SMH 1 December

The stories behind the myths...

2009-12-01T19:48:00.009+11:00

How did the kangaroo transform from a bizarre curiosity to an internationally recognised symbol of Australia? How did Vegemite, a waste product of beer, come to be the most popular spread in the country? How did the Opera House survive early controversy to become a national symbol equal to the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal? And does the pavlova belong to Australia or New Zealand? Australia is a land of symbols.

From the curious, the folkloric, the official, the ancient, the inspiring, the commercial, the lovable, the feared, even the edible, these symbols make the abstract concept of the nation tangible and give us an identity by representing Australia to itself and the world. But how are national symbols created? What makes them popular? Do they unite or divide the nation? And what do they really mean?

Symbols of Australia uncovers the stories behind Australia’s best-loved symbols. Entertaining, provocative and often surprising, it proves that while some may seem quirky or frivolous and others get taken for granted, they all have significance that goes beyond the surface.

I'm looking forward to reading this book. Edited by Richard White and Melissa Harper, and featuring a number of distinguished contributors, it has chapters on the boomerang, the cooee, the map, vegemite, the baggy green, the lifesaver, the flag and the southern cross - among many other things!

Climate change: Just a flesh wound?

2009-11-27T11:49:00.005+11:00

The Emissions Trading Scheme bill has stirred up a lot of debate in parliament recently - and not only about climate change (just ask a Liberal!) The situation isn't funny - I mean, what ARE we going to do, as a country, about climate change?

Still, I was glad of this little joke by Independent senator Nick Xenophon: he said Mr Turnbull reminded him of the Monty Python character the black knight, who has lost both arms, both legs and has blood spurting everywhere. "And he says it's just a flesh wound. That's what he reminds me of," he told reporters last night. (The full article is here).

Time will tell whether Turnbull has a future as leader of the Liberals - whether the environment will finally divide the most conservative elements of the party from their colleagues. I just hope that those politicians remember that time isn't on the side of the environment!

On trusting God in parenting

2009-11-25T14:10:00.003+11:00

I've just finished reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead for my book club. Its main character, John Ames, is an old and dying pastor, who writes a long letter about life and faith and family to his young son. One of several passages that really stood out to me reflected on the story of Hagar and Ishmael, and the lessons of Abraham's experience for parenting:

Abraham is in effect called upon to sacrifice both his sons [Ishmael and Isaac], and the Lord in both instances sends angels to intervene at the critical moment to save the child. Abraham's extreme old age is an important element in both stories, not only because he can hardly hope for more children, not only because the children of old age are unspeakably precious, but also, I think, because any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents' love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness. (p.146-7)

That passage reminded me of something Dad said to me in the days before he died: 'remember your heavenly Father loves you even more than I do.' It was a great gift of a trusting father to a grieving child. I hope I can pass on the same knowledge to my child too.

Pic: Jemima at six months

The Southern Cross: a racist symbol of the nation?

2009-11-15T15:18:00.007+11:00

An interesting article from today's Sydney Morning Herald reflects on the Southern Cross as a national symbol. Is it beautiful of racist? Transcendant or politically captive? And has it become our default national symbol? (I wonder what people from New Zealand might have to say about that!) Pic: the Eureka flag

Berlin wall anniversary

2009-11-10T16:28:00.007+11:00

There have been several interesting articles in recent days, prompted by the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.

This one reports on a massive worldwide poll of people's attitudes to capitalism - and their clear verdict that it's not working. Conducted by the BBC World Service with Maryland University, and combining responses from people in 27 different countries, it found that only in the United States (25 percent) and Pakistan (21 percent), did more than one in five people agree that capitalism works well in its current form. (For some more interesting reflections on capitalism, see Richard Glover's reflections on the new film from Michael Moore).

This one notes that French President Sarkozy has posted a picture of himself on facebook - chipping away at the wall.

Joel and I visited Berlin a couple of years ago now. I loved the city. My thoughts on it are contained in the following posts:

Place and history in Berlin part one, part two, part three
The Berlin Jewish museum

Sadly I don't have personal memories of hearing about the wall coming down (though I was well and truly old enough at the time). Do you? I'd be very interested to hear them...

Boat people: a challenge to Australian sovereignty?

2009-11-03T07:43:00.004+11:00

What is it about asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat that excites such an outcry in this country?

I mean, every time there's a refugee boat spotted in the water, the media goes beserk, our political leaders start grandstanding, and parliament drops other issues in order to devote time and energy in question time to discussing it.

I'd be surprised if most Australians fear boat arrivals as a security risk. I don't think the general population considers them terrorists, or in some way politically dangerous.

Perhaps there is some concern about boat arrivals posing an economic threat. Perhaps there are some people out there, especially in financially challenging times, who fear that boat arrivals will somehow take 'Australian' jobs. It's an old argument (advanced, for example, by the labour movement as a good reason for establishing a 'white australia' immigration policy) - but it doesn't really make sense, not least because boat arrivals represent such a small proportion of people seeking asylum in Australia.

The main issue is probably to do with sovereignty. Australians don't like other peole seeking to enter the country by boat because it looks and feels like a challenge to our national sovereignty. John Howard certainly read the public mood this way at the time of the Tampa episode in 2001:

'We have an absolute right to decide who comes to this country. And there is a concern inside the Government, and I suspect in the broader community, that we are fast reaching a stage where we are losing that right because of the increasing numbers of people, illegal immigrants, who are coming to Australia.'*

I actually agree with Howard's assertion that its the government's prerogative to determine who does and doesn't enter the country. Border control is part and parcel of what national sovereignty involves.

The problem is not with the 'absolute right' of states to control their borders. It is, perhaps, with the very notion of nation states and the idea of national borders. I don't imagine that this way of arranging human communities is doing to dissolve or be replaced anytime soon, but perhaps a borderless gloabl society in which people are free to move wherever they like is, in the end, the only just and equitable means of inhabiting the planet.

I don't mean to shock you, but I also agree with Howard's suggestion that Australians freak out about boat arrivals because they seem a threat to Australian's right to control its borders. I think he's dead wrong in suggesting that such people are actually a threat to the country, and i think he's dead wrong to label them 'illegal immigrants'. And, for the record, I was appalled by his government's response to the issue, and am thoroughly disappointed by the present government's decision to not only retain but enlarge the policy of dentention.

But I suspect Howard's correct that, for many people, the issue is one of sovereignty. After all, boat arrivals and contests over soveriegnty have a long-established relationship in Australian history. It's not a new point to make, but settler Australians asserted their soveriegnty over the land in part by jumping of boats and setting about making a home for themselves here. Perhaps some unconscious disquiet over the security, morality - even the legality - of white Australians' historical claim to sovereignty is what makes boat arrivals such a potent issue today. We need to get over it by changing at least two things:

the terms of our relationship with the Aboriginal people of the land (saying 'sorry' was a start, but does not constitute an end)

adopting a more open position on 'border control' (at the very least by giving boat arrivals a forum in which to make their claims for asylum, and appropriate physical, emotional and legal support while they do so).

* Source: 7.30 report

A home for the persecuted and the poor?

2009-11-02T13:57:00.007+11:00

From Amnesty International Australia:

So-called 'boat people' make up less than four per cent of those who come to Australia seeking asylum, yet never fail to generate an astonishing political and media storm.

Here are some facts:

more than 96 per cent of asylum seekers arriving in Australia step off planes, not boats.

the vast majority of boat arrivals are typically found to be genuine refugees – those fleeing for their lives and safety, not simply seeking better lives in wealthier nations.

asylum seekers are not, as the Prime Minister wrongly stated, "illegal immigrants": they are exercising the right to seek asylum under international law.

Yet right now our Government is actually considering paying Indonesia, a country which has not signed the UN Convention on Refugees, to swoop in on people desperately seeking refuge in Australia before we’ve even had a chance to hear their claims.

Ensuring the right to seek asylum is the entire reason the Refugee Convention was created in the first place, in the aftermath of Jewish persecution and genocide during World War II.

The reality is that, no matter how politically inconvenient, no government of Australia can simply wish away the victims of war, abuse and conflict. Nor should any government congratulate itself for offloading some of the world’s most vulnerable and traumatised people onto other countries.

If you want to urge our government to take a different approach, and to rise above the politics of fear, then please contact the Prime Minister:

Kevin.Rudd@aph.gov.au

The Hon. Kevin Rudd
PO Box 6022
House of Representatives
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600

Pic: Tamil asylum seekers aboard a boat intercepted by the Indonesian Navy, October 16 2009.

The uses of history

2009-11-01T10:19:00.004+11:00

Call me a nerd, but I'm excited about the upcoming workshop on Welfare History, to be held at UNSW in February next year. The program features a special plenary session on social welfare history in the 21st century - involving three of the founding Australian scholars in the field: Professor Stephen Garton, Professor Jill Roe and Professor Brian Dickey. Should be really interesting!

Anyway, I've proposed a little paper titled 'the uses of history' - which will examine the stories that a faith-based welfare provider, Hammond Care, has told about itself over the course of its history.

Established as a land settlement scheme for unemployed men and their families during the Great Depression, Hammond Care reinvented itself as an aged accommodation provider in the 1950s. In recent decades it has expanded its services into the community and prioritised the care of people with dementia as well as the financially disadvantaged. In 2007, its seventy fifth year, its CEO proudly declared that ‘while the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ might have changed, the ‘who’ of Hammond Care stays the same: it remains, as in 1932, an independent Christian charity.’

From very early in its history, Hammond Care’s leaders have looked to the organisation’s past to clarify its identity and meet particular present needs. As early as the 1930s, they pointed to the past to stimulate donations. As they ventured into aged care, they appealed to the organisation’s beginnings to justify innovation and claim the initiative in their dealings with increasingly interventionist governments. In more recent times, as politicians have critically re-evaluated the status of faith-based welfare providers, Hammond Care’s leaders have used history to emphasise the organisation’s Christian values and character. And as market models of welfare provision have reshaped the third sector, Hammond Care has mined its past for stories that differentiate it from competitors and help establish a particular market identity. In short, its changing uses of history provide a new perspective on some of the major shifts in welfare provision over the course of the twentieth century.

What I'm...

2009-10-30T14:25:00.009+11:00

Listening to: Townsville by the Necks - one track, three instruments, 53 minutes. A gift of my coolest brother, Jono the composer.

Reading: The Spare Room by Helen Garner, an honest and beautifully written novel about the strains that terminal cancer places on the friendship between two older women. And Growl, by Judy Horacek, about a female monster who initially gets in trouble but is eventually redeemed by living up to her name.

Buying: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, the next book on the table for my bookclub. Don't know anything much about it, except that it won the Pulitzer and Richard Glover suspects its the best book he's ever read. Also, a portable baby highchair - my first purchase from eBay.

Playing: peekaboo!

Eating: bangers and mash for dinner tonight, with fresh corn and buttery green beans.

Organising: a day conference on Christianity and History for July 2010.

Writing: a talk for cottage church on Jesus' statement 'I am the Light of the World'. What did he mean??

Experimenting with: introducing solid food to a baby. Three days in, Jem is getting the hang of being fed with a spoon. The menu has only one item at the moment: home-made organic brown rice cereal mixed with breast milk. No, it doesn't really taste very nice. But we'll try avocado and banana in the next few days.

Stressing about: getting the Hammond Care history written!! And getting Jemima and her stuff onto the train to Nowra next tuesday, so I can visit the fam while Joel is HSC marking.

Pic: the Necks, from nme.com

Faith in crisis

2009-10-24T15:50:00.008+11:00

This weekend's job is to finalise an article that's been accepted by the Australian Journal of Politics and History. I did the research for it yonks ago (ie for my honours thesis in 2003!) It's been interesting to revisit this stuff, though, especially in light of Renate Howe's new book A Century of Influence: the Australian Student Christian Movement 1896 - 1996, (UNSW Press, 2009). Anyway, here my abstract...

'Faith in Crisis: Christian University Students in Peace and War' examines religious belief and political activism among Sydney undergraduates during the 1930s and 1940s. Confronted with such major political issues as the peace movement, the eruption of world war and the question of post-war reconstruction, a substantial number of students looked for solutions informed by faith.

The history of two influential campus groups, the Student Christian Movement and the Evangelical Union, reveals that political activity was often shaped by particular religious views. The SCM’s openness to theological liberalism and biblical criticism was accompanied by a willingness to grapple with political issues and question the capitalist structures of society. The theologically conservative EU eschewed political engagement in favour of defending the fundamentals of Christian belief and calling individuals to conversion. The religious differences between these two groups help explain their members’ contrasting responses to peace and war during the second quarter of the twentieth century. They also illuminate Christianity’s complex and significant contribution to political thought and action at Australia’s first university.

Is God a hacker?

2009-10-21T14:05:00.003+11:00

Is God a hacker? I suspect not - though perhaps some of his followers may (unwisely) prove to be. A sad tale of fundamentalism on both sides.

more on theological temperament

2009-10-20T11:47:00.006+11:00

The idea of a harsh land leading to a harsh view of the Christian God is central to the vision of nationalist historians like Russel Ward and especially Manning Clark. For Clark, life in the bush exposed the irrelevance of 'old world' ideas and beliefs. The new nation didn't need the empire. It didn't need the Church of England. And it certainly didn't need prudish preachers with wowserish morality. In Clark's view, what the new nation needed was a new idea of God. It needed a new fusion of the image of Christ with the enlightenment idea of the brotherhood of men. Australians needed Jesus as a mate, not as a miracle-working, body-raising God.

Interestingly, Henry Lawson (whom Clark deeply admired) was one of a number of writers to articulate the idea that Jesus was the bushman's mate. Here are the first two stanzas of his 1898 poem 'Christ of the Never':

WITH eyes that seem shrunken to pierce
To the awful horizons of land,
Through the haze of hot days, and the fierce
White heat-waves that flow on the sand;
Through the Never Land westward and nor’ward,
Bronzed, bearded and gaunt on the track,
Quiet-voiced and hard-knuckled, rides forward
The Christ of the Outer Out-back.

For the cause that will ne’er be relinquished
Spite of all the great cynics on earth—
In the ranks of the bush undistinguished
By manner or dress—if by birth—
God’s preacher, of churches unheeded—
God’s vineyard, though barren the sod—
Plain spokesman where spokesman is needed—
Rough link ’twixt the bushman and God.

This is interesting to me because it suggests that Lawson saw a positive place for Jesus in Australian life and culture. For Lawson, the bush and the experiences of the bushmen gave shape to an idea of Jesus as a mate. There was no need for churches or their preachers - the bush itself helped men connect authentically with God. Perhaps we might say that Lawson describes an Australian theological temperament saturated with ordinariness and egalitarianism - and, I might add, masculinism.

Pic: from www.todonaiart.com/blog/

an Australian theological temperament?

2009-10-18T08:16:00.006+11:00

Do Australians have a distinctive theological temperament? Has the national landscape fostered particular notions of God? How might Christianity be different in this country to other parts of the world?

As a few readers commented, these questions swirl just below the surface of the passage quoted below from Tim Winton's Breath. The discussion reminded me of Manning Clark's answer to such questions, from vol.3 of his History of Australia. Writing of the early pastoral workers, he said:

To the town dweller they spoke like men who had forgotten their mother tongue and adopted that of the devil in its stead. The native-born in the bush inherited the habit of talking in oaths and imprecations. Some said that the dryness and the hot winds of summer in the inland aggravated this habit by inducing a degree of irritability of temper which found relief in cursing and swearing, tormenting other human beings and mocking the whole of creation as a cruel joke...

Some assuaged loneliness by improvising music on a gum-leaf, and some were sustained by the thought of what they would do when next they visited the grog shop; some became as mad as hatters, but few turned to God for consolation or were carried away by the ranting of a revivalist preacher, for there was no 'bible belt' in the bush of Australia.

The monotony, the harshness and the loneliness were broken from time to time by a visit from the head station, or the arrival of travelling stockmen. Each traveller ... rolled himself for the night in a blanket or possum's cloak, using his saddle as a pillow, and slept under the canopy of heaven. This sensation of absolute freedom, when united with the wonder and mystery of the night, and that exhilaration of the body washed clean in some mountain stream, induced a sense of well-being, a sense of the majesty of life. It was as though life in the wilds of Australia cleansed a man from Adam's stain...

In their private lives they behaved in ways that offended the self-appointed defenders and promoters of the faiths of the Old World. Unaware of what was beginning to take root in the minds of these men, unaware that in these men a new vision of the world was replacing the worn-out faiths of europe, unaware of the powerful charm these men had found in their free and wandering state under the sunny skies and clear moonlight nights down on the Monaro or up on the Darling Downs or out ont he plains of Australia Felix, the masters deplored the way of life of itinerant workers...' (vol.3 pp.273, 275)

Clark, I think, got rather carried away with his own romantic ideas. He and other radical nationalist historians of the time (such as Russel Ward, most famously,) saw the bush as a profoundly influential environment shaping the spiritual outlook of its white inhabitants. The bush workers, in turn, helped create the culture of the nation: according to Clark and Ward, they were the archetypal Australians whose culture and values eventually shaped those of the urban population.

In this view, the harshness of the pastoral frontier helps explain the apparent godlessness of settler Australians. Those who still cling to 'the worn out faiths of Europe', furthermore, are distinctly unAustralian. The only authentic spirituality is a place-based one - and for Clark, this excluded the kind of Christianity introduced here from Britain.

pic: Albert Tucker (1914 - 1999) The Metamorphosis of Ned Kelly

Tim Winton on faith and place

2009-10-13T18:14:00.009+11:00

While on holidays I read this - and am really looking forward to talking about it at my bookclub. I thought it was very beautiful, though at times deeply disturbing. I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on it.

One passage that stood out to me compared the religious character and landscape of North America with that of Australia:

'On TV Americans were so soft and sentimental, all happy-go-lucky and forever safely at home. But the way Eva told it, her countrymen were restless, nomadic, clogging freeways and airports in their fevered search for action. she said they were driven by ambition in a way that no Australian could possibly understand. They wanted fresh angles, better service, perfect mobility. I tried to picture what she meant. She made her own people sound vicious. Yet God was in everything - all the talk, all the music, even ont heir money. Ambition, she said. Aspiration and mortal anxiety.

'It was hard to negotiate the tangled cross-currents of pride and disgust in Eva's rambling account, but it gave me plenty to think about. Here in Sawyer people seemed settled - rusted on, in fact. They liked to be ordinary. They were uncomfortable with ambition and avoided any kind of unpredictability or risk. There was a certain muted grandeur in our landscape but it seemed that power and destiny did not adhere to bare plains and dank forest. There were no mighty canyons and mile-wide rivers here. Without soaring peaks and snow, angels seemed unlikely and God barely possible' (p168).

I wonder ... do you think Winton is right? Is God barely possible in a land like Australia? Or perhaps just the Americans' God?
And for those who've read the book ... do you think the main character, Pikelet, is unAustralian to the extent that he rejects ordinariness for extreme experiences? Hmmm...

Is Jesus a greenie? (5)

2009-10-04T21:51:00.005+11:00

To sum up the discussion so far - if the environment was God’s idea, if Jesus was the original greenie, what difference does it make to how we might relate to the environment? I think it means we’d be wise to listen to him about how to treat the earth. It means that caring for creation is our special responsibility.

In doing this, though, we shouldn’t make the mistake of treating the environment as more than it is: we shouldn’t worship creation in place of the creator.

Nor should we make the opposite mistake of treating the environment as less than it is: we shouldn’t act like God doesn’t care, or as if the earth just there to be exploited to satisfy our wants, our selfishness, our greed.

Avoiding these two mistakes and caring for creation as we adapt it to meet our legitimate needs - I think that’s how, in the beginning, God wanted us to be greenies.

One last thought before I take a break and head up north for a little holiday.

Both the bible and human history tell us that we’ve dropped the ball on this one. We’ve failed to be true greenies. I don’t need to rehearse the details of climate change and the alarming state of our environment today. It's pretty obvious that people - individually and collectively - have been pretty hopeless at looking after the earth. In fact, we’ve been pretty hopeless at taking God’s advice on how to live generally. According to Genesis chapter three, the first humans got it wrong pretty much from day one. I’m sure you know the story. Adam and Eve doubted God’s word to them in Eden. They ate the forbidden fruit in a bid for divinity. And as a result, they wrecked their relationship with God, their relationship with each other, and their relationship with the earth.

I suspect we make the same mistakes ourselves. We usually ignore God’s advice on how to live. We fail to show perfect love for one another. And our use of the natural environment is often exploitative, characterized by selfishness and greed. As verse 17 says, ‘cursed is the ground because of you.’ I think we’re in a major mess with God and the planet. I doubt we’re even capable, any more, of caring responsibly for the environment and being the kind of greenies God originally made us to be.

pic: Shelley beach, Yaraygir national park NSW

Jemima - nearly five months already!

2009-10-01T20:38:00.004+10:00

Cottage update

2009-09-29T16:13:00.007+10:00

People have been asking me a bit recently how our little cottage gathering on Sunday afternoons is going. The idea was to have a very low-key kind of church meeting that offers people plenty of time to talk and get to know one another, as well as opportunity to think out aloud and express their thoughts and ideas on issues of spirituality. We wanted the meeting to be welcoming to all kinds of newtown people, and its content and culture to be accessible to locals without a Christian background. We wanted to establish a community that shares food, friendship and faith - and to invite our friends and neighbours to journey with us in working out what it might mean to follow Jesus.

Nine months in, I think its fair to say that we've found some things pretty challenging. We've settled on a basic program:

We have afternoon tea from about 4.30 - Dan serves up lovely coffee with latte art as good as any barista's!

around 5-ish we settle into our seats around tables under the big old fig, and get into the more structured part of the meeting. This has three core elements: a sharing time, in which someone talks or responds to interview questions about how God is working in their lives; a bible time, in which someone gives some prepared reflections on a passage and we all discuss related issues and questions; and lastly a time of prayer.

by then its usually a bit after 6pm, the sun has dipped below the horizon, and we linger in the half-light over a home-cooked dinner together.

Most weeks i think we get close to the kind of vibe we had initially envisaged. It's been hard, though, to do the bible part of the meeting well. Some of us have over-prepared and presented something much too much like a sermon. Others of us have left things so open that the discussion has been too general to be challenging. We've also realised that we've often lacked the basic skills to prepare helpful comments on a theme or bible passage. But at the same time, we've learned a lot as we've had a crack at it.

In terms of community, I think things are going pretty well. The cake pictured was one I baked to share with another cottage member, and a friend of hers who is interested in Australian history. We are getting better at sharing our lives with one another, at making time to hang out other than on Sundays. We're also getting better at sharing our lives with other Newtown locals - by gardening, for example.

How will things turn out? None of us know the answer. We're still trying to work out how to go about things on a Sunday, how to shed as much of our church culture as we can without shedding our identity as Christ-followers. We need love, wisdom and patience as we work through the issues together.

Is Jesus a greenie? (4)

2009-09-24T08:49:00.006+10:00

One reason I am not a pantheist is that the environment was God's idea. He made it, and us. Or as Colossians puts it, Jesus brought everything into being. The natural environment, like us, is not divine but creaturely.

Last episode I suggested that one implication of this is that we should listen to the Creator on how to treat the creation. The beginning of Genesis - and particularly those famous words about filling and subduing the earth, working the ground and caring for it - offers some clues on this. Specifically, it says that God has given humanity a special responsibility for the rest of creation. People aren't like other living things. We aren’t just another bunch of complex organisms making up the ecosystem. Under God, humans have a special role to play.

I think this means several things for our relationship with the environment:

1. Looking after the earth is inescapably part of what it means to be people.

We as people have been created by God to thrive in a thriving environment. We’ve been given a special responsibility, by the creator, for the care of the rest of creation. Environmentalism, in that sense, is not a trendy cause or an optional extra. It’s a fundamental part of our humanity.

2. It’s ok for us to adapt the environment to meet our needs.

The Genesis the story also means that ‘untouched wilderness’ is not necessarily God’s environmental ideal. We have permission - even encouragement - from the creator to have an impact on the rest of creation. The natural environment is not something for us to just preserve untouched in a museum. Environmentalism doesn’t mean leaving everything alone completely. Now don‘t get me wrong - I’m definitely not saying we should set off with our chainsaws and bulldozers to flatten every last bit of wilderness there is. But in light of Genesis, I think its right and good for us to cultivate the ground, to harvest food from it, to change our surroundings to meet our physical (and perhaps our social and cultural?) needs.

3. We are responsible - to God - for the care of the natural environment.

This is the flipside, or the limit, to our freedom to adapt our surrounds to meet our needs. We are to fill and subdue the earth, but we are not allowed to just do whatever we want to it. For example, we aren’t to use the earth in ways that deprive others from drawing sustenance from it. We aren’t to exploit the earth to satisfy our baseless wants or greed. Rather, we are to take care of the environment - we are to look after it as its creator, our creator, originally intended.

Pic: my father in law on Mt Ossa, Tasmania [JM]

Dust to dust

2009-09-23T10:06:00.004+10:00

I was up around dawn this morning, and outside everything was enveloped with an opaque, dark red. The sky gradually grew lighter and the colour changed to white, but even now the buildings are hard to make out. A film of red dust covers everything.

It reminds me of the opening scene of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, the novel my bookclub last read:

'With the first grey light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless...

'When it was light enough to use binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk...

Pic: King St, Newtown, earlier this morning. (Source: ABC News)

Is Jesus a greenie? (3)

2009-09-21T07:11:00.007+10:00

If Jesus is the original greenie, what might that mean for us and how we relate to creation? I mean, how does it matter that the environment was his idea? Should it make a difference to us that, in the beginning, God made an earth that was good and thriving?

Again, opening up the Bible can help us think about these things. There are clues around the end of chapter one in Genesis:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so.
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. (Gen 1:26-31)

Genesis chapter two recaps the story in different words:

The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being ... The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Gen 2: 6, 15)

Two big themes stand out to me from all this. One is that

God made us, like he made everything.

In a sense there are basically only two types of things - creatures and creators, the maker and the things he makes. And according to Genesis, at least, its clear which one we are: we are not God, we are not creators but creatures. This has a couple of important implications.

(i) Because the environment was originally God’s idea, not ours, it makes sense for us to listen to God about how we should treat it. It makes sense, in other words, for our spirituality to inform our environmental values. Our beliefs about God should influence our environmental behavior.

(ii) The fact that we are creatures, rather than the creators, is also something we have in common with the rest of the earth. I think this means that we shouldn’t worship the environment as some kind of divinity - like us, it was brought into being by God, like us its creaturely. So we might admire the natural environment, and contemplating it might lift our hearts and minds to the divine - but to venerate or worship the environment itself would be a mistake. It’s the creator, not the creation, that we should worship. So let’s not get carried away and treat the environment as something more than it is...

Flygirl

2009-09-20T20:16:00.001+10:00

Is Jesus a greenie? (2)

2009-09-17T10:14:00.005+10:00

I've been suggesting that yes, Jesus is a greenie not least because he was the original greenie. The New Testament letter of Colossians describes him as the one through whom, by whom and for whom creation was brought into being. There’s a fuller account of this - and perhaps a more familiar one - in the Old Testament book of Genesis.

Famously, the first verse says: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ Why? We aren’t told - perhaps God needed to satisfy the greatest creative urge in history! I suspect he made the environment because he wanted to. Because he was into it. The rest of that first chapter certainly gives the vibe that he was pretty stoked with it. It says:

God made the day and the night, the sky and the land - and saw that it was good (v10).

Then he made the plants and the trees - and saw that it was good (v12).

He made the sun, stars and moon - and saw that they were all good, too (v18).

And then he made the animals: the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and every living creature. He blessed them and told them to be fruitful and increase. And again we’re told that God looked around at creation - and saw that it was good. (v21, 25)

In the first chapter of Genesis, as in that verse from Colossians, we get a picture of an extravagantly creative God bringing the whole universe into existence. We get a picture of God as a very enthusiastic greenie. The environment was his idea. He wanted the earth and its creatures to thrive. He was really into creation as a good and beautiful thing. He was stoked about the environment he’d brought into being - and for that reason, I’d definitely say Jesus is a greenie!

pic: the first seedlings planted in the Cottage in the Graveyard Community Garden.

Go mums

2009-09-15T15:02:00.008+10:00

I think this is great!

Pics of Kim Clijsters with the US Open trophy from telegraph.co.uk and dailymail.co.uk

Is Jesus a greenie? (1)

2009-09-14T08:25:00.007+10:00

It's a while now since this blog featured an 'environment series', but over the next few weeks, my newtown cottage church will be thinking about 'green' things. The plan is to look at some key texts from the bible - in fact, to go on a quick tour of the whole biblical history of the environment, from the beginning in Genesis to the end in Revelation, with stop offs in the Psalms and the new testament book of Colossians in between!

Sound daunting, but really we’re just going to spend a few weeks chewing on two basic issues:
(i) God’s relationship his creation
(ii) ours in light of it.

Or to pose these issues as questions … we’re going to discuss ‘is Jesus a greenie?’ And ‘what difference might Jesus make to how we relate to the environment?’ In short, we’re going to consider the possible connections between environmental values and Christian spirituality.

I'm up to lead the first discussion, so I've been thinking recently about that first question - is Jesus a greenie? At this stage, I want to suggest the answer is yes. Its not just the long hair, kaftan and thongs - I reckon Jesus is really into the environment. Why do I think so? because Jesus has been green from the beginning - before recycling was cool, before climate change became a mainstream political issue, before being green was anything! Jesus is the original greenie in that he made the environment in the first place, he thought it was really good, and he wanted it to be a dynamic, thriving thing.

The New Testament book of Colossians, written by one of the first followers of Jesus as a letter to a bunch of early Christians, has some really strong words about Jesus’ relationship to creation:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. By him all things were created … all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together. (Col 1:15-17)

One thing we learn from this is that Jesus was there at the beginning. He brought everything into being. He has an intimate, creative relationship to the environment: on his own initiative and for his own reasons, he made the earth and everything! This is one reason why I think Jesus is the ultimate and original greenie.

Eucalyptus

2009-09-10T08:40:00.006+10:00

We could begin with desertorum, common name Hooked Mallee. Its leaf tapers into a slender hook, and is normally found in semi-arid parts of the interior.

But desertorum (to begin with) is only one of several hundred eucalypts; there is no precise number. And anyway the very word desert-or-um, harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there is a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origins in the bush, so it is said, the poetic virtues (can you believe it?) of being belted about by droughts, bushfires, smelly sheep and so on; and let's not forget the isolation, the exhausted shapeless women, the crude language, the always wide horizon, and the flies.

It is these circumstances which have been responsible for all those extremely dry (dun-coloured - can we say that?) hard-luck stories which have been told around fires and on the page. All that was once upon a time, interesting for a while, but largely irrelevant here...

So begins Murray Bail's Eucalytus. Joel just gave me a copy for my birthday, and i'm already entranced by its promise of wry reflection on Australia's landscape and identity...

pic: on the walk to triplet falls, great ocean road Victoria [ML]

Happy father's day Joel

2009-09-05T18:02:00.013+10:00

Have evangelicals stopped caring?

2009-09-01T07:57:00.005+10:00

Richard Glover asks why evangelicals in Australia today seem so unconcerned about the situation of Aboriginal people - especially given the passion of earlier evangelicals who spoke out strongly on the issue. Have Christians just stopped caring? If so, why? When did their indifference set in?

These are challenging questions, but I think it's worth remembering that nineteenth century evangelicals didn't exactly get it right, either. In fact, part of their problem (and ours?) is that they criticised the brutal ways in which Aboriginal people were treated by colonists, without being about to step entirely outside that colonial culture themselves. They spoke out against racial violence and the worst excesses of colonialism, but at the same time leant their support to the British occupation in Australia and - as Peter Adam recently stressed - benefitted directly from it.

John Dunmore Lang is a prime example of this. For decades he condemned the murder and mistreatment of Aboriginal people, and denounced colonial society for its injustice and violence. But at the same time he actively promoted the greater colonisation of the land by Britons. He expended a considerable sum of his own money in organising greater migration to both the Port Phillip and Moreton Bay regions, and promoted his schemes with biblical arguments. He argued that eastern Australia was a Promised Land which should be populated by virtuous Protestant small farmers, rather than by those greedy pastoralist types. The problem, as he saw it, wasn't so much that the British took the Aborigines' land, but that they failed to improve it either materially or morally.

Nineteenth century evangelicals like Lang thought that the British needed to colonise properly - Christianly - rather than just leave the Aborigines in the peaceful enjoyment of their territory. In light of this, Dr Adam's suggestion that we either leave or make recompense is all the more radical and challenging.

Searching for a national identity ... again

2009-08-26T06:59:00.006+10:00

Who the bloody hell are we?

The Sydney Morning Herald has very helpfully alerted me to Tourism's Australia's renewed efforts to identify - and thus promote - the essense of 'Australian.' The whole question of national identity is getting dragged up again, for another play in the sun as we um and ah about what it means to be Australian (and how to get cashed-up overseas visitors to come and have a look see at it!)

Does anyone else get a bit sick of all this?

I wonder if Australia's seemingly endless efforts to brand itself is also a side-effect of an over-attachment to the very idea of nation. Do we cling to the idea of an essential Australia because we are somehow unable to admit that its an invention and get on with really embracing diversity?

Or perhaps our felt need to label ourselves is just a matter of pithy marketing. A slogan sure helps in the advertising world. In which case, perhaps nationalism and national identity are sustained by commercial rather than a cultural or political forces these days? I'm not sure I find that reassuring!

Racial violence and other national sins

2009-08-25T08:24:00.010+10:00

In recent weeks, there has been renewed discussion* in both the secular and religious media of the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and more recent arrivals to this land. Stimulated by Dr Peter Adam's comments in the second annual John Saunders Lecture, entitled Australia - Whose Land?, it has centred on the question of how the beneficiaries of dispossession should relate to the dispossessed. Is it enough to say sorry? Should there be practical repentence - i.e. restitution - as well? And what does the Bible suggest that Australians Christians and their churches should do about all this?

I don't mean to try and answer these questions - but rather to add an historical note on these themes. John Saunders, the colonial Baptist minister from whom Dr Adam took his cue, readily expressed his concern about how the British treated Aborigines during the 1830s. But he was by no means the only colonial clergyman to do so. The comments of his contemporary, the Presbyterian leader John Dunmore Lang, are also well worth considering. In a sermon preached on 2 November 1838, a day appointed by the colonial Governor Gipps as a day of fasting and humiliation on account of the late calamitous drought, Lang said this:

'Now, my brethren, ...standing as we are in the immediate presence of God on this day of fasting and humiliation on account of our social and public, as well as our private and individual sins; let us ask ourselves seriously and in earnest, whether, as the European colonists of this territory, we can lay our hands upon our hearts, and plead not guilty concerning the Gibeonites, I mean the wretched Aboriginal inhabitants of this land? Alas! we are verily guilty concerning these our brethren; for not only have we despoiled them of their land, and given them in exchange European vice and European disease in every foul and fatal form, but the blood of hundreds, nay of thousands of their number, who have fallen from time to time in their native forests, when waging unequal warfare with their civilised aggressors, still stains the hands of many of the inhabitants of the land!..

If God visited the slaughter of the Gibeonites... on the whole house of Israel... much more then will the Lord avenge the blood of the wretched Aborigines of this territory, who have fallen unnecessarily before the progress of European colonisation, on the European inhabitants of this land! ... They are still bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh - formed originally after the image of God, like ourselves...We may rest assured, therefore, that these Gibeonites, so to speak, are especially under the divine protection...

Yes, brethern, every district of this land of our adoption has been defiled with the blood of these innocents; and who knows but it is for this that the Lord has been pleased, a second time, ‘to call drought upon the land…' If so, we have reason this day to humble ourselves mightily before the Lord our maker, as the sinful members of a sinful community.’ - John Dunmore Lang, National Sins the Cause & Precursors of National Judgements: A Sermon preached in the Scots Church, Sydney on Friday November 2, 1838, James Tegg, Sydney, 1838

Interestingly, the other 'national sins' for which Lang considered the drought a punishment were ‘injustice and oppression, on the part of the rich and powerful, towards the poorer classes of the community' - namely the convicts - and the proffanation of the Sabbath.

* See, for example, the Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Anglicans and blogs including Hebel and I woke up this morning with a frappacino in my hand...

Pic: Myall Creek massacre and memorial site.

Jemima today

2009-08-23T14:02:00.000+10:00

Eating for the environment

2009-08-12T12:49:00.004+10:00

The Newtown community gardeners are doing a spot of fundraising as we gear up for spring - so come along and buy a sausage and some yummy baked things! There'll also be live music, a bookstall, and other curiosities. It's a great way to support grassroots environmentalism.

Fine print: the Cottage in the Graveyard community garden is a joint project of St Stephen's Newtown and the local community.

2009-08-11T12:43:00.005+10:00

'We cannot conceive a heavier sentence on the Church of England than that she should be pronounced fitter and more congenial with the comfortable and rational, and well informed classes, than with the poor and needy, the simple and unlearned.' - Tractarian newspaper British Critic, October 1842

I came across this quote while reading about the social criticism of the Tractarian movement in England during the 1830s and 1840s. Although times have changed and so indeed has Anglicanism, this comment retains its sting. Are our churches too closely aligned with the cultures and values of the middle and upper classes?

The growth of the Anglicanism in the global south suggests that, in some places at least, the church has been very successful in appealing to individuals and groups with few material resources. Anglicanism has risen rapidly in the aftermath of European colonialism, and been embraced by many African and Asian peoples with a culture and history very different to England's.

In Australia, though, the Anglican church has historically struggled to attract and maintain the involvement of the lower classes. Convicts generally had little interest in the church, and tended to express their spiritual beliefs in other ways and arenas. I suspect that even today, the middle classes over-represented in the Anglican church. Anglican churches and communites may still struggle to adapt their activities and meetings to make them more accessible. I know that in Newtown, at least, its been quite a challenge for our cottage congregation to shed some of its educated, middle class trappings.

What is an evangelical?

2009-08-09T10:15:00.003+10:00

It's been quite a while since I last blogged about the definition of evangelicalism, but I've been reflecting on the question again recently. As I looked over the EHA's constitution the other I day I was interested to note the Association's definition. Full membership is open 'to all who are in agreement that:

The Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, the Christian's authoritative guide for faith and conduct, and

Jesus Christ is the Son of God and through his atonement is the mediator between God and humanity.'

It makes me wonder ... Are the beliefs listed here evangelical distinctives? Is evangelicalism adequately defined by content of belief? How does the above definition compare with more historicist answers to the question?

The Evangelical History Association

2009-08-06T17:57:00.002+10:00

Last Friday night, I was elected President of the Evangelical History Association. Before you fall over yourselves to congratulate me, though, note that there wasn't much competition. I was the only nomination for President and the position of Vice-President is still vacant!

The EHA has been around for just over twenty years. Its original purpose was:

To encourage evangelical Christian scholars to explore the relationship between their faith and historical studies;
To provide a forum for discussion of philosophies of history, to survey current scholarship, and to foster research perceived generally from the point of view of Evangelical Christianity; and
To establish more effective means of interaction among historians professing evangelical Christian faith and associated with tertiary institutions in Australia.

A strong and vibrant group during the late 1980s and 1990s, the EHA was instrumental in stimulating and disseminating historical research on evangelicalism in Australia. In recent years it has maintained a seminar series and issued an occassional journal, Lucas. However, its membership base has dwindled and the organisation has struggled to maintain its former energy. The founding generation of scholars (including Mark Hutchinson and Stuart Piggin) are keen to encourage the Association's reinvigoration and reinvention - by passing its leadership on to new people ... hence my election.

What exactly am I in for? I suspect its partly up to me!

Pic: detail from the Berlin wall [ML]

new tricks

2009-07-20T08:21:00.003+10:00

It's amazing how much fun a little kid can have standing up, then sitting down, then standing up, then....

At two months, Jemima

2009-07-08T14:12:00.007+10:00

... loves hanging with her mum

... already has attitude

... but gets away with it by flashing sweet smiles!

Climate change and poverty

2009-07-06T11:02:00.005+10:00

Suffering The Science, a report into the impact of climate change on people in poverty, is being published by Oxfam today. Most of the gains made by the world's poorest countries over the past half a century will be lost unless action is taken on climate change, it says. Up to 375 million people may be affected by climate-related disasters by 2015.

'Climate change is becoming quite rapidly the central issue to do with poverty today,' Oxfam Australia's chief, Andrew Hewett, has said. 'That also raises deep ethical dilemmas because the people least responsible for this crisis have the least resources to deal with it, and they are also those who are on the front line.'

Read more here and here.

Pic from http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/climatechange/about

A thing of extraordinary beauty

2009-06-29T16:16:00.004+10:00

My brother Jon is a composer and jazz musician. To mark Jemima's birth, he wrote her some extraordinarily beautiful, tender music. Close your eyes and have a listen.

Pic: their first meeting

Deity and History II

2009-06-28T15:20:00.007+10:00

'The view of the Bible current among many New Testament scholars and theologians is that ... it is not God's Word written, but that it is a record of God's revelation, in particular that it is a record of His revelation in Christ, who is supremely the Word of God. This view of the Bible suffers from many defects which render it untenable.' Broughton Knox, The Everlasting God (1982)

It seems to me that Knox is trying to have his cake and eat it too. Having insisted that the existence of personal Deity is made apparent by the Deity's self-revelation in history, he then argues against approaching the New Testament as anything other than the inspired Word of God, against reading it as mere history. He gives three reasons for his position:

Jesus considered the Scriptures to be divinely inspired, as God's past word to present readers, so we should too;

To see the Bible as anything less than God's Word written, is contrary to the Nicene Creed; and

To see the Bible merely as a record of God's Word 'prevents the Bible from doing its proper work in convicting the conscience and so moving the will of the reader to obedience.'

I suspect there are a few problems with Knox's reasoning here (e.g. surely the conviction of the conscience is the work of the spirit, not a function of the reader's attitude to scripture.) But what really stood out to me was his implicit about-face on the importance of history to Christianity.

If, as Knox claims, a personal deity has indeed revealed himself to humanity by a word or action that has entered into history - say, in the person of Jesus - then surely both Christians and other interested people need to approach the New Testament as history and interrogate the gospels as sources on Jesus. Can we actually come to a conclusion about whether or not Jesus is the revelation of God without any recourse to history? Can we only come to the view that Jesus is divine, with consequences for how we live our lives, if we first regard the Bible as divinely inspired? I am not convinced by Knox's suggestion that reading the New Testament as an historical record of God's Word (i.e. of Jesus), rather than as itself God's word, necessarily obstructs christian faith and discipleship.

In my view, interrogating the documents that comprise the New Testament as one would other historical sources is very worthwhile. They are the best sources we have for Jesus, and thus for investigating his mission and identity. Approaching the gospels as history may be an important step towards the conclusion that Jesus is indeed Emmanuel, God with us - and towards the view that his view of Scripture as God's past Word to the present is the appropriate view for us too.

Jemima at 6 weeks

2009-06-23T18:53:00.000+10:00

Deity and history

2009-06-18T18:05:00.007+10:00

'If deity not only exists but is personal, the possibility follows that deity may reveal itself to mankind. This possibility is inherent in personality. We ourselves, being persons, may take the initative and reveal ourselves to whom we will, soo, too with personal deity, it may reveal itself to whom it will... [And] Once deity has acted to reveal itself, then the event passes into history. From that moment on, it is an historical event which cannot be eliminated with the passage of time.' - Broughton Knox, The Everlasting God (1982).

This passage really stood out when I came across it this week. (The mothers' bible study group I've joined has just started reading Knox's book). It makes a lot of sense to me - because I adhere to an essentially historical religion. Christianity is centrally concerned with a particular person who lived in a specific place and time. It stands or falls on the life, death and resurrection of a first century Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. It is a religion that invites historical investigation.

Knox's comment made me wonder, though, about the limits of history as a discipline. Does it really give us sufficient tools to settle the general question of the existence and character of the divine? Is history as essential to the integrity or otherwise of non-Christian faith traditions? Perhaps not in cultures that do not conceive of time in a linear fashion, among peoples who do not record or recount their past in ways accessible. I suspect that, while Knox's approach applies well to Christianity, it is inadequate - or rather inappropriate? - for understanding and evaluating a belief system like the Aboriginal Dreaming. Hmm...

Australia: the film

2009-06-15T14:02:00.009+10:00

Just got word of this...

To mark a year since its premiere, the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University and the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia present

Baz Luhrmann's Australia Reviewed:

An interdisciplinary conference on history, film and popular culture

7 & 8 December 2009
National Museum of Australia, Canberra

'In his fabulous hyperbolic film Australia, Baz Luhrmann has leaped over the ruins of the “history wars” and given Australians a new past – a myth of national origin that is disturbing, thrilling, heartbreaking, hilarious and touching.' - Marcia Langton, 2008.

Arguably Luhrmann’s epic film Australia is the most ambitious, creative and expensive engagement with our nation’s past since the opening of the National Museum of Australia in 2001. Even though it is ostensibly a 1940s romance between the English aristocratic fish-out-of-water, Lady Sarah Ashley and the Drover, a quintessential Aussie bloke, the film engages with recent debates in Australia’s national history from the removal of Aboriginal children from their families to the bombing of Darwin. The backdrop to this mismatched romance is the contradictory racial frontier of northern Australia, where official segregation, casual and entrenched discrimination, and sexual and labour exploitation coincided with inter-racial friendships, illicit relationships and mixed-race children. Luhrmann’s engagement with our nation’s racial past is explicit; the film begins with a definition of the Stolen Generations, and concludes by commemorating Prime Minister Rudd’s 2008 apology.

The film’s release met with both praise and sharp criticism from film critics, politicians and other public commentators. This conference presents an opportunity for scholars to review and extend these initial debates on Luhrmann’s re-visioning of Australia’s past...

Themes and topics for papers may include, but are not limited to

Australia’s national and popular imaginings

- notions of genealogy and inheritance in national imaginings

- reconciliation narratives and shared histories

- land, sovereignty and questions of possession

- the idea of home and belonging

- sexuality and national imaginings

- images of race on the northern frontier

- selling Australia through Australia

Australia and histories

- histories of cattlemen and droving, including Aboriginal workers

- imperial connections and dynasties

- Aboriginal and Chinese labour on the frontier

- World War II, including the bombing of Darwin, the Japanese ‘threat’, and Aboriginal servicemen

- frontier violence and racism

- ‘mixed-relations’: inter-racial relationships and marriages

- Stolen Generations

- native title and dispossession

Australia’s borrowings and the language of film

- filmic references and histories, ie Wizard of Oz, Jedda etc

- histories and representations of Indigenous people in film

- melodrama and constructions of race

- cinematic representations of country and landscape

- material culture studies and film

- Australia and Australian literary influences

All sounds very interesting. Wonder if Germaine Greer will put a paper proposal in?! (My thoughts on the film are back here).

Jemima at five weeks

2009-06-11T11:01:00.002+10:00

Sorry, can't help myself from posting these!

J and the doctor

2009-06-06T08:44:00.005+10:00

Well, that's finally it. No more significant life events from me for a while now!

Imagining faith and place

2009-05-29T16:50:00.009+10:00

I’ve been on a steep learning curve these last few weeks as I’ve begun the adjustment to full-time parenting. My time is basically spent feeding Jemima, changing and washing her nappies and trying to catch up on sleep. Most days we also get out for a walk, and sometimes I’m even able to do some reading.

Our book club book this month was An Imaginary Life by David Malouf. It’s a beautifully written novel about the Roman poet Ovid, whose literary and perhaps personal indiscretions prompted Augustus to banish him to the fringe of the empire - the village Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. Historians don’t know much about the years Ovid spent there- but in reimagining it Malouf offers a very moving meditation on language and imagination, transformation and exile.

As I was reading aloud to Jemima the other day, I came across an intriguing passage on my favourite themes of religious faith and ideas about landscape:

'Do you think of Italy - or whatever land it is you now inhabit - as a place given you by the gods, ready-made in all its placid beauty? It is not. It is a created place. If the gods are with you there, glowing out of a tree in some pasture or shaking their spirit over the pebbles of a brook in clear sunlight, in wells, in springs, in a stone that marks the edge of your legal right over a hillside; if the gods are there, it is because you have discovered them there, drawn them up out of your soul’s need for them and dreamed them into the landscape to make it shine. They are with you, sure enough. Embrace the tree trunk and feel the spirit flow back into you, feel the warmth of the stone enter your body, lower yourself into the spring as into some liquid place of your body’s other life in sleep. But the spirits have to be recognized to become real. They are not outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it.'

The passage struck me for its elegance and for its suggestion of the power of 'dreaming.' Malouf seems to mean more here than 'the world is the product of our imagination', or even 'our souls and the universe are one.' He seems to suggest that, in dreaming, we both express our true, spiritual selves and create the world of which we are part. In the deep dreams he describes, faith and place are one.

'Wonderfully made'

2009-05-27T10:00:00.009+10:00

What an incredible few weeks it’s been. It’s hard to describe all the many things I’ve been feeling, perhaps impossible to capture the emotion of birthing a child into the world. But stronger even than the surges of joy and delight, awe and relief, is an overwhelming sense of the kindness and goodness of God. Every bone in my body wants to thank and praise Him for the gift of my beautiful daughter, Jemima Lauren Morrison.

As Stevie Wonder put it:
‘Isn’t she pretty, truly the angel’s best
Boy I’m so happy, we have been heaven blessed
I can’t believe what God has done
Through us he’s given life to one
Isn’t she lovely
Made from love.’

Or in the words of the 139th Psalm:
‘You created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful, I know that full well.’

There were a couple of complications very late in the pregnancy and the birth didn’t exactly go as we’d hoped, but thankfully I am fine and Jemima is safe and thriving. Holding her in my hands, I’ve never been so amazed by God’s generous gift of life. Watching her wake or sleep, I’m astounded by His creativity.

Planting more seeds...

2009-05-02T10:27:00.004+10:00

'We talk endlessly about the need for balance, by which we usually mean the balance between work, family and leisure. But there is another quite magical possibility: balancing the stresses, disappointments and terdium of life with the therapeutic release of tension through some form of regular creative outlet that restores your sense of perspective and your sense of worth while connecting you to others.' - Hugh Mackay, Participation Society

Its been floating around for at least a year now - the idea of transforming part of the Newtown cemetery into a garden where local people can come together to plant seeds, grow friendships and harvest a new and deeper sense of community. In recent weeks, this idea has begun to acquire some of the characteristics of reality. Several Newtown people have joined with the residents of the cemetery cottage and a handful of others connected to St Stephen's church to clear the cottage grounds, prepare the soil and mark out garden beds. Saturday mornings have become gardening mornings, and though I haven't been too useful given my advanced state of pregnancy, it's been great to meet new people over a handful of weeds and a cup of tea. And although we haven't yet planted a single seed, you can already see progress - in terms of both the transformation of the cottage yard and the creation of neighbourly connections. It's the beginning of a beautiful thing.

Fire history

2009-02-16T11:01:00.002+11:00

Stephen Pyne, a leading expert on the history of fire around the world, has just published his reflections on the bushfires in Australia at Peeling Back the Bark, the Forest History Society's blog.

He suggests that 'the reason for the fires is simple. Australia is a fire continent: it is built to burn. To this general combustibility its southeast adds a pattern of seasonal winds, associated with cold fronts that draft scorching, unstable air from the interior across whatever flame lies on the land. At such times the region becomes a colossal fire flume that fans flames which for scale and savagery have no equal elsewhere on Earth...'

Pyne is the author of several environmental histories of fire, including The Still-Burning Bush (2006), which traces the environmental and social significance of the use of fire to shape the environment through Australia's Aboriginal and colonial history.

Fire and the environment

2009-02-10T09:50:00.007+11:00

Are the Victorian bushfires a result of climate change?

A sign that the state of our environment is now so precarious that its deadly?

Overseas papers are making the link, with the Montreal Gazette reporting the opinion of CSIRO scientist Kevin Hennessy: 'Continued increases in greenhouse gases will lead to further warming and drier conditions in southern Australia, so the (fire) risks are likely to slightly worsen.'

An opinion piece in today's Sydney Morning Herald goes even further, suggesting that 'Saturday's events showed us the terrifying face of climate change' and proved the urgent necessity of government action on the state of the environment. The author urges the federal government to redirect some of its proposed stimulus package towards projects designed to protect and improve the environment and mitigate the effects of climate change.

All this made me wonder: Perhaps, if the money does end up in our individual pockets, we should take responsibility ourselves and spend it on making our homes and cars etc more energy efficient?

Or perhaps we should just take those steps anyway, and send any government handout we receive to aid and development organisations who work with far poorer people overseas. After all, there are scores of communities whose very subsistence is already threatened as a result of climate change. As the UN Development Programme puts it:

'The impacts of climate change will be most severe in heavily-populated, low-lying coastal areas and in regions where people are most dependent on natural resources drawn from their local environment.'

'It is critical that climate change not be approached as an isolated, stand-alone issue, but rather as part and parcel of overall sustainable development efforts and integrated in to strategies for poverty eradication.'

Desertification, for example, is far less dramatic than a bushfire - but more people's lives and livelihoods are at risk from it. The Victorian fires provide a tragic wake up call, and governments need to respond both by providing assistance to the victims and by taking climate change more seriously. Furthermore, the response should not be limited to Australia: it should be extended for the benefit of the world's numerous poor, whose lives and communities are no less endangered.

Pic: Cattle roam in burnt paddocks in the Yarra Valley, by C. Abraham [SMH]

Planting seeds

2009-02-03T12:43:00.010+11:00

'The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.' - Jesus, Matt 13:31-32

On Sunday afternoon, a group of us began what we hope will be a weekly gathering of Newtown people interested in exploring spiritual things. In the grounds of the cemetery cottage in the famous Camperdown graveyard, we gather for some food, some discussion, some reflection on the bible and prayer. We are open to anyone who wants to come along. There is lots of time to hang out and get to know the other people who are there, plenty of opportunity to figure out together what it means to follow Jesus in this patch of the city.

Over the next few weeks, the group will be thinking about its core values: truth, grace, people, community and diversity. After that, we'll spend just over a month looking at the historical accounts of Jesus. And after that? We're hoping to explore some big themes like forgiveness and reconciliation, and the environment. That should take us through til about the middle of the year.

Also on our radar is a new community garden. A few of us and our friends are keen to plant some herbs and vegies in the backyard of the cottage. I suspect that getting the admin sorted out, preparing the soil, establishing the worm farm etc could take a little while. But perhaps by spring we'll be ready to plant some literal seeds too.

Pics: a mustard seed; our first meeting [ML]

Australia Day: the controversy continues

2009-01-27T14:46:00.006+11:00

The new Australian of the Year, Mick Dodson, has suggested that we need to find an alternative date to 26 January on which to celebrate our nation. To many Aboriginal people, he said, 26 January was 'invasion day,' 'the day on which our world came crashing down.'

The legitimacy of 26 January as the date for Australia's national day has been debated for a surprisingly long time. And since at least the sesquicentenary of British settlement, the question of the day's legitimacy has been tied to the issues of indigenous dispossession and reconciliation.

On 26 January 1938, the first Aboriginal activists to protest the celebrations declared a 'Day of Mourning' to mark 'the 150th anniversary of the Whitemen’s seizure of our country.’ At a meeting at Australia Hall, Sydney, a crowd of about 200 people passed a resolution 'protesting against the callous treatment of our people by the white men during the past 150 years' and 'appealing to the Australian nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines.' They demanded 'a new policy which will raise our people to FULL CITIZEN STATUS and EQUALITY WITHIN THE COMMUNITY.' The meeting of 1938 is often seen as the beginning of the campaign that culminated in the 1967 referendum.

The argument that Australia Day lacks legitimacy as national day because it commemorates the event of Aboriginal dispossession has been put forward by Aboriginal leaders for over seventy years now. During the nineteenth century, though, the most vocal resistance to the idea of observing 26 January as our national day came from white people from colonies other than New South Wales. These people argued that 26 January was just an anniversary for Sydney-siders, rather than an anniversary of the foundation of the nation. As the Adelaide Adverstiser explained in 1888, NSW was only the ‘senior’ colony, not the ‘parent’ of all the others. South Australia, like Western Australia, had been founded directly from Britain, and had its own local memories and historic dates. For this reason, it insisted that 26 January was not ‘in any sense the anniversary of a common birthday.' According to this argument, 26 January was not even inclusive enough to be a legitimate national day for the white people of the continent.

26 January has a long history of contested legitimacy as Australia's national day. I think Dodson has rightly drawn attention to the problematic nature of the anniversary, though I'm not sure that observing a different date is a workable solution. Perhaps we just need to make sure, every January, that we do not celebrate the arrival of the first fleet so much as critically reflect on our national history.

Pics: Mick Dodson; Aboriginal activists observe a Day of Mourning, Sydney, 26 January 1938

Leadership & history

2009-01-19T10:01:00.009+11:00

I'm gearing up to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama (1pm Wednesday, Sydney time). I found the whole election campaign compelling and I'm looking forward to seeing how Obama positions himself and the country as he takes up the Presidency. What's especially interesting to me is how he draws on the American past to construct an idea of the nation, its spirit and capabilities.

I've been thinking a lot recently about Australian leaders do this - how they construct an image of the nation, its values and character, and act as both interpreters and creators of the national myth. As Paul Keating once explained, 'in the prime ministership is invested, in some respects, the ideal of the nation and its aspirations.'

John Howard certainly took this part of his job seriously. He persistently argued for an 'achievement' narrative of Australian history - a narrative that stressed the blessings of our British inheritance, the rugged resilience of the pioneers and the heroism of the Anzacs and all those who have served alongside their mates in the military.

I found Howard's approach to Australian history deeply troubling, but I'm not sure that Rudd has yet presented much of an alternative. There were glimpses of another narrative in his Apology to Indigenous Australians, and he identified some bedrock national values in his 2008 Australia Day speech:

'Values of independence, values of freedom, of resilience, enterprise and hard work. At the same time, values of looking out for one another, of mateship and compassion. And the value of a fair go for all – that great Australian value. These values remain the bedrock of our nation – they have forged our past and they will fortify our future.'

Other than that, though, Rudd hasn't seemed to make much of a priority of interpreting the character of the nation, or of explaining its past and future. He's not like Obama. He's a bureaucrat rather than an orator. And for all my relief that I no longer live in Howard's Australia, I'm a bit disappointed that our new leader seems something less than inspiring. I'm not asking for a stronger dose of re-worked Australian nationalism, but I think good political leadership involves expressing and pursuing a clear vision for the community.

Pics: President-elect Barack Obama at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday [NY Times]; Kevin Rudd from http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/11/a_democracy_at.php

Summer fun

2009-01-05T08:43:00.009+11:00

Happy new year! Hope you all had a good break. I took some time off to hang out with family and friends - but otherwise have been preparing madly for my first lecturing gig. Yep, I'm teaching a summer school course at uni over January - which means adapting the course, setting the reader, doing the lectures and teaching the tutorials. Something of a step up, since I only have experience in one of those four things!

The course is called Australia: Politics and Nation. It explores ideas about what it means to be ‘Australian’ from the nineteenth century to the present day. In particular, it examines the political dimensions of the debates over national identity and the national interest.

How have definitions of the nation been shaped by political conflicts and ideologies?
How have politicians given voice to ideas of Australia?
And how have national leaders managed the shifts from ‘bastion of the British speaking race’ to ‘multiculturalism’, from ‘radical nationalism’ to ‘new nationalism’ and from the ‘great Australian silence’ to ‘reconciliation’?

In examining such questions, the course will not confine itself to the world of high politics, but operate on the assumption that political life cannot be separated from the broader society and culture of which it is so integral a part. Thus it will encompass political, intellectual, social and cultural history. It is loosely divided into four ‘units’, one for each week of the course.

Locating the Nation

The course begins by questioning the very notion of ‘Australian nationalism’. In looking historically at the origins of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the first unit interrogates the idea that national identity is essential or inherent, and suggests that it is instead imagined or invented - with political consequences. The unit will introduce students to various accounts of the ways in which ‘Australianness’ was imagined in the colonial era, including the bush myth and British race patriotism. It will become clear that the imperial tie to Britain furnished generations of Australians with a deeply felt and widely manifested attachment to the idea of being British, both before and after Federation.

Conflict and Nation

The second unit examines the significance of political, ideological and military conflict in shaping the nation to about the mid 1940s. It considers several deep divisions in Australian politics and society, as well as emergent differences between the British and Australian national interests - and yet the strength and persistence of British race patriotism as a unifying idea.

Unravelling the Nation

This unit focuses on the unravelling of long-held assumptions about Australian identity in the decades after the Second World War. Increased migration from continental Europe and Asia signalled the end of the White Australia policy, the success of the 1967 referendum formally recognised Aboriginal people as citizens, and feminists challenged long-standing masculinist interpretations of Australian history and identity. These various shifts and debates helped undermine the association of Australianness with Britishness and demanded new answers to the question of what ‘Australian’ meant.

Debating the Nation

The final unit explores the complex and complicated process whereby Australians substituted their ‘British’ moniker for a more exclusively ‘national’ myth. Although the new mood of national self-assertiveness fostered the widely held view that the country’s transition from imperial to national symbols and beliefs was as effortless as it was inevitable, this final unit will show how painful and problematic a process it was. For all the rhetoric about the arrival of ‘mature’ nationhood in the 1960s and early 1970s, the reality is one of a hesitant, disoriented people grasping at new emblems of civic identity in a rapidly changing world. The still unresolved issues of reconciliation, republicanism and the public representation of what it means to be Australian indicate that the dilemma of post-imperial Australian nationalism endures well into the twenty first century.

Pic: my favourite summer icon, Michael Clarke, on his way to 138 at the SCG yesterday [SMH]

The politics of Australia: the movie

2008-12-17T15:20:00.010+11:00

Have you seen Baz Lurhmann's film Australia? I went with some friends a couple of weeks back. It's a good-looking and often entertaining movie, expansive in scope and impressive in its cinematography. It also brings together some of our nation's most familiar myths and characters - the gruff cattle-droving hero who defies the big bad man who owns all the land; the deeply spiritual Aboriginal elder who stands in stark contrast to the ridiculous and incompetent missionaries; the delicate but adaptable white woman and the oppressed but resilient indigenous mother.

The film has stayed on my mind - but not because it at last explained to me what an authentic Australian is, or because it presented deep and challenging issues to wrestle with for weeks. It's lingered in my head for the opposite reason - because of the disappointing simplicity of its politics. Maybe I expected too much, but I was surprised to find that a film so expressly concerned with the stolen generations offered a very simple, and ultimately unchallenging suggestion for how indigenous and non-indigenous Australians might live together.

The film centers on the relationship between a childless English woman (Nicole Kidman) who moves to a pastoral property in the Northern Territory, and an Aboriginal boy of mixed decent (Brandon Walters) whom she meets there. She gradually comes to consider the boy as her son. He is not without connections to his Aboriginal family, however: his grandfather (David Gulpilil) is a tribal elder who inducts him into his traditional culture and, at a crucial point in the film, asks him to go walkabout to learn his country. There is some acknowlegment that Kidman's intense maternal interest in the boy and her impulse to refuse him permission to leave, borders on oppressive control and could undermine the boy's ties to his indigenous family just like the government's child removal policy. However, other events intervene before the matter is explored or resolved, and the plot moves on with the 'good guys vs bad guys' story of pastoral rivalries.

With the help of both the Aboriginal boy and his grandfather, Kidman and her gruff cattle-droving hero (Hugh Jackman) eventually overcome the bad guys (David Wenham) who are trying to push them off their property. In the end they settle down as small-scale pastoralists in the comfortable knowlege that, since the power of the large land-holders has been broken, they and the Aboriginal people of the area can just get on with amicably sharing the country. The film thus implies that well meaning white people can just run their hoofed cattle all over the land, while the indigenous people can go walkabout and keep doing whatever else they do. There will be no conflict of interest, no point at which these prove to be incompatible uses of the land.

One problem with this conclusion is that it obscures these larger and more challenging issues about conflict and compatibility; another is that it tends to overstate the adequacy of good intentions. It plays into the all-too-common habit of white Australians to think of themselves as basically good people who don't really need to change their behaviour because they don't set out to hurt anyone. But are good intentions really all we need to live in harmony and use resources equitably? I think the history of this country shows that well meaning white people are more than capable of inflicting serious injustices. We need to recognise this and make a practical as well as a symbolic commitment to redressing them as a national community.

Hooray! (part 2)

2008-12-02T11:47:00.005+11:00

In more exciting news, there have been some developments in my 'career plans' for next year. Joel and I are expecting a baby! Yep, two will become three in about five months' time. Its hard to express all the things I am thinking and feeling about this - its just a bit mind blowing. But we are really stoked and looking forward to 'meeting' the little one when we have our 18 week scan later this week.

Pic: getting rained on at Teddy's Lookout, Lorne Victoria [ML]

Hooray! (part 1)

2008-11-14T15:00:00.005+11:00

Hi all, good news. I got my PhD thesis reports back the other week, and it seems it's not a disaster after all. One report was very good, one was really great, and one was more critical. In the end I only had to make some very minor typographical corrections - not write another word! Hooray!

I'm planning to pick up the hard-bound copies tomorrow and submit the final version to the University on Monday. I'm saved from another year of this happening to me :-) The end of an era, it seems.

Let the credits roll...

It has been a great pleasure to know and learn from my supervisor, Richard White. I thank him for all the ways he contributed to this project, especially for his suggestions and criticisms, his advice and unfailing encouragement.

Several people discussed ideas, read drafts and gave feedback which considerably enriched the thesis: Joanna Cruickshank, Rhiannon Davis, Andrew Errington, John Hirst, Julia Horne, Denise Lake, Cath Lamb, Joel Morrison, Rory O'Malley, Paul Pickering and Mike Thompson. I am deeply grateful to each of them.

Thank you to my friends*, my families and my brothers and sisters at St Stephen's, Newtown, for such patient love and support. To my husband Joel, who encouraged and supported me in every way, thank you for every day.

* including you, kind readers :-)

Pic: at the pinnacle, grampians VIC [JM]

Fiction, history and God

2008-10-08T13:30:00.002+11:00

There has been some debate in the media recently about the relationship between history and fiction, and their relative merits in providing readers with access to the truth about the past. Much of the discussion has centered on Kate Grenville's widely read novel The Secret River and her newly released work The Lieutenant. This most recent offering is based on the life of one of early colonial Sydney's most likable evangelicals and most sensitive cross-cultural ambassadors, William Dawes. He is most famous in Australia for compiling substantial vocabulary lists of the indigenous Sydney language, partly with the help of Booron, about whom I wrote in my PhD thesis. As you might imagine, Grenville's work and the issues it raises about about how we access the past spikes my keen interest.

In a recent interview, Grenville explained that she decided to omit Dawes' religious views and values from her fictionalised account of his life. She claimed to do so on the basis that his Christianity alienates contemporary readers from him. She has also claimed that, while not history, her work provides readers with some kind of access to truth about the past.

I suspect that there is far more at stake in the debate than the respective truth-claims of history and fiction. There are also important questions about how post-christian Australians try to make sense (or not) of our Christian past. I haven't read the book yet, but I suspect that secular writers are sometimes guilty of a failure of imagination when it comes to writing about matters (or people) of faith - with potential implications for how their readers understand the place of faith in society. For Christians, there is a challenge to engage more seriously with the representation of faith in the cultural sphere, perhaps to counteract the insistence of other writers on the cultural irrelevance or marginality of Christianity. In light of the Grenville incident, there is an argument to be made for the importance of Christian contributions to both the humanities (disciplines like history) and the creative arts (literature).

P.S. I'm hoping to write an extended review of The Lieutenant for an upcoming issue of Zadok magazine. I'll keep you posted.

You'll love every piece...

2008-09-24T11:23:00.010+10:00

It's taken me a while to get around to it, but let me have a rave about Victoria. I spent a fortnight driving around there on a post-thesis holiday - having never been down that way (apart from Melbourne) before. It was great to catch up with Jo and others, and amazing to see what a diverse and beautiful state Victoria is. Somehow, that's been a kept a secret from us up here in New South Wales! Anyway, here are some of my pics.

Joel making cups of tea on our little stove, Cape Conran, south east Vic.

Near Torquay

Forest near Triplet Falls, a detour we took from the Great Ocean Road.

Loch Ard Gorge, shipwreck territory.

Dusk at Reid's Lookout, the Grampians. All pics by ML.

September update

2008-09-17T12:07:00.003+10:00

Proof that there is life after a PhD (a much livelier life, in fact, than while completing a PhD!):

This month I've been:

relaxing in the evenings and on weekends, rather than turning on the computer to work. I've been catching up with friends, films and even reading a novel. Bliss!

tutoring an honours-entry course on 'the history of history' - from the foundations of the academic discipline and the rise of 'scientific history' in nineteenth century Germany, through mid twentieth century social history (in both Marxist and Annalist forms), to the linguistic turn and the advent of cultural history. Its been a whirlwind tour of texts as disparate as E. H. Carr's What is History, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures and Foucault's History of Sexuality.

writing about Christian responses to the great depression in 1930s Sydney - part of my Hammond Care history project.

winning the division three mixed oztag grandfinal! After a great season resulting in the minor premiership, the Raptors held off their opponents to win the big game in sudden death extra time. Yours truly went over for two tries and declared it a fine time to retire.

Hopefully there'll be more posts soon.

'Such Spiritual Acres'

2008-07-03T10:54:00.006+10:00

Well... I have just been to the binders and handed over the file. Yes, its late; yes, I found mistakes in the initial print out; yes, it feels like an anti- climax. But its nevertheless a pontius pilate moment: 'what i have written i have written.' I'm collecting the bound version tomorrow and handing it in.

Here's my abstract:

This thesis examines the transmission of Protestantism to Australia by the early British colonists and its consequences for their engagement with the land between 1788 and 1850. It explores the ways in which colonists gave religious meaning to their surrounds, particularly their use of exile and exodus narratives to describe journeying to the colony and their sense of their destination as a site of banishment, a wilderness or a Promised Land. The potency of these scriptural images for colonising Europeans has been recognised in North America and elsewhere: this study establishes and details their significance in early colonial Australia.

This thesis also considers the ways in which colonists’ Protestant values mediated their engagement with their surrounds and informed their behaviour towards the land and its indigenous inhabitants. It demonstrates that leading Protestants asserted and acted upon their particular values for industry, order, mission and biblicism in ways that contributed to the transformation of Aboriginal land. From the physical changes wrought by industrious agricultural labour through to the spiritual transformations achieved by rites of consecration, their specifically Protestant values enabled Britons to inhabit the land on familiar material and cultural terms.

The structural basis for this study is provided by thematic biographies of five prominent colonial Protestants: Richard Johnson, Samuel Marsden, William Grant Broughton, John Wollaston and John Dunmore Lang. The private and public writings of these men are examined in light of the wider literature on religion and colonialism and environmental history. By delineating the significance of Protestantism to individual colonists’ responses to the land, this thesis confirms the trend of much recent British and Australian historiography towards a more religious understanding of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its overarching argument is that Protestantism helped lay the foundation for colonial society by encouraging the transformation of the environment according to the colonists’ values and needs, and by providing ideological support for the British use and occupation of the territory. Prominent Protestants applied their religious ideas to Australia in ways that tended to assist, legitimate or even necessitate the colonisation of the land.

P.S. I'm going on a holiday.

P.P.S. When I get back, I'm having a celebratory gathering on Saturday 19 July. BYO picnic lunch atHollis Park, Wilson st Newtown (there's play equipment for kids, a terrific cafe for good coffee, but no BBQ facilities). And / or join me for a drink that evening at the Couthouse, Australia st Newtown.