Abstract
When was it possible to see Christ in Australia? In the nineteenth century, the continent was seen through imperial eyes as a “waste” wilderness, held under the imagined sovereignty of a British Crown. Thefts of ancestral lands and massacres of Aboriginal people were the order of the day. Since the colonies were not unified under a federal parliament until 1901, such historic crimes were as much British as Australian. Could a “Christology” be found beyond the sphere of colonial ideology, and how did secularisation remain dependent on religious themes? This remarkable collection of essays addresses such questions in fresh ways.
In “Christ as Storyteller,” a palawa Aboriginal woman from lutruwita (Tasmania), Alison Overeem, focusses on the life of her father’s grandmother, Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834–1895), who, miraculously, wove together traditional culture and Methodist faith in story and song. The chapter affirms that Christ was seen in lutruwita by people resolutely connected to their ancestral country. The larger conceptual implications of Indigenous Christology, cosmic and rhizomic, have lately been discussed more explicitly by other writers, notably Lee Miena Skye, Garry Worete Deverell, and Michael Bowden.
In “Christ as Lost Innocent,” Kerrie Handasyde focusses on the motif of the lost child, ubiquitous in colonial narratives. Literary critics have shown how this motif of fragile innocence could forge new and mysterious connections with the land. The lost child in the bush formed a paradoxical counterpart to the masculine legend of the rugged pioneer, battling a harsh and unforgiving landscape. While some nineteenth-century narratives reflect secularised tropes of pilgrimage and providence, others fed into the scepticism of Marcus Clarke’s Civilization without Delusion (1880), which bid farewell to a useless church.
“Christ the Bushranger” takes up the story of Ned Kelly. In this chapter, Glen O’Brien explores the reasons why the outlaw pilgrimage of a notorious Irish Catholic would come to play such a significance role in Australian folklore. Kelly presented himself as a defender of widows and orphans against an unjust regime. Dying at the hands of the police in Glenrowan in 1880 contributed a Christological layer to the myth, which lives on in literature and film. Even some Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District have seen Kelly as a moral European, in contrast with Captain Cook, as previously shown by Deborah Bird Rose in her essay “Ned Kelly Died for our Sins” (Oceania, 1994).
Kyle Moffitt’s chapter “Christ as Anzac” follows a well-trodden path, describing the significance of the tragedy that befell the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in 1915 at Gallipoli in Turkey. Now firmly planted in national imagination, this is a story of how English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh soldiers could be fused together as white Australians in sacrificial solidarity on foreign soil—a secularised Christology that has, until recently, also functioned to draw attention away from colonial frontier wars.
In the chapter “Christ as Work/er?,” Katherine Massam focusses on the novel Foveaux, written by Kylie Tennant (1912–1988). The novel first appeared in Britain in 1939, published by “the progressive house of Victor Gollancz (who were also publishing George Orwell),” as Massam puts it (p. 93). The story opens in Sydney with a celebration of Labour Day, highlighting the Eight Hour Day floats that recalled the success in 1856 of a movement for eight hours of work, eight of rest and eight of recreation (an idea that had been proposed by Robert Owen in 1817 in the context of his utopian community in Scotland). The image of Christ as Worker emerges in solidarity with an international labour movement, and Massam includes some allusions to Latin American liberation theology in her concluding reflections.
Rebekah Pryor’s “Christ as Princess of Pop,” has a similarly transnational scope. Kylie Minogue’s concerts take on a religious dimension, it is suggested, providing ecstatic, outside-of-self experiences with communal implications, including Kylie’s solidarity with LGBTQIA+ groups. This is a Christological framing that seems to be very much in the eye of the beholder. The princess of pop becomes a clue to “the very survival of Christianity,” which is “contingent on an embodied, justice-orientated understanding of Christ” (p. 116).
Nick Cave, on the other hand, provides a different model within the music industry. He has produced his own remarkably poetic theology, which seeks to liberate Jesus from Christian hubris and sanctimonious enemies of the imagination. In “Christ as Strange(r),” Jason Goroncy juxtaposes Cave’s project with the artwork of Badimya woman, Julie Dowling, who sees assimilation as an enemy of Aboriginal Christianity. In their different ways, Cave and Dowling resist a dominant consciousness. In Julie Dowling’s art, we see “the landscape itself as denoting Christ’s ubeity” (160). The “word becomes land,” on Goroncy’s account—emplaced within ancestral law and enduring networks of kinship.
In many respects, Dowling’s vision of Christ is inverted in the artistic repertoire of Justin O’Brien, as discussed by Alana Harris in her chapter “Christ as Friend Betrayed.” Turning from religious faith after the death of his mother in 1954, and ostracised by reason of his homosexuality, O’Brien found an enduring significance in Catholic symbolism and iconography. He was one of very few Australian artists at the time who could make a living through his painting, but significantly, he could not bring himself to paint Australian landscapes: “When I’m in Australia, I really feel that I’m a bit like being on the moon,” he once confessed in an interview (p. 145). Harris concludes that while O’Brien abjured the quest to see Christ in Australia, he bears testimony to the “cultural Christianity” of the late twentieth century (p. 146).
A number of the essays in this collection betray a characteristically Australian preference for “prophetic” contestation of a dominant culture. The notion of “Christ as Prophet” is explicitly taken up in Lyn McCredden’s discussion of three literary figures—Patrick White, Tim Winton and Alexis Wright—whose novels are characterised here in terms of prophetic imagination. Each of the three novelists have their own vision of the sacred in nature, but the Aboriginal author, Alexis Wright, is distinctive, not least because she maintains an affirmation of ancestral law. In this respect at least, there no tension between legal and prophetic imagination.
The question of Christianity’s survival returns again in Geoff Thompson’s closing chapter, “Christ as Saviour of the West,” which contrasts the proposals of two public intellectuals: Greg Sheridan, a Catholic journalist, and John Carroll, an atheist sociologist. Both see the figure of Jesus as providing an urgently needed integration for a fragmenting Western tradition. Sheridan wants to resist the secularizing moves that would reduce Jesus to a merely symbolic or political model, shorn of transcendent significance. Carroll is convinced that “We cannot live without a story” and the one most adequate to the existential predicament of the West is the story of Jesus, minus clerical or ecclesial aspirations. Thompson, a theologian, affirms neither proposal as such, but leans more towards Carroll’s “metaphysical sociology.”
After reading this volume, one might be forgiven for thinking that established experts in Bible and theology are often incapable of communicating their vision of Christ in public spaces. Theology has become synonymous with cant; it is artists, novelists and musicians who can best speak undogmatically. One chapter seems to break frame, “Christ as Son and Brother,” in which Sean Winter discusses Christos Tsiolkas’s historical novel Damascus. This was published in 2019, and it provides a breathtaking literary vision of the brutalities of imperial Rome at the time of the apostle Paul. In spite of possible resonances with colonial histories, this is not focally an example of seeing Christ in Australia, although it does raise the question of how a Jewish messiah might shape non-Jewish hopes in a colonial context.
A Christology that plays into colonial interests is no longer tenable. In a paper published in Studies in World Christianity (2018), Liam Miller speaks more constructively of a “Christification of the least,” following Matt 25:37–40, where the righteous bear inadvertent witness to a hidden Christ in the stranger, the hungry, the incarcerated and marginalised. Miller highlights the plight of asylum seekers and Aboriginal people in particular. A Gentile Christ will always be transnational, but it seems hardly possible to forge spiritual connections with the land—to see Christ in the land now called Australia—without the full participation of Indigenous theologians. In sharing kinship with our eponymous ancestor, who died at the hands of empire, we have the opportunity to participate together in a community who refuses to give brute force the final word.