Killing the Indigenous: reflections on baptism in Warwick Thornton's 'The New Boy'

‘The New Boy’ is a 2023 film by Kaytetye man Warwick Thornton which explores the collision between white Catholic and Aboriginal spirituality. It does this through an exploration of various baptismal motifs such as that of a new birth and body, along with death and resurrection. In short, a captured Aboriginal boy seeks to incorporate Catholicism into his own spirituality, but is eventually, himself, incorporated by white Catholicism.

The ‘New Boy’ (Aswan Reid) is captured by police and brought to a remote orphanage run by nuns. He doesn’t speak English and is largely silent throughout the film. He refuses to wear a shirt and eat with cutlery. He hugs trees. He plays with baby snakes. These function as signs of his difference and his resistance to being incorporated in the white Catholic community.

The orphanage is run by Sr Eileen (Cate Blanchett), who assumed leadership extra-canonically when the parish priest died a year earlier. Sr Eileen is a complex character. Powerful yet vulnerable. Spiritually earnest and zealous for the boys’ education yet given to systematic lying and alcoholism. She symbolises a form of white Catholic feminism, assuming the authority of a white male priest yet without the protection of the white male church.

Sr Eileen’s subordinates are Sr Mum (Deborah Mailman) and George (Wayne Blair). Both ‘incorporated’ Aboriginal people who nevertheless keep up their resistance in small ways. Sr Mum is the cook and domestic servant. She apparently became a nun when her own children were taken from her. She is kind to the New Boy. George is a farm labourer who is glad to have work a long way from the centre of white society. He puts the children of the monastery to work but is disinclined to participate in church services. He is gruff and cold, but clearly cares.

The New Boy’s otherness is also seen in his ‘clever’ powers. He has a light with him, by which he heals a boy bitten by a snake and saves the life of another boy burned in fire. George recognises that the boy is ‘clever’, a practitioner of Aboriginal magic, and worries that word will get out and their remote peace will be destroyed. Sr Eileen seeks to interpret the New Boy’s healing powers as signs of saintliness.  It is her way of seeking to incorporate the boy into the white Catholic body.

The New Boy’s best attempt to incorporate Catholicism into his own spiritual frame comes when a large crucifix, made of wood, arrives at the monastery. Seeing the crucifix as a suffering being somehow connected to trees, the New Boy seeks to heal its wounds by taking some baby snakes and placing them before the crucifix. In many Aboriginal cultures, snakes are powerful ancestral beings able to heal and bring life to the dead. The snakes are killed by the worshippers, but one is made alive again by the New Boy and effects a transaction by which the wounds of the tree/Christ are connected to self-inflicted wounds on the hands of the New Boy.

Perhaps because there are not enough snakes involved in the magical exchange, the living being is not healed and the New Boy becomes unwell from his wounds. Sr Eileen interprets his wounds as stigmata and prays for his recovery. When the New Boy is well enough to walk again, Sr Eileen baptises him in the church and his wounds are apparently healed with baptismal water. The New Boy notices that the crucifix no longer communicates with him as a living being. And when he seeks to summon his light later the same day, it is extinguished. The New Boy begins to wear a shirt and, having lost his ‘spark’, apparently submits to white Catholic ways. Having sought to incorporate the white Catholic imagination into his own, he finds that it is he who is incorporated.

     Theological Reflection

At the heart of the film is a confrontation between two ways of imagining the world, each seeking to absorb or incorporate the other. Will native Aboriginal ways prevail, or the coloniality of the white Catholic body?

Historically, the white Catholic body prevailed. In this frame, the New Boy can be seen as an ‘innocent’, a saint, sent by God to bring hope and healing to this small, struggling, Christian orphanage. He is a Christ figure whose eventual baptism fulfills all righteousness and incorporates him fully into the body of the church. I am, however, part of a very small group of Aboriginal thinkers who are seeking to subvert this colonial logic in the field of theology by seeking to re-read white Christian interpretations within the more ancient frame of Aboriginal spirituality.

From this point of view, the crucifixion of Christ is not about God sending a messiah to save the world. It is about the suffering of country, and of Aboriginal community and culture, under colonial power.  For us, there is no ‘divinity’ other than ‘the dreaming’ and its embodiment in the cosmic community of country and kin.

In this perspective, the resurrection of Christ is not an intervention, extra nos, from a God beyond, but the innate capacity of country and kin to renew themselves, to be reborn from the compost of old bio-matter. This means a ritual washing in water is not, primarily,‘baptism’as an incorporation in the white Christian community. Water symbolises, for us, the lifeblood of country, distributed to the whole body of the land via the ‘veins’ of creeks, rivers and other waterways. For us, water rites dramatize a participation in the dying and rising of country itself, including country’s capacity to resist the power of coloniality for stealing, killing and destruction.

This capacity is beautifully illustrated in Glenn Loughrey’s painting ‘From the Depths, Life Rises’, where the colonial imagination is represented by squares, much like fields cultivated in the European manner. At one point there is a circle within a circle. This represents the capacity of country, and of mob, to resist the colonial imagination.

On this anniversary of the failed referendum, I simply note that this theological work is necessary because Australia remains a colony in which First Peoples, our culture and our spirituality, are still regarded as little more than a footnote in the 'great' theological narratives from Europe that have made modern Australia what it is.

Garry Worete Deverell

A short paper given at the Talanoa Oceania conference held at United Theological College, Paramatta, on April 5, 2024.