On Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann's 'Dadirri'

Colonisation is not only about the annexation of land and the removal of those who live on it. It is also about the annexation and repurposing of imagination and thought. The ‘white possessive’ (a term from Aileen Moreton-Robinson) wants to own the brains and hearts of Indigenous peoples, as well as our territories and bodies. That is why the ‘welcome’ offered to Indigenous people into white institutions, especially institutions of learning, is deeply conditional. ‘You are welcome’ means ‘You are welcome so long as you submit to our (white) knowledges, our (white) epistemologies and our (white) ontologies’. Resisting the terms of that conditional welcome is fraught with difficulty because it is offered by the dominant, controlling, culture. It is a welcome backed not only institutional power, but also by the dominating imagination that animates that power. In this context, when a white teacher says ‘listen to me’, the invitation comes with a number of unspoken corollaries: ‘ . . . because I know the objective truth . . . because your truth is inadequate to the real (white) world you must face . . . because your survival as a worthwhile contributor to (white) society depends upon your listening . . .’ and so on.

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann’s invitation to come listen (‘dadirri’) to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is therefore deeply radical. She is not inviting (white) people into a lovely, wafty, spiritual experience with ‘nature’, for example, the kind of experience that you can also get from a (white) Buddhism that is deeply compatible with, and supportive of, (white) middle-class suburban life. She is inviting (white) people to question and relativise the very foundations of the white possessive, including its imaginative power, its epistemologies and ontologies. What Miriam-Rose means by ‘dadirri’ is a deep and sustained process of conversion, of learning and unlearning: a learning about Indigenous practices of ethical relationality with the ancestor-creators who formed the earth, with country and waterway, with animals and plants, and finally with other people; and, with that, a subsequent unlearning of (white) practises that ignore and even abuse these deeply beloved kin. 

Conversion like this will certainly never happen if Indigenous knowledges and practises continue to be seen as interesting but marginal, pretty and decorative, like a dot painting on the wall of a suburban home that is otherwise entirely european in style. Conversion only comes, I believe, when the stability and apparent ‘success’ of a particular paradigm starts to come undone. I suppose I hope that the ecological emergency that is slowly starting to penetrate (white) Western consciousness, along with the collapse and imminent implosion of (white) churchly structures and their supporting theologies, may eventually create the kind of crisis in which Christian people will eventually turn to what the world’s oldest living cultures might have to say.

Insofar as the Christian faith can be an ally in that learning and unlearning, Miriam-Rose, myself, and many others are happy to be Christian. But the Christian faith we embrace will be necessarily different from the dominant (white) ways of being Christian. Our faith remembers that Christianity arose in a colonial setting as a protest against the excesses of the Roman empire and against the Jewish leaders who collaborated with empire in their oppression of ordinary people. Our faith remembers that Jesus was a keen observer of the processes and cycles of local ecosystems, and that he counselled his hearers to attend to the lessons he observed there in the parables. Our faith remembers that Jesus blurred the difference between bread and his body, wine and his blood, all these things being, for him, a dying and a mourning by which life and joy is given anew, as much in country and ecosystem as in human community. Our faith remembers that Jesus was concerned, most of all, with the last and the least, the forgotten victims of oppressive structures and regimes. In him we see ourselves, and we hear in his message the voice of our ancestor-creators who say that life is not yet spent, that there is hope yet for a better tomorrow.

With thanks to Prof Dorothy Lee who prompted me to write something about this.

Garry Deverell

Lent and reconciliation

Jeremiah 2.1-13; Psalm 26; Mark 14.1-25

As a child I was very talkative. At the edge of the vast estates of barley, wheat and potatoes which dominated the landscape where we lived, were small stands of native bush: atop hills, on the steep slopes of mountains and along creeks. Whenever the opportunity arose, this is where I would wander. And as I wandered, I would talk. Not with myself (though many might see it that way) but with the trees and the ferns, the crows and the hawks, the wallabies and the potaroos, even the rocks and the waterfalls, that I passed on my way. I would greet them all cheerfully and enquire about what kind of day each was having. I would pause to watch and to listen a while, finally wishing each well and offering a prayer or an incantation seeking their good and their well-being. Sometimes I would tell them about me, my troubles, my hopes, my bewilderments. And I would hear their voices speaking back to me. Not in English, mind. Whatever the language, however, I understood. I heard wisdom. I heard care. I heard guidance. And, after a little while, I would return to my family, my school, and all the complex negotiations of civilised life, somehow calmed and refreshed.

As a teenager, another conversation-partner was added. The bible. I became fascinated with its characters and voices, as many and as varied as I knew in the bush, though considerably more violent. Here were people I recognised. People who suffered great injustice, whose hopes and dreams were shattered. People who coveted all that belonged to another. People who stole, raped, murdered, and committed genocide in order to obtain what belonged to another. People who were afraid, but who were able to overcome their fears through faith in God. People who were able to change their hearts and their behaviour because they believed in the mercy of God. People who carried great wounds and flaws, and yet were chosen to become God’s emissaries. These days I marvel that a book as violent and as tragic a testament to our inhumanity towards one another as ever was written, could simultaneously bear a message from and about a God of love.  But it does. On every page. For what the bible finally proclaims, surely, is just this: first, that we are loved by God, even as we fail, consistently and repeatedly, to love each other; and, second, that because God has not given up on us, it is possible not only to recognise and learn such love, and also to abide in its mysterious power more deeply and consistently. 

 So, two conversation partners, two sources of wisdom for the living of life as a trawloolway man who is also a Christian. The one located in a sacred book, a book brought to this country by the coloniser, and the other located in a sacred landscape, a landscape that is alive with the presence of ancestor-spirits who can be spoken to, and who can speak.  Both book and country, in their own ways, are sacred texts. Both, being full of divine spirit, may be consulted for wisdom and guidance, if you know how. If I have a lament, this night, it is not (as some of you may perhaps expect) that the coloniser has attended carefully to the sacred book, and not enough to sacred country. No, my lament is a tad more comprehensive than that. That the coloniser has paid little attention to either.

 Here I want to draw your attention to the second chapter of Jeremiah which says, in part:

Thus says the Lord:
I remember the devotion of your youth,
   your love as a bride,
how you followed me in the wilderness,
   in a land not sown.

What wrong did your ancestors find in me
   that they went far from me,
   and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?
I brought you into a plentiful land
   to eat its fruits and its good things.
But when you entered you defiled my land,
   and made my heritage an abomination.
The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’
Those who handle the law did not know me;
   the rulers transgressed against me.

Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
   be shocked, be utterly desolate,
says the Lord,
   for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water,
   and dug out cisterns for themselves,
   cracked cisterns
that can hold no water.

This oracle, first uttered in the presence of the last king of Judah, is uncannily prescient about where we find ourselves, right now, as a nation and as a church. It is true, is it not, that we have forgotten the ancient ways, the ways here described as a covenant, a marriage, a communion with the divine in the wild places, a country not sown or intensively cultivated by the invader. Is it not true, as the prophet says, that upon entering this country the colonists saw the land not as a cathedral in which God might be known and worshipped, but rather as a commodity to be exploited in exchange for wealth and influence? Did not the colonists clear the land of its owners and managers, its first peoples, in a manner that fundamentally fractured the terms of God’s law and covenant? Did they not covet what belonged to their neighbours, did they not steal and rape and murder in order to obtain what they desired? Does not that theft, rape and murder still continue to this day? Is not the lament of those of us who have survived that genocide also the lament of the land itself, and the ancestor-spirits who dwell therein, and of God’s own self? Are we not the voice of the crucified one who is, at one and the same time, both Christ and country?

By commodifying this country and removing those whom the divine Spirit placed here to manage and cultivate its fruitfulness, colonists have polluted the sacred stream God provided for all of us as a gift, the stream of sacred lore designed to sustain us in life over many hundreds of millennia. Instead we have dug cisterns for ourselves, cisterns so badly designed that they can barely hold water: practices and structures and policies which have brought us to point of ecological emergency, and to the certainly, certainly I say, of a fundamental implosion in the biological operating-system of our planet.  Unless. Unless we repent of our sin. Unless we turn again to the God whose wisdom and way may be discerned in both sacred text and sacred country.

In the world of politics and public policy, this means removing the puppets of capitalism from government and replacing them with people who are willing to listen to the still, small, voice of the divine Spirit. In our church it means jettisoning all that remains of that possessive, status-hungry, exclusionary impulse in every state-sanctioned church and replacing it with the disciplines of listening, hospitality, and prophecy. For unless the voices we generally exclude, ignore and belittle are welcomed to the table, then we shall be as guilty of killing the prophets and dancing on their graves as the kings of Israel and the priests of its temple. And we shall pay for it in the end by finding ourselves at the wrong end of the Magnificat: scattered to the bottom of the food-chain, rendered empty, nothing.

All of which is to offer an invitation for you all in this season of Lent. See, I place before you the way that leads to death and the way that leads to life. If you die to your self-importance, and the self-importance of the colonial imagination, you will be empty enough for God to fill you with life.  But if you hang on to such things, you will find that you are already dead. And your deadness will continue to infect the systems and networks of which you are part, both publicly and privately. As the spiral of Lent into Easter is properly a return to the waters of baptism, to receive there, through repentance and the death of self, the risen life of Christ; so may it also be, for you, a turning to the rivers and creeks of country, through which that same God’s speaks a word of grace that will renew not only your own life, but the life of the whole planetary eco-system.

Garry Deverell

1st Sunday of Lent 2021, Christ Church South Yarra

On Aboriginality

Yesterday I went for a drive with my extended family in northeast lutrawita (Tasmania) along the coast road between Bridport and tebrikunna (Musselroe Bay), where we were able to clearly see the islands of the Furneaux group to the immediate north. This is a part of the state that I love very much, not least because it was my ancestral home. Like a great many of my contemporary brothers and sisters in the palawa (Aboriginal Tasmanian) community, I am a direct descendent of the trawoolway chieftan and warrior known as Mannalargenna.

As we sped past the sacred mountain, wukalina (Mt William), where the clans traditionally gathered for trade and sacred ceremony, a member of my wife's extended family initiated a conversation about a live dispute between his church and the neighbouring Aboriginal Centre about the placement of a fence. He observed that the Aboriginal community in question was probably made up of people who had come from other parts of the state, because 'there were no Aborigines in our part of Tasmania when the settlers arrived.' I informed him that there were a number of Deverells involved in the palawa community in Burnie, to which he responded (and I quote), 'Oh, the Deverells are as Aboriginal as I am'. Since the ancestry of my wife's family is strictly Scots and German, I assume that what he meant by this is that the Deverells - myself included - are not really Indigenes of Tasmania at all, and that our claims to the contrary are therefore spurious at best.

I have to confess that I was rendered quite speechless. Which is not a condition I am used to. Not at all.

This incident raises, yet again, a question I have been dealing with all of my life. In what sense can a white-skinned and red-headed lad from Sheffield, Tasmania - who, incidently, happens to have an Irish family name - claim to be Aboriginal? If Aboriginality is not primarily about the colour of one's skin and the keeping-intact of traditional european notions of blood and ancestry, then what could possibly remain?

I will not, here, rehearse the history of colonialism in Tasmania. Others have done that very well - Lyndall Ryan, James Boyce and Henry Reynolds amongst them. I simply want to summarize what these scholars, amongst many others, have concluded: that Aboriginal identity in not primarily about the dominance of a particular biological inheritance over and against others; nor is it about the preservation of a particular, primitive and tribal, way of life. Aboriginal identity is about the perseverance of a sense of spiritual connection to particular places and the kin (animal, plant and human) that belong to that place, and this over and against the will of a dominant culture and society that has demonstrably sought to erase such things. Given the devastating success of the colonizing will, especially in places like Tasmania and Victoria, this means that Aboriginality is most often preserved in the form of a memory and a deep-down sorrow pertaining to what has been lost or stolen - land, kin, spirituality - a sorrow that is manifested in various forms of grief and mourning, but also in the search for a justice in which these things might be returned, or at least acknowledged as having been stolen, along with appropriate gestures towards repentance and recompense.

My own Aboriginal identity is manifested, I believe, in the way I look at the landscape of lutrawita. What I see and the way I see it is very, very different to the way in which my in-laws see it. As we drove along the coast-road yesterday, my father-in-law very often spoke of the productivity of the farmland, the breed of the dairy-herds, the people he knew who were, or had been, engaged in the mining and farming of the land. He spoke with the pride of a family that had come from the other side of the world and made itself prosperous by the sweat of its collective brow. It was a discourse of celebration.

What I saw and felt could not be more different. I saw a land that was filled with older memories and songlines. At each creek I imagined a small group of kin searching for swan's eggs. At each open plain I saw men chasing parlevar (kangaroos and wallabies) with spears. As we passed wukalina I imagined the ecstasy of dancing out the dreaming stories of our tribe, the shrewdness of trade, the skill of legal and theological storytelling and dispute. When we stopped by the bay, I saw women diving for shellfish, and fires on the beach around which proud families gathered to consume stories and news along with their food. I also felt the loss of these things: the drying-up of foodstocks as new 'settlers' pushed up the rivers; the hunting and stealing of people and of land; the agonizing deaths wrought by new diseases. I looked across the straits at the Islands and saw the devastation on my ancestor Manalargenna's face as he realized he was been consigned, along with the peers he had sought to rescue, to the world of the dead.

This is a sensibility that I wish I could successfully share with my in-laws and the wider community. I have tried to do so in various ways across a number of years. But I fear I have failed, for the look of incomprehension so often remains, even after telling my stories many times over.

Garry Deverell

An expanded version of this reflection can be found in my book Gondwana Theology: a trawloolway man reflects on Christian Faith (Melbourne: Morning Star Press, 2018).

Taking pride in Christ's cross

Text: Galatians 6.7-16 

There are many things in life which people like you and I take pride in.  Our work.  Our kids and grand kids.  Academic or sporting achievements.  Our gardens or our mechanical skills (I stand in awe of anyone with mechanical skills!)  But today I'd like to reflect on what it means to take pride in the cross of Jesus Christ.  In the passage we read from Galatians, Paul says this:

May I never boast of anything save the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the life of the world.  For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision in anything; but a new creation is everything! (6.14, 15)

What's Paul on about here?  What is this concern he has with those who take pride in their circumcision more than in the cross of Jesus?  And what value could this rather bizarre and ancient controversy have for our contemporary life in faith?  Well, I'd like to have a go at answering those questions, but we'll need a little background first.

When Paul wrote to the Galatian churches in 54 or 55 of the first century, he did so with a clear purpose in mind.  Apparently some of the folk in the region had begun to teach that one had to obey the Jewish law in order to find salvation.  In particular, these teachers encouraged their followers to be circumcised, as a sign of their belonging to that community, the community of the Jews and of the Jewish law.  Paul's letter is a serious attempt to expose the futility of these claims.  

For Paul, you see, the Christian gospel proclaims a complete and permanent freedom from the Law of the Jews through the crucifixion of Jesus.  The Law, he argued, is double edged.  It is good in that it reveals the ethical standards of God for human beings. And these standards are very important.  But the law is also bad because not one of us is able to entirely obey the Law. The Law functions, in fact, to condemn us:  to sentence absolutely everyone to death as people unworthy of a holy God.  Paul's good news chimes in at precisely this point.  Through the law I am condemned to death.  But if, through baptism, I die with Christ himself, I then also rise with Christ, leaving the power of the Law for condemnation behind me.  Through the living Spirit of Christ, I am enabled to participate in a new life of freedom with Christ which is no longer subject to the crushing weight of the Law.

Now this is a seriously climactic move!  In one fell swoop, which has reverberated through the ages, Paul dispenses with the religion of law and social status; in its place he urges us to embrace a spirituality of death and re-birth in Christ.  Can you hear the difference there?  Can you discern how the landscape has changed forever?  

Let me reframe this whole discussion by bringing it into the present.  We ourselves live in a very religious society.  Karl Marx rightly said that the main concern of religion is social control.  Each person is raised to their allotted path in life, pre-destined to be bigger, better and more worthy than the generation before.  The religious person is mainly concerned with whether or not they're 'doing the right thing' in the eyes of their community, their elders or their peer group.  The religious person gains self-esteem and a sense of purpose from the positive feedback of that community.  So, as long as you do as you are told, you’ll thrive.  That’s the promise, at least!  

But religion fails, of course, when a person finds themselves either unable or unwilling to live up to the goals and expectations their community has allotted them.  Let me share with you a personal example.  From a very young age I was told, by a complex system of media and gossip, that I will have made it in life if I were able to buy a large house in the suburbs and drive a nice car—if, in fact, I were able to join the middle-class.  The funny thing is, that when I went to university on a scholarship and started hanging out with middle-class folk for the first time, I found that they weren’t very happy.  Many of them, even as students, already had nice cars and were well on their way to owning their own homes.  Yet they felt a constant pressure to do even better than that:  to own more, to have a better job, a better body and more prestigious credit-card than the other bloke, to have travelled more extensively and squeezed in more ‘experiences’ than the other person.  Even at University, many of the people I met were already being crushed under the weight of those expectations.  Some of them folded under that weight and thought themselves utter failures. Others gritted their teeth and set out to be happy in the terms their parents and their community had allotted for them.  But they, and most of us, never get there.  We never become good enough, or affluent enough, or good-looking enough, or credentialed enough, to be happy or content.

Paul suggests that if we really do want to move on from that point, we need to let go of religious concerns, the laws and concerns of our society and culture, and embrace the life of the Spirit.  Now, ‘letting go’ is like a dying, and that's why Paul is forever talking about crucifixion with Christ.  Note that Paul does not suggest, as some preachers still do, that the death of Jesus is able to achieve our salvation apart from what we ourselves do in response.  It is not simply the fact that Jesus dies in our place that is able to save us from the terrible weight of religion, but also our willingness to participate  in that death by dying ourselves.  In chapter 2 of Galatians, verses 19 and 20, Paul says: 

Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God.  I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.  The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 

What saves us, according to Paul, is our willingness to surrender every religious rule or aspiration that may have pushed us along, every socially-constructed behaviour or symbol which may have defined our sense of worthiness up until now.  Like Christ on the cross, in our baptism we are stripped of any status or power we may have possessed as a result of our conformity to religious rules or socially defined paths towards status or achievement.  We acknowledge, in a rather horrifying moment of clarity, that the sum total of all these things is nothing.  They are unable to save us, to liberate us from either guilt or the ever-present spectre of failure.  They are unable to fill the void, to bring contentment, to make us whole.  The American singer John Cougar Mellencamp put it well a few years ago when he sang 'There's a hole in my heart that I can't seem to fill/ I do charity work when I believe in the cause but my soul it troubles me still'.  

At that moment, according to Paul, salvation arrives as from another place.  When all our own achievement comes to nought and nothingness, Christ arises to face us with a word of surprising grace: you are forgiven, you are loved, you are free . . .  But I hesitate at this point.  I am reluctant to talk of grace too quickly.  I suspect, you see, that many of us have been taught about a rather cheap kind of grace, a grace that arrives apart from the gospel injunction to take up one's cross and follow after the way of Jesus, a grace that tries to skip over the necessary experience of emptiness and void which John of the Cross called the 'dark night of the soul'.  Don’t get me wrong, grace is real, it is powerful, and it is freely given.  But it is certainly not cheap.  In order for God to come to us as the healer and the liberator of souls, we must be prepared to lay ourselves bare.  We must let go of every religious pretension, every cultural certainty, every economic doctrine, every aspirational rule.  Then, and only then, when we have been stripped bare of every skerrick of cultural capital . . . then we may be ready to receive that mystery we call grace.

And so I ask you today:  what is the circumcision in your flesh which you rely on for your salvation?  Is it your attendance at worship?  Is it the fact that you're heterosexual rather than homosexual?  Is it your generosity or charity towards others?  Is it your self-effacing nature?  Is it that fact that you've worked hard to provide for your family, or remained faithful to your spouse?  Or is it, more nakedly, your caste or position in the social pecking-order?  Whatever it is, hear this word of God today:  'neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything!' 

This sermon was first preached at St Luke's Uniting Church, Mount Waverley, in 2004.