Australia - Whose Land?

Peter Adams, the principal of the Ridley College, an evangelical Anglican theological college in Melbourne, in Australia - whose land? A call for recompense (John Saunders Lecture 2009) takes us beyond saying sorry to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people pushes the consequences of this recognition one step further:
If I have hurt someone, it is not enough to be sorry, not even enough to repent. I must also recompense the person, or else my repentance is shown to be a sham. The idea of recompense is not popular today, but it is essential. (p.10)

What might recompense, Peter Adams asks, require of us who arrived since1788?
i. We would recognize that recompense is a duty and responsibility, that we owe it to the indigenous peoples of this land, out of respect for them as our brothers and sisters made in God’s image, and out of awareness of the vileness of the crimes which have been committed against them and their ancestors.
ii. We would recognize that recompense is based on our duty, not the needs of indigenous people. I am not saying that we should not care, but that we must act with integrity and justice.
iii. We would recognize that no recompense could ever be satisfactory, because what
was done was so vile, so immense, so universal, so pervasive, so destructive, so devastating, and so irreparable.
iv. We would ask the indigenous people if they wanted those of us who have arrived since 1788 to leave [Baxter’s ‘Restitution’], or to provide an equivalent recompense [Baxter’s ‘Satisfaction’]. Leaving would be a drastic  and complicated action, but, as I have pointed out, it has happened in India, Africa, and Indonesia in the last sixty years.
v. If we do not leave, then we would need to ask each of the indigenous peoples of this land what kind of recompense would be appropriate for them. This would be an extremely complicated and extensive task, but must be done.
vi. We would need to be prepared to give costly recompense, lest it trivialize what has happened.
vii. We would then need to adopt a national recompense policy, in the form of a Treaty. It would need to be implemented locally, according to the wishes of each indigenous tribe.
viii. By negotiation, it could be a one-off act of recompense, or it could be a constant and long-term series of acts of recompense.
ix. We could also implement voluntary recompense by churches in a coordinated way, and should include support of indigenous Christian ministry and training, as negotiated by the leaders of Christ’s indigenous people. Christian churches should lead the way in this, not least in supporting indigenous Christians and their ministries. For churches too have benefited from the land they use, and from
income from those who have usurped the land. 

It would be difficult to agree to do this, complicated to negotiate, and costly and demanding to deliver. The alternative is to fail in our moral duty, to admit that, for Australia, in Martin Luther King’s words, ‘the bank of justice is bankrupt.’ We owe the indigenous people of Australia not only their full rights as citizens of our nation, but also recompense for the damage we have done. Recognizing citizenship and recognition of Native Title are just the first steps in a long process of appropriate restitution and recompense.

The idea of recompense is not alien to our society. As one well-known example, James Hardie has had to provide recompense to workers harmed by working with asbestos. There is wide-spread feeling that this is right. If this recompense is right, then it is also right to offer recompense to the indigenous people of Australia.

Ernest Gribble, a son of John Gribble, and also a worker among indigenous people said:
"We have a three-fold debt to pay to the Aborigines. We owe them a debt for the country we have taken from them. We owe the race reparation for the neglect and cruelty... We owe them... the gospel of our Lord."
             
It is time to pay our debts: for, Paul, writes, " Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law."

Love involves duty, as well as charity. We have wronged our neighbours. It is now time to pay our debts, to confess our sins, to give the recompense that we owe. We who know God’s great love in Christ should be the most active in loving others. May God strengthen us to love the Lord our God, and so to love our neighbours. (pp.11-13)

Peter Adams has reached these conclusions with reference to such radical sources as the New Testament, John Calvin and the puritan theologian Richard Baxter.  For the full text contact CACE.

Anglicans in Australia

Tom Frame has done a good job with his most recent book Anglicans in Australia (UNSW Press, 2007) in telling a complex story well. At least that's my view as someone from outside the Anglican tradition though I confess to having spent a fair amount of time churching with Anglican communities.

It is a book that is distinguished by a good tempered tone. a deep commitment to the renewal of the Anglican church and a willingness to be clear about the difficulties facing the church. There is something deeply "Anglican" in the best sense of that term, about the tone and temper of the writing.

I shall look forward to the reviews by his fellow Anglicans and hope that they engage with Tom's argument in the spirit in which it has been written.

On the way through a number of questions occurred to me that arose from my perspective as one who has been deeply influenced in recent years by the Anabaptist tradition. A nest of overlapping questions seemed to be lurking just out of focus as I read the text:

• whether the Anglican Church in Australia has quite gotten over a hankering for Establishment?
  
• How willing it would be to revisit and acknowledge the ambiguities of the Christendom settlement? (there are a couple of unqualified references to Christendom in the book that seem to be in the present tense)
  
• How really enthusiastic are Australian Anglicans about mission post-Christendom?
• What might the implications be for Anglican ecclesiology and theology more generally of active engagement in the post-christendom context in Australia? In posing this question I am asking in my own way about the historical contingencies that have shaped Anglicanism and what forms of church life might survive as something recognisably Anglican in this new context.
  

These questions are not so much directed at Tom (on the issue of Establishment there is no question as to where he stands - very much against it) but a first attempt to frame some of my own questions.

Claiming an historical heritage as central to their identity as Anglicans do is fair enough. The issue that is rarely explicitly dealt with by those claiming the heritage is the question of the use of state power to enforce matters of worship and theology, whether directly by capital punishment and torture, or less directly by educational, social and economic discrimination against Catholics and dissenters. This it seems to me to be a scandal that needs to be more directly addressed.

I was delighted to note that Tom suggests a revisiting of the Thirty-nine articles. A reconsideration of those articles might provide a useful opportunity for dialogue with descendants of the 'detested anabaptists" over a number of matters canvassed therein.

Separation of church and state in Australia - some random observations

1. While we have a legal separation of church and state in Australia we have an informal establishment in which church leaders, anglicans, Catholics and increasingly Pentecostals have an access to the political and economic centers of power in Australian society that minority christian groups and other faith communities do not.

2. The scope of delivery of government programs in Australia by non-goverment organisations including church related welfare, health and education programs has been increasing at an apparently exponential rate. This poses risks to both the government and the organisations. The web of connection and complicity is becoming even more deeply woven with each additional discretionary funding program.

3. The requirements attached to funding programs are increasingly raising the question of separation of church and state not because of tengagement of faith related bodies in the public sphere but because of the interference by the state in church related bodies.

4. The increasing pressure of global issues will place increasing pressure on Christian churches to confront the state over issues that cross national boundaries, global warming, questions of war and peace particularly if they recover their own integrity as a body that crosses national boundaries and whose roots are in the first commandment - you shall have no other gods before me.

History, silence and the indigenous community

Over two weeks campervanning around the Northern Territory along with some long plane flights has left me with a good deal of food for thought around the way history is told and the notable silences about what happened on the Australian frontier .

Darwin for example is laden with monuments to the bombin by the Japanese and the impact of Cyclone Tracy. You hav to work hard to find anything beyond that - the monument to John McDowall Stuart, the Scotsman who was the first European to cross the continent from south to North was celebrated by a small obscure plaque. He should be so lucky.

The indigenous community are now acknowledged on notice board in national parks for their role in management of the parks. About the history of conflict between the original occupiers of the land and their response to the invaders there is little to be found. Historical amnesia abounds. In a couple of museum entries their is refeence to conflict but it is so generalised in expression that the reality of invasion is elided from view.

The silence is, or ought to be deafening but we of those who benefited from the invasion remain largely oblivious.

On the long flight home I was reading Henry Reynolds' account of his personal journey as a historian to discover the truth about Australian history 'Why weren't we told?. Invasion and the violence along the frontier are the elements of Australian history that were acknowledged in the nineteenth century writings by Australian writers but were then ignored through the twentieth century.

There is a deep silence at the heart of Australian life, culture and political debate. There have been moments at which this slience has been broken, the struggle of Eddie Mabo that resulted in the High Court overturning of the doctrine of Terra Nullius and the work of historian such as Henry Reynolds come to mind.

Those of us who seek to be people of the way, followers of Jesus in Australia need to learn how to be speak truthfully. On this issue we might find some assistance in the words of the Baptist minister the Rev John Saunders, preached in Sydney on the 14 October 1838.

After setting out the grounds on which indigenous people become invested with all the natural rights that belong to humanity Saunders spells out the wrongs that have been done to the indigenous commuity:

1. We have robbed them withour any anction in moral or revealed law, descending as invaders upon their territory and taking possession of their soil.
2. We have brutalised them, taught them intoxication, bribed them to shed the blood of each other.
3. We have shed their blood, eradicating the possessors of they soil. the blood of the poor and defenceless is upon us, the blood of those we wronged before we slew.

Black arm band history? Sounds like solidly grounded truth telling Christian preaching to me - one that has deep roots in the practice of the Old Testament prophets.