Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

Colonial or post-colonial religion? Reading Aboriginal Christianity
Heather McDonald, Blood, Bones and Spirit: Aboriginal Christianity in an East Kimberley Town.
Carlton South, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2002.
Reviewed by Anne Elvey.
At the beginning of Blood, Bones and Spirit, two maps, which could be
overlaid one directly upon the other, show the contemporary East
Kimberley region in north-western Australia. On the left hand page the
region is marked with the names of European towns and stations, on the
right hand page with the names of the Aboriginal communities whose place
it is. The two maps in a sense act as a metaphor for a mapping that occurs
throughout the text: two quite different ways of interpreting the world meet
with varying degrees of conflict and appropriation when Aboriginal
cultures in the East Kimberley encounter Western Christianity. Although
this study is specific to a particular place in north-western Australia, Blood,
Bones and Spirit addresses a key contemporary concern, not only
understanding and redressing the past and the on-going violence of
colonisation, but to be attentive to the particular ways in which indigenous
peoples and others throughout the world are negotiating with, reinterpreting
and resisting colonial practices for their own survival.
Roberta (Bobbi) Sykes has a poem entitled 'Rachel' commemorating the death of an eight-month-old
child on Palm Island Reserve (off the north-east coast of mainland Australia) in 1974 after a doctor's
refusal to treat the child. The poem begins by recalling the arrival of the Bible in Australia as
accompaniment to and agent of colonisation. Moving through a description both of the dead child,
whose name Rachel comes from the Bible, and of the doctor's neglect, the poem suggests that those
who brought the Bible to this land 'need to take a closer look.' Focusing on the tragedy of the child's
death and the racist underpinnings of the doctor's neglect, the poem also highlights the ambiguity that
surrounds Aboriginal experience of Christianity in Australia, where Christianity has come to be
experienced in both colonial and counter-colonial ways by its Aboriginal adherents.
In recent years, publications such as A Spirituality of Catholic Aborigines and the Struggle for Justice
(Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Apostolate, 1993) and the
Rainbow Spirit Elders' Rainbow Spirit Theology: Towards an Australian Aboriginal Theology
(Blackburn: HarperCollinsReligious, 1997) attest to some of the ways in which Aboriginal Christians in
Australia have been articulating their experiences of and reinterpreting their practice of Christianity
'Aboriginal way.' McDonald's approach is different. Blood, Bones and Spirit is an anthropological study
undertaken as doctoral work at the Australian National University. It looks not at those Aboriginal
Christian traditions, for example in the Uniting, Anglican, and Roman Catholic churches, where
Indigenous participants are actively reworking the Western traditions brought by the missionaries.
Rather, Blood Bones and Spirit considers the emergence of Aboriginal Christianity within two
evangelical Protestant churches, the United Aborigines Mission (UAM) and the Assemblies of God
(AOG) congregations in Halls Creek, a small town in the East Kimberley area. The UAM and AOG
adherents there are Gija and Jaru people. Occasionally, McDonald also makes analytical comparisons
with the practice of Aboriginal Christianity within the Roman Catholic community of the region.
While McDonald identifies as post-Christian, she comes 'from a long family line of Christian
67