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

missionaries and evangelists' (p.xi). As well as her work as a health professional in Aboriginal
communities, this evangelical heritage shapes her interest in Aboriginal Christianity and informs her
measured critique of the colonising discourses of contemporary Christian evangelists in the Kimberley.
Although there have been anthropological studies of Aborigines and Christianity in the past,
'Aboriginal Christianity' as such has not been a subject for anthropological investigation. The readiness
to acknowledge Aboriginal Christianity as a possibility within Christianity parallels the emergence of
Asian, Black American, liberationist, and feminist (theological) movements that challenge and reveal
as partial the universalising claims of Western Christianity (pp. 8-9).
McDonald for her part is concerned less with why many Aboriginal people become Christians than
with what meanings they make within Christianity. She asks: 'How did a land-based people who
celebrate in ritual their embodied relationship to a fecund universe, embrace a Hellenistic
Mediterranean religion of displaced peoples?' (p. 2). Blood, Bones and Spirit considers the ways in
which a universalist religion of placelessness, as she understands Western Christianity to be, affects and
is in turn affected by the encounter with Aboriginal spiritualities of place.
While this book is written in a clear and engaging style, it is not always an easy book to read. For this
reader, McDonald's descriptions of the overtly colonising discourse of the AOG missionaries were
particularly disturbing. She makes note, too, that what might seem more benign traditions such as
Roman Catholic, Uniting Church and Anglican, may continue the colonising process in more subtle
ways. On the surface the UAM appears less conservative than the AOG and its attitudes to traditional
Aboriginal cultural practices appear somewhat less negative. Nevertheless, the accommodation of
Aboriginal cultural practice to white Christian expectations does not correlate directly with the level of
conservatism and overt racism underlying and expressed in those expectations. Differences between the
experience of the adherents in terms of their town or station background and their earlier experience of
colonisation are also key factors affecting the way in which Aboriginal culture is valued and
maintained in the context of the competing expectations and claims of Western Christianity.
For McDonald, however, many of her informants expressed attitudes to their own race which suggested
to her that they had internalised the racist attitudes of the contemporary colonising missionaries. In
particular, both missionaries and Aboriginal adherents used the language of 'black' and 'white' to
describe respectively the pre-Christian sinful person (black inside and out) and the Christian person
(white inside). In addition, McDonald describes an ongoing demonisation by the AOG missionaries of
Aboriginal cultural practices. It can be difficult to judge the internal attitudes of another - this involves
in a sense speaking for the other. Nonetheless, the evidence that McDonald presents, replaying in part
the ongoing tragedy and injustice of colonisation and in particular the shame engendered in Aboriginal
people through exposure to racist ideologies, is deeply disturbing.
But Blood, Bones and Spirit also challenges an easy understanding of Aboriginal experience of
Christianity. Through taking up and interrupting her narrative of Aboriginal Christianity, McDonald
offers a simple but complex picture of difference, conflict and meaning-making where the experience
of belonging to a local Christian congregation is part of a multifaceted set of negotiations between
kinship responsibilities, the threat of the state through police, courts and other government agencies,
and the demanding but sometimes mediating influence of local churches or assemblies. In chapter four,
'Maddy Jarra's World History', McDonald suggests that '[t]raditional Dreaming narratives are unable to
account for European colonisation' (p. 78). This inability sets the scene for the complex interplay
between colonising Christian narratives and the narratives of Aboriginal adherents whose contemporary
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