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

stories cannot be easily categorised as colonial products.
Importantly, McDonald contrasts what is significant for Aboriginal adherents with what is meaningful
for their pastors. For example, where Aboriginal adherents might focus on health, their pastors applaud
heavenly salvation as a higher good. In the latter view, for example, healing of the body is sought not
so much for the health of the adherent as to display divine power and glory. Throughout the course of
her book, McDonald develops a series of comparisons which distinguish Aboriginal Christianity from
the experience, worldviews, and expectations of the pastors and the universalist Christianity they
represent. Centrally there is the contrast, and indeed this catalyses McDonald's study, between
spiritualities of place and a universalised religion of placelessness that gave meaning to displaced
peoples of the first-century CE Mediterranean. McDonald also identifies other key differences between
Aboriginal and traditional Christian understandings. For example, the way knowledge, spirituality and
personal power is situated in the body differs: for Aboriginal adherents the 'binji', (munda), the
diaphragm and stomach area is a corporeal focus which both parallels and contrasts with the Western
emphasis on heart and mind (pp. 116-7). Western Christian notions of individual salvation are at odds
with the values of responsibility toward one's local kinship group and country. Inter-relationships with
local, protective ancestral powers, which accompany Aboriginal spiritualities of place, are at variance
with a belief in a universalised and salvationary Holy Spirit power which accompanies a religion of
placelessness (p.103). Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Christians model differently the relationships
between the divine and the human which parallel relationships between pastors and ordinary adherents.
McDonald argues that for the Aboriginal Christians she encountered the boss/worker model (drawn
from the experience of station life and in which mutual obligation plays a part) prevails over the
military model presented by conservative Christianity in which obedience follows command (pp. 135-
8).
Further, McDonald notes:
The churches have been successful in suppressing traditional religious practices such as initiation
ceremonies and death rituals which are expressed through performance and spectacle. They have been
markedly less successful in suppressing (or appropriating) the beliefs and values which underlie these
practices. Beliefs and values cannot be seen, and values in particular are rarely articulated. Both
Aboriginal people and missionaries tend to interpret the other's behaviour by situating it within their
own cultural context and judging it according to their own standards of appropriate behaviour. As a
result, there is a great deal of unrecognised misinterpretation and miscommunication between
Aboriginal people and missionaries. This protects Aboriginal beliefs and values from close scrutiny and
evaluation by missionaries and other agents of change. (pp.148-9)
The layers of difference, which the contrasting expectations and experience of Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal Christians represent, form the basis not only for conflict between missionaries and
Aboriginal people, but also for the development of an alternative Aboriginal Christianity in which
kinship responsibilities, relationship to country and the pursuit of land rights retain their salience in
Aboriginal life. McDonald concludes her study: 'Rather than accepting a religion of exile (that is, a
salvation religion) as compensation for dispossession and displacement, Aboriginal people in northern
Australia are choosing to repossess their land instead' (p. 201).
Another significant aspect of this book is the way in which it moves between McDonald's reading of
Aboriginal culture and experience and her consequent re-reading of the early Mediterranean and
Hellenistic origins of Christianity. Methodologically this approach enriches the study by allowing the
anthropological eye to turn its gaze upon the cultural foundations of Western Christianity. The final
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