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

chapter offers an excellent summary of the ways in which Western religious traditions, specifically
Christianity but also more recent feminist, ecological and new age spiritualities, perpetuate a desire for
another world which is at odds with Aboriginal spiritualities as McDonald presents them. Her reading
of Aboriginal Christianity informs her appraisal of these traditions very well.
While I found Blood, Bones and Spirit engaging, it raised a few questions for me. First, I wondered to
what extent McDonald's articulation of the contrast between Aboriginal and Western Christian
worldviews reinstated the kind of dualistic framework that has undergirded Western philosophy and
theology. As McDonald herself indicates, this dualistic mode of thought can be found in contemporary
Aboriginal distinctions between 'blackfella' and 'whitefella' and between 'Aboriginal way' and 'gardiya
way' (p. 182), and it is perhaps from here that she takes them for her study. Second, I felt that the voices
of her Aboriginal informants were somewhat muted by the weight of interpretation traditional in a
scholarly study of this kind. The book carries twelve pages of coloured photographs, one of the hilly
country around Halls Creek, the remainder of local Aboriginal people mostly engaged in everyday
food-gathering and other subsistence activities such as cleaning out a water hole. While the
photographs are beautiful in themselves, and in a sense offer portraits of the people among whom
McDonald conducted her study, I was unclear about precisely how these images were meant to
complement the text, except perhaps to affirm that despite the ravages of colonisation the Aboriginal
people remain embedded in country. But I was left wondering in what ways McDonald's Gija and Jaru
informants benefited from her study. There seemed to me to be less transparency on this point than, for
example, in Deborah Bird Rose's Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal
Culture (1992).
Nevertheless, this is a timely study. In Australia the percentage of Aboriginal people who claim
adherence to Christianity is significantly higher than that of the non-Aboriginal population. If we are to
respect this aspect of contemporary Aboriginal life, we need to avoid assuming that Aboriginal
Christianity is a carbon copy of Western Christianity. Blood, Bones and Spirit offers a nuanced
approach to the question of the way in which Gija and Jaru people make sense of a religious tradition,
namely Christianity, which emerged in a situation quite different from both their pre-colonial and
colonial experiences. McDonald claims that within the AOG and UAM Aboriginal adherents remain
colonised. At another point she presents a narrative of post-colonial resistance within the local Catholic
community (p. 88). But none of this is over-simplified. The continuing efficacy of Aboriginal spiritual
practices, the uses of Christianity by Aboriginal adherents to counter the extra-Christian colonising
practices of the State and to alleviate some of the violent legacies of colonisation, as well as the
prevailing importance of the land suggest that the ongoing processes of colonisation are not absolute,
but neither are they to be ignored.
Anne Elvey is an Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender
Research at Monash University. Her research interests include ecological, feminist and postcolonial
approaches to biblical interpretation. She has also studied at the United Faculty of
Theology and the Melbourne College of Divinity.
Bobbi Sykes, Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press,
1988) 17.
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