This reading contains selected extracts from “Gondwana Theology” by Rev’d Canon Dr Garry Worete Deverell [1]. Garry is a trawloolway man from northern lutruwita/Tasmania and a priest of the Anglican diocese of Melbourne. He was Academic Dean in the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Divinity between 2020 and 2024.
Basic building blocks of life
“The First Peoples of Australia are just as unlikely as Jews to locate spirituality in rare or special experiences or claims about privileged knowledge concerning the supernatural or otherworldly. For us, spirituality is all about the most basic building blocks of life: country, kin, and the practice of a ritual storytelling that weaves past, present and future living together in a web sometimes referred to as ‘the dreaming’. Let’s say a little about each in turn.
Country. A fundamental basis of every Indigenous way of life is our relationship with the land of our ancestors. The first thing one Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander will ask another when they meet for the first time is ‘where is your country? Where is your sea?’ For the particular country or body of water from which we come represents not only a place of origin or of dwelling. It represents, also, a place of sacred communion with our ancestors, a communion in which we might learn both who we are and what our unique vocation or responsibility in the world might be.
Kin. A second marker of Indigenous spirituality is kin. When an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person meets another, the second question they ask of each other is ‘Who are your mob?’ When I am asked this question, I reply ‘I belong to the trawloolway pairebeenener mob in trouwerner (Tasmania)’…..So, when Aboriginal people talk about kin, they certainly mean it in the usual sense of biological family. But there is a second meaning of kin, for us, and it is deeply connected with our spirituality of land. Because we believe that our country is still filled with the presence of the ancestor-creators who formed it a long time ago, we also regard all that is alive in that land as our kin, our family. For we are descendants of those ancestor-creators. We are their offspring. That is why, whenever we approach a new place that is not familiar to us, we talk to the spiritual presences in the land, the ancestor-creators, asking for their permission to cross that country and for their protection while we are there. For, unlike the children of modernity, we do not take the country and its resources for granted.
The Dreaming. We have now come to our final marker of Indigenous spirituality, that ritual weaving together of land, lore, and kin—in each of their past, present and future dimensions—that is often referred to as ‘The Dreaming’. The dreaming is sometimes mistaken for a series of mythological stories describing events from long ago. In this rendering, the time of the dreaming is past and has no direct bearing on the present or the future; it is also mistakenly assumed that the dreaming is something akin to a Platonic ‘Idea’: that it exists nowhere as an actual body or material reality, but only as the shadow of a chimera in the collective memory or longing of a people. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth! For the dreaming is not primarily about the past. It is like the presence of Yahweh in the burning bush encountered by Moses on Mt Horeb (Exodus 3): it is everywhere and always present, in the living things all around and like the breath in our own nostrils; it is a past rendered meaningful, a future full of promise, and a present aflame with life in all its fulness. The dreaming is nothing less, in fact, than the passage of the divine Spirit in and through the world as body, materiality, lore, flesh.”
A Simple Typology of Indigenous Theologies
In Contemplating Country” [2], Garry Deverell describes four types of Indigenous Christian theology.
“Aboriginal and Torres Street Islander people are, as you would expect, diverse in our beliefs, spiritual practices, and experiences with coloniality. Some of us were given a choice about whether, or how, we received the colonial gospel. Most of us did not, because Christianity was part and parcel of the control colonial authorities sought to exert over our country, our bodies, and our imaginations. In addition, the churches who were given effective carriage of the settler gospel into our communities did so in a variety of different ways. Some were less draconian and more respectful than others. Most were brutally disrespectful. This messy history issues, today, in four broad types of Indigenous Christian theology.
One colonial plant. Eradicate and replace Indigenous plants. This type of Indigenous theology emerged in communities where the missionaries successfully clear-felled the local plants and replaced them with imported ones. The view, here, was that the local plants were evil and Indigenous “souls” could only be saved by suppressing local culture and spirituality entirely. Once the ground was cleared and the plants poisoned, missionaries could then introduce their own beliefs and spiritual practices from the only seed bank in town. This approach survives into the present day in the Aboriginal Evangelical Fellowship (AEF). Tragically, in my view, such theology is entirely consistent with the dominant forms of conservative white theology in the colony.
Two plants entwined. An Indigenous stump with colonial grafts. This kind of stump and graft theology is explicitly inspired by the relationship between Hebrew religion and Gentile Christian faith in St. Paul’s olive tree analogy. Here, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander theologians retain the stump of Indigenous belief and spirituality but graft the colonial gospel onto it in such a way that the traditional knowledge is reinterpreted or reframed within colonial categories. Indigenous spirituality becomes a kind of “Old Testament” to which colonial Christianity is the “New Testament.” The more ancient spiritual forms are absorbed into the cultural-linguistic framework of the newer, colonial religion which is seen as a fulfillment of the former. Creator ancestors become a “Creator Spirit,” for example, and the speaking land of country can only be heard insofar as its teaching is consistent with settler readings of the Bible. This approach would accord, broadly, with that of the Preamble to the Constitution of the Uniting Church in Australia and the work of the Rainbow Spirit Elders.
Two entwined plants. A colonial stump with Indigenous grafts. This, too, is a form of stump-and-graft theology, but explicitly reversing the Pauline hierarchy. Here the settler-Christian gospel is reframed or reinterpreted in the light of Indigenous knowledges. Somewhat paradoxically, in this example, the historically older cultural-linguistic framework of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people seeks to absorb the newly arrived gospel of colonists. The settler “God” becomes, as we shall see, the dreaming or kinship matrix, and both “Christ” and “Bible” become country.
Two plants. An Indigenous tree and a colonial tree, growing side by side. This kind of theology neither seeks the eradication of any plant nor the integration of one plant into another by way of a graft. Instead, it seeks to imagine a world in which a local plant and colonial plants may live side by side without either of them becoming the strongest or the most important in some kind of hierarchy. In some ways, this is the kind of theology which is practically operant amongst most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, regardless of our conscious or personal commitments. For each of us must walk in two worlds, whether we want to or not. When I am with my Aboriginal cousins, for example, I invoke the “ancestors” and “country” and the “dreaming” as primary spiritual categories. And this is the case whether those cousins are Christians or not. But when I am with my settler Christian friends I talk about “Christ” and “Scripture” and the “Holy Spirit.” There is little other option, because very few settler Christians seem able to step outside of their assumptions about the world and about truth. That is their coloniality. At a pragmatic level, in other words, we Indigenous people assume that there are two cultural-linguistic frameworks which have their own integrity, and which cannot be readily transformed or even translated into the other. In this fourth type, Indigenous spirituality and colonial theology are ideally able to talk with each other, and even to influence each other by virtue of the communicative genius of analogy and metaphor, but never to the point where they morph into an entirely united, somehow hybrid, religious tradition. In practice, of course, the ideal is rarely activated because the colonial trees are more numerous and self-absorbed than our own trees, and they generally pretend we don’t exist.”
Questions for reflection
How has your life journey and enculturation affected your perspective of Indigenous spirituality?
in what way might your understanding of Indigenous spirituality enhance your understanding of your own spirituality?
What question would you like to ask our guest presenter, Garry Deverell, when you have the opportunity?
[1] “Gondwana Theology” by Garry Worete Deverell, 2nd ed., ATF Press, 2024, pp. 2-7
[2] “Contemplating Country – More Gondwana Theology” by Garry Worete Deverell, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2023, pp.12-14
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BUTTERFLY SERIES
04 March 2025, 5:45 pm – 7:45 pm AEST
Virtual event on Zoom
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