Abstract
The Australian prime minister’s apology to the Stolen Generation in the national Parliament in 2008 was conceived as a spectacle, a visual act to be remembered, as a visible exclamation point in history. That moment was not just about the formal text of speeches, but about the ceremonial positioning of Aboriginal people who had been stolen and forgotten and their becoming visible and seen within the environment of the most powerful political space in Australia. One of the ten official photographers commissioned to assist in that process of creating a visual memory, Juno Gemes, said of her experience: “History … is about awakening. It is also about temporary blindness and how we regain our sight.”1 It is this observation that I would like to explore further in this chapter by looking at the aspect of visuality as a site for public theology and cultural analysis. This will involve an analysis of visuality as a form of touch, a form of looking that anticipates a meeting with the subject of one’s gaze, where detached observation moves toward a sensual meeting, and where theological reflection touches the skin of perception.
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Notes
Juno Gemes, “Witnessing the Apology,” http://www.junogemes.com/exhibitions/apology/index.htm (accessed Jan 03, 2013).
Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed (Sydney: Harper and Row, 1984).
See the important collection, Ian Donaldson and Tamsin Donaldson, Eds., Seeing the First Australians (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1985).
Rod Pattenden, “Visible Religion, Visible Spirituality: Boundary Management and the life of Images,” in Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production, edited by Carole Cusack and Alex Norman (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
Peter Sutton, Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia (Melbourne: Viking, 1998), 15.
Quoted in Hetti Perkins and Victoria Lynn, “Blak Artists, Cultural Activists,” Australian Perspecta: 1993 (Art Gallery of NSW, 1993), x.
Michael N. Jagessar and Stephen Burns, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (Sheffield: Equinox, 2011), 26.
Rosemary Crumlin and Anthony Knight, Aboriginal Art and Spirituality (North Blackburn: Collins Dove, 1991). Also see the Warmun Art Centre website (http://www.warmunart.com.au), which offers an insight to the culture and images of this community.
Rosemary Crumlin, The Blake Book: Religion, Spirituality, Art in Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan, 2011), 184–85.
Rod Pattenden, “Bliss, Blasphemy and Belief: Tensions between Religious Tradition and Contemporary Art,” ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies 22:3 (2011): 4–12.
Judith Ryan with Kim Akerman, Images of Power: Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1993), 40–47.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2.
Catherine Laudine discusses ecological and land-care practices and their relationship to religion in traditional Aboriginal society in Australia in Aboriginal Environmental Knowledge: Rational Reverence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
Rainbow Spirit Elders, Rainbow Spirit Theology, 2nd ed. (Hindmarsh: ATF Press, 2007), 30.
David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California, 2012), 48.
Stephen Pattison, Seeing Things: Deepening Relations with Visual Artefacts (London: SCM, 2007), 53.
Djiniyini Gondarra, Series of Reflections of Aboriginal Theology (Darwin: Uniting Church in Australia, Northern Synod, 1986), 30.
Lee Miena Skye, “The Spirit of God: The Centre for Australian Aboriginal Christian women,” in Seeking the Centre, Religion, Literature and Arts Conference Proceedings 2001, edited by C. Rayment and M. Byrne (Sydney: University of Sydney Printing Service, 2001 [265–75]), 273.
David Morgan, Ed., Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (London: Routledge, 2010), 8.
See Mark G. Brett, “Canto ergo sum: Indigenous Peoples and Postcolonial Theology,” Pacifica 16 (2003): 247–56;
Ivan Jordan, Their Way: Indigenous Christianity amongst the Warlpiri People (Darwin, NT: Ivan Jordan, 2003);
Noel Loos, White Christ: Black Cross, The Emergence of a Black Church (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007);
and Graham Paulson, “Towards an Aboriginal Theology,” Pacifica 19 (2006): 310–21.
Elizabeth A. Johnson, Women, Earth and Creator Spirit (New York: Paulist, 1993), 60.
Sallie McFague, Super, Natural Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997).
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© 2014 Jione Havea
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Pattenden, R. (2014). Seeing Otherwise: Touching Sacred Things. In: Havea, J. (eds) Indigenous Australia and the Unfinished Business of Theology. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426673_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426673_3
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