Abstract
Anthropologist Patrick Wolfe claims that “Invasion is a structure not an event.”1 In Australia, the majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples find the socioeconomic and legal-political structures that evolved from invasion to frame their lives. But for the vast majority of nonindigenous Australians such a notion runs contrary to their self-understanding as people of the “lucky country” and the “fair go.” The hidden nature of the privileges that derive from the structure(s) of invasion mean that for nonindigenous Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues are either removed from their daily existence to be of concern or are merely a source of guilt, confusion, and pity. What tends to be identified is that, as Richard Frankland suggests, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are a problem peoples, rather than peoples with a problem.2
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Notes
Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 2.
For example Richard Frankland in Richard Frankland, Muriel Bamblett, Peter Lewis and Robin Trotter, This is Forever Business: A Framework for Maintaining and Restoring Cultural Safety in Aboriginal Victoria (Melbourne: VACCA, 2010), 14.
Walter Brueggemann, Texts that Linger, Words that Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 73.
Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988), 6.
Don Carrington, “Theologians Struggling to Cope at the End of an Era: Theological Educators Confronting a Multicultural World,” in The Cultured Pearl: Australian Readings in Cross-Cultural Theology and Mission, ed. Jim Houston (Melbourne: JBCE, 1988), 12–14. Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther use this concept as the basis for their commentary on the Book of Revelation in Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999), 236. Walter Wink uses the term “the domination system” to describe this reality in
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 9. Walter Brueggemann refers to the “royal consciousness” throughout, in The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1978), and “empire” in The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999); Texts that Linger, Words that Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000) and Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000).
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991), 303.
Kevin Gilbert, “God at the Campfire and That Christ Fella,” in Aboriginal Spirituality: Past, Present, Future, ed. Anne Pattel-Gray, (Blackburn, Victoria: Harper Collins, 1996), 54f.
See Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin, 1982);
Meredith Hooper, Doctor Hunger & Captain Thirst (North Ryde, NSW: Methuen, 1982);
Bill Peach, The Explorers (Sydney, NSW: ABC Enterprises, 1984).
John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 245.
Ian Anderson, “Introduction: the Aboriginal Critique of Colonial Knowing,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed. Michele Grossman (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2003), 24.
Anne Curthoys, “Mythologies,” in The Australian Legend and its Discontents, ed. Richard Niles (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2000), 13.
W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming: The Boyer Lectures 1968 (Canberra: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969), 25.
Peter Lewis, Acting in Solidarity? The Church’s Journey with the Indigenous Peoples of Australia (Melbourne: Uniting Academic Press, 2010), 131.
John Howard as quoted in Sarah Maddison, Beyond White Guilt (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011), 19.
Sean Brennan, Larissa Behrendt, Lisa Strelein, and George Williams, Treaty (Sydney: The Federation Press, 2005), 12 and 102.
Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg, eds., Unsettling the Settler State: Creativity and Resistance in Indigenous Settler-State Governance (Sydney: The Federation, 2011).
See Shaun Berg ed., Coming to Terms: Aboriginal Title in South Australia (Kent Town: Wakefield, 2010), which contains detailed articles on issues surrounding land rights in South Australia.
For example, bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 31ff and Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 9f. For an Australian perspective a useful text is Henry Reynolds, Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia’s Identity (Camberwell, Victoria: Viking Penguin, 2006).
Ben Wadham, “Differentiating Whiteness: White Australia, White Masculinities and Aboriginal Reconciliation,” in Whitening Race, ed., Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004), 201.
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Tiddas Talkin’ up to the White Woman: When Huggins et al. Took on Bell,” in Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, ed., Michele Grossman (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2003), 66.
Inga Clendennen, True Stories: The Boyer Lectures 1999 (Sydney: ABC Books, 1999), 10. As quoted by Frankland in Frankland, Bamblett, Lewis, and Trotter, This is Forever Business, 20.
The Secretariat for National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, Proposed Plan of Action for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect in Aboriginal Communities, (Melbourne: SNAICC, 1996), and State of Denial: Aboriginal Child Abuse in the Northern Territory, (Melbourne: SNAICC, 2003).
Pat Anderson, in Lindsay Murdock, “Aboriginal Action A Betrayal,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 6, 2007. Also Rex Wild, “Unforeseen Circumstances” in Coercive Reconciliation: Stabilise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia, eds. Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (North Carlton, Australia: Arena, 2007), 111–120.
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of Patriarchal White Sovereignty,” Cultural Studies Review 15 (2009): 77.
See particularly Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall (London: SCM Press, 1959),
but also Gerhard von Rad, Genesis (London: SCM, 1972)
and Claus Westermann, Genesis: A Practical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).
Gustavo Gutiérrez, The God of Life, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991), 51.
Often justified by the misinterpretation of Genesis 1:28 and the call to “subdue” the Earth. See e.g., Mark G. Brett, Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (Sheffield: Sheffield, 2008), 32–39.
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, (New York: Vintage, 1983), 4.
For example Mark G. Brett, Genesis: Procreation and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 2000), 45f. The suggestion is that the table of nations in Genesis 10 that outlines the lineage of Noah’s descendants is arranged around “socio-political rather than ethnic considerations.”
Walter Brueggemann, Hope within History (Atlanta: John Knox, 1987), 12.
I am aware that “Exodus as liberation” is problematic given the subsequent appropriation of Canaanite lands by the Israelites. It is an issue particularly raised by Palestinian and American Indigenous theologians and by postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said and Roland Boer. Australian Indigenous theologians at this stage have demonstrated less concern and often use the Mosaic phrase “Let my people go” as a call to liberation. For example Djiniyini Gondarra, “Overcoming the Captivities of the Western Church Context,” in The Cultured Pearl: Australian Readings in Cross-Cultural Theology and Mission, ed. Jim Houston (Melbourne: JBCE, 1988), 180.
Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970). Ellul maintains that the city represents humanity’s rejection of God in the search for independence.
For example: Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993);
Fernando Belo, A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1981);
Howard C. Kee, Community of the New Age: Studies in Mark’s Gospel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977); Myers, Binding the Strong Man; Howard-Brook and Gwyther, Unveiling Empire;
Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical Reading (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2000);
John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, then and now (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
Ched Myers, The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics (Washington, DC: The Church of the Saviour, 2001), 23–29.
Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 87.
However Jon Altman suggests that such a hybridity can and should exist in Aboriginal communities. For example Jon Altman, “What future for remote Indigenous Australian? Economic hybridity and neoliberal turn,” in, Culture Crisis: Anthropology and Politics in Aboriginal Australia, eds. Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 259–280.
Morgan Brigg and Sarah Maddison, “Unsettling Governance: From Bark Petition to You Tube,” in Unsettling the Settler State: Creativity and Resistance in Indigenous Settler-State Governance , eds. Sarah Maddison and Morgan Brigg, (Sydney: The Federation, 2011), 4–8.
Report of the Expert Panel, Recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2012).
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© 2014 Mark G. Brett and Jione Havea
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Lewis, P. (2014). “Terra Nullius Amnesiacs”: A Theological Analysis of the Persistence of Colonization in the Australian Context and the Blocks to Real Reconciliation. In: Brett, M.G., Havea, J. (eds) Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475473_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137475473_12
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