The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History

By Meredith Lake

'STUNNING, REFRESHING AND ORIGINAL.' — JULIA BAIRDKoby Abberton emerges like a shark on to the sand at Maroubra Beach. Tattooed from shoulder to shoulder, his body bares letters like teeth: 'My brothers keeper'.In this surprising and revelatory history of the Bible in Australia, Meredith Lake gets under the skin of a text that's been read, wrestled with, preached and tattooed, and believed to be everything from a resented imposition to the very Word of God. The Bible in Australia explores how in the hands of Bible-bashers, immigrants, suffragists, evangelists, unionists, writers, artists and Indigenous Australians, the Bible has played a contested but defining role in this country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781742245102

Book preview

THE

BIBLE

IN

AUSTRALIA

MEREDITH LAKE is a historian, broadcaster and award-winning writer, with a PhD from the University of Sydney. She is the host of Soul Search on ABC Radio National, a program about the lived experience of religion and spirituality. Her other books include The Bible Down Under and Faith in Action: Hammond Care. She is an Honorary Associate of the Department of History, Sydney University.

‘An endlessly fascinating book … Lake brings a generosity of both mind and spirit to this vast story.’ – Michael McGirr, Sydney Morning Herald

‘The Bible in Australia is an unpretentious title for a remarkable book, and yet it is accurate enough. The Bible has been an ever-present aspect of life in Australia for 230 years, but no one has ever thought through its profound importance before.’ – Alan Atkinson, Australian Book Review

‘Lake’s authority as an historian, her skills as a writer and her subject matter expertise are all on full display in this work … The Bible in Australia will surely dominate the short lists of every major literary award over the coming months and will certainly come to be regarded as one of the most important Australian history books of the year.’ – Rachel Franks, The Dictionary of Sydney

‘It is often popularly assumed that Australia is a secular society, even as we debate the merits of religious freedom and the right to worship. The Bible in Australia presents, for the first time, a thorough examination of the broad cultural, political, and historical context that Christianity and the Bible have played in Australia since 1788. This is a vast and sweeping book that covers ground from the religiosity of new immigrants to the impact of the Bible, via missions and missionaries, on the world’s oldest living culture. This is a highly original look at our past; a highly readable narrative that reminds contemporary Australians of the forces that shaped our culture. Lake is comprehensive in her analysis of the impact of the Bible on Indigenous culture, its role in frontier conflict, and its cultural impact on free settlers, and reform movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Australia’s shift towards secularism since the First World War and how the Bible has lost influence and favour is documented in meticulous detail. The lively, energetic and highly accessible writing covers a range of topics, including popular culture, music, unions and political activism. The Bible in Australia adds an extra dimension to our understanding of Australian religious and cultural history and addresses a significant gap in our collective knowledge.’ – WINNER of the 2019 Prime Minister’s Australian History Prize, judges’ comments

‘The Bible is everywhere in the history of Australia since British settlement – under Australian skin, as Meredith Lake eloquently puts it – yet The Bible in Australia is the first occasion on which an historian has placed it in the foreground as a subject in its own right. As ancient and modern, sacred and secular, the Word of God for some and yet composite and fluid, the Bible is interwoven with the diversity and complexity of Australian life.

[This book] is a book of remarkable originality. Formidably researched yet carrying its scholarship with an enviable lightness of touch, this is a ground-breaking cultural and social history. As the songwriter Paul Kelly says, biblical stories and language are part of the cultural air that we breathe. Lake’s outstanding narrative history captures this atmosphere and makes sense of it with a rare skill. Reputedly secular and secularising Australia will never quite look the same again.’ – WINNER of the 2019 NSW Premier’s History Award: Australian History Prize, judges’ comments

‘Tremendously stimulating and original, The Bible in Australia is a mind-altering read. A historian of religion, society and culture, Meredith Lake takes it as dogma that we need to go deeper (than what appears obvious) to do good history. Here, she reconsiders the competing myths about Australian society, as either doggedly secular or straightforwardly Christian, by deconstructing that most-recognised of books into the globalising, the cultural and the theological Bible(s).

As Julia Baird remarks, Lake breathes colour, poetry and life into our understanding of the contested but defining role of the Bible in Australia. Beautiful portraits of individuals reveal a depth of empathy, openness and imagination that mark her as a remarkable writer and historian.’ – WINNER of the Nonfiction Award 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, judges’ comments

‘Lake shows that Australia has been neither a secular society nor a Christian nation. At every level the Bible has been held to be everything from a resented imposition to the word of God. However, even while Bible reading and biblical literacy decline, the Bible is an indelible part of our story. This is a history of national importance and an insight into Australian culture.’ – WINNER Australian Christian Book of the Year in 2018, judges’ comments

THE

BIBLE

IN

AUSTRALIA

A CULTURAL HISTORY

MEREDITH

LAKE

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Meredith Lake 2018, 2020

First published 2018

New edition 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

ISBN:9781742237213 (paperback)

9781742245102 (ebook)

9781742249629 (ePDF)

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Peter Long

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: Under the skin

PART 1 | COLONIAL FOUNDATIONS

1In the beginning?

2Indigenous encounters

3God’s immigrants?

PART 2 | THE GREAT AGE OF THE BIBLE

4Spreading the Word

5Seeking the good society

6Re-evaluating the text

PART 3 | BIBLE AND NATION

7Advancing Australia Fair

8Politics and the Bible

9War and its aftermath

PART 4 | A SECULAR AUSTRALIA?

10The turning point

11Re-imagining Australia

12The Bible in the new millennium

Select bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

PREFACE

Political Bibles

In June 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, US President Donald Trump stood outside St John’s Episcopal Church in Washington and held up a Bible.

By then, anger at racial inequality – and fresh grief at its deadly expression – had been spilling onto American streets for weeks. Trump was unsympathetic, and that day in the capital, police had turned tear gas on demonstrators to clear the way for his arrival. He delivered a ‘law and order’ speech to reporters, and brandished the Christian scriptures in a stunt broadcast around the world.

‘Is that your Bible?’ a journalist asked.

‘It’s a Bible’, Trump replied.

In his grip, it was not a personal or devotional text, but a political weapon – an object with totemic power.

In mid-2019 as many as two million Hong Kongers marched in defense of their political freedoms. Some of them were church pastors; some carried their Bibles. Many adopted a hymn – ‘Sing Hallelujah to the Lord’ – as their unofficial anthem.

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement could not be defined as Christian in a straightforward sense, but key activist Joshua Wong recently told the ABC, ‘we should be salt and light in the society, and that teaching is from the Bible … I think now, it’s like how can we get out of Egypt, under the crackdown of a tyrant emperor. ’¹

In Wong’s reading, the Bible was a text of liberation, nourishing an idea of justice that could be turned against a dominant power.

On Easter Sunday, 2019, Australian Liberal leader Scott Morrison invited cameras into his church, a large Pentecostal congregation in Sydney’s southern suburbs. In the context of a looming federal election, and high-stakes debates about religious freedom and discrimination, he was photographed with his eyes closed, hands raised, singing in worship.

A few weeks later, on election night, Morrison declared his surprise victory ‘a miracle’. He had previously said that ‘the Bible was not a policy handbook’, but many wondered – what turn would the long argument about religion and politics take, with a Pentecostal in the Lodge for the first time?

IN THE TWO AND A HALF YEARS SINCE THIS BOOK WAS first published, potent new images have clustered around the Bible. Internationally, and here in Australia, it has been in the spotlight in ways I did not anticipate. It turns out that even a historian of religion can underestimate the Bible as a text in motion in contemporary society.

The recent public prominence of the Bible has a lot to do with politics. These days, politics is the primary media lens on religious issues in our common life. This hints at the way the nation state has taken on aspects of the sacred. In our so-called secular age, politics has become something to congregate around, in our competing tribes. At the same time, the visibility of religion signals that it is not going away, or retreating entirely into ‘private’ life. Here in Australia, and elsewhere, the Bible has all kinds of political afterlives.

Yet politics is not the only lens for considering the Bible or its uptake in society. One of the pleasures of writing this book was telling the story of people with a creative connection to the Bible – such as rocker Nick Cave, author Helen Garner, painter Grace Cossington Smith and songwriter Paul Kelly. I was especially fascinated by the sceptics and agnostics who maintained an existential dialogue with the Bible – from provocateur Germaine Greer to legendary bush outfitter RM Williams.

Many more have found the Bible an inspiration – not so much for a political ‘position’ but a mode of being, a whole way of life. While doing the research for this book, I was gripped by the stories of suffragist Bessie Lee, trades unionist William Spence, and Torres Strait leader and Mabo case plaintiff, Father Dave Passi. Each of them had a devotional relationship to the Bible as a sacred text, that nourished an activism for social justice that transformed Australian society.

It is precisely these different experiences and interpretations that I wanted to explore. This book is not a history of Christianity, nor of the church, but of how all kinds of people in Australia have encountered and reacted to the Bible – from tattooed convicts to middle-class sceptics, Indigenous evangelists to contemporary writers. It is not primarily about politics per se, either, but it does keep a keen eye on who is using the Bible, why and how.

THE RECEPTION OF THIS BOOK SO FAR HAS CONSISTently surprised me. I wrote it in hope because, after all, Australians coined the phrase ‘Bible-basher’ more than 120 years ago now. Even apart from current political debates, there’s a cultural streak of impatience with preachy types, easily triggered by the word ‘Bible’. In light of that, I suspect some people have heard of the topic or seen the title and run a million miles.

But I’ve been thrilled to discover that the audience I hoped for does exist: numerous people, who may not be Christians, prepared to entertain a hunch that there’s more to say about religion and culture than we might expect from the headlines.

At Adelaide Writers’ Week, I met a former nun turned atheist. ‘It sure takes a lot to make me pick up a book about religion,’ she told me, ‘but this one did it.’ After a packed-out panel session I had with the Rev Tim Costello and novelist Christos Tsiolkas, another self-confessed ‘secular non-believer’ remarked it was ‘one of the most thought provoking discussions’ they had heard in some time.² At an indie bookshop in Brisbane’s West End, a young staff member confessed her surprise at finding that the story is not just about social and political conservatives. There are radicals here too, both Christian and otherwise.

A second broad group of readers is made up of Christians. While this book is not quite addressed to them, it is in many ways their story. At the same time, I suspect some of this interest reflects a desire for signposts. The relationship of church and society is changing very rapidly at the moment, in Australia and other parts of the world. Some Christian readers are excited by this and see possibilities for new relationships between the Bible and culture. But I’ve also met some who feel anxious about what they see as the marginalisation of Christian contributions and viewpoints in public life. Some are baffled by the gap between public representations of their faith, and their own experience of Christianity in life. How can anyone – including Christians – get their bearings right now?

History can help, in part by panning out from the media cycle. A longer view can open up perspectives on cultural transformation, as well as ‘religious decline’. And at a time when the dominance of American news makes it easy for the US to become the default reference point, paying closer attention to this place shows the Bible as a globalising text – with a complicated story both in and beyond ‘western’ societies.

WHEN I SET OUT TO WRITE THIS BOOK, I WAS AN UNknown author, juggling research and writing with the care of young children, on the fringe of the academic gig economy. As such, it was a special, if terrifying, joy to have the finished work reviewed so carefully by other historians and public commentators.

I especially appreciated those who understood the project perhaps better than I did. In the Australian Book Review, Professor Alan Atkinson compared ‘the legend of the Bible’ to Russell Ward’s ‘Australian legend’ – which had presented an influential vision of the ‘Australian character’ as typically sceptical of religious as well as intellectual pursuits. But perhaps what some have seen as scepticism, he ventured, may have been more like ‘taciturn bafflement?’³ Could it be that matters of faith are not uninteresting, or even unimportant to Australians, so much as hard to put into words and discuss frankly?

I was further encouraged by Atkinson’s remark that ‘this book raises more questions than it can reasonably answer’. My main aim is to open up a conversation, rather than exhaust one. And it’s true that even a thick tome like this comes nowhere near a comprehensive treatment of its subject. For instance, more attention could be paid to the Bible’s place in Catholic and Orthodox spirituality, and to the reception among Jews of what is sometimes called ‘the Hebrew Bible’, the Tanakh. There’s also a story to be told about the use and abuse of the Bible in public debates over traditional morality – recently reprised by Australian rugby star Israel Folau and his infamous social media posts about homosexuality.⁴

As a material object, too, the sheer scale of Bible distribution remains a challenge to comprehend. On top of the work of Bible Societies, churches and booksellers, discussed in part here, Gideons International have distributed close to 16 million Bibles and New Testaments in Australia since the mid-1950s (you’ve probably come across one in a hotel or hospital drawer).⁵ All this suggests rich possibilities for rethinking many aspects of Australian life and culture, not least in the intellectual sphere.⁶

IN AUGUST 2019, NGUNAWAL ELDER WALLY BELL WELcomed me onto his traditional country, where Australia’s federal parliament house now stands. For thousands of years, long before the foundation of Canberra, it was a meeting place where decisions were made. I was there as a shortlisted author at the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

Awards ceremonies are surreal occasions, I’ve discovered, and this one felt an especially long way from the realities of actually writing the book. Mingle with the literary establishment! Smile for the press pack!

Parliament was in session, so the politicians ducked back and forth between the awards and the chamber. Almost comically, the Prime Minister was called out to vote half way through his opening speech. He missed the announcement of the Australian History Prize, so I shook hands with the ‘alternative prime minister’ of the day – master of ceremonies, Annabel Crabb from the ABC.

Minutes later, Scott Morrison popped back in and resumed his formal remarks, before adding his congratulations and announcing that The Bible in Australia was on his summer reading list. Then he left again, and I gave a belated acceptance speech – finally returning to my seat, astonished.

The rest of the afternoon was a whirl of small talk with well-wishers, happy phonecalls to family and friends, and interviews with the media (including arrangements for my first live television appearance).

In the midst of it all, I checked my social media feed. With hashtags like #GetReligionOutOfOurParliaments, the tweets were rolling in:

‘Captain’s pick?’

‘I am speechless. Who were the judges?’

‘Whoever they were, I bet SM made it clear that something very Christian needs to win a prize. Ffs.’

At least briefly, the prize had propelled my work into the spotlight. And regardless of the fact that Morrison had not interfered in the selection process, or even read the book, a ‘Prime Minister’s award’ made it a magnet for the expression of some very palpable anxieties.

‘Ah yes, the bible, perhaps the single most plagiarised and self-contradictory work of fiction ever written by anyone since the dawn of language.’

‘The quickest way to find the cultural history of The Bible in Australia is to look up the child sex offender registry.’

‘If the last chapter doesn’t include clear reasons for excluding all religion from matters of national importance, it is worth less than toilet paper.’

As I travelled home from Canberra on the bus, I could see there was a deep cynicism at play, much of it focussed on the Prime Minister. Some of these reactions also likely reflected deeper wounds and betrayals.

These are acutely personal topics, and the sheer strength of feeling on religious matters is not to be underestimated. This is partly what makes the Bible and its reception here both important – and difficult – to discuss.

In seeking to open up a complex and contested topic like the story of the Bible in Australia, I take it as my responsibility to find a generous register for honest conversation. As a writer, and now as a broadcaster, I remain hopeful that there is a way of having often challenging discussions relating to faith – with a careful eye on the powerful, and a compassionate ear for the vulnerable. It is for the reader to decide whether I have succeeded in this book.

For all that, though, there is sometimes an abiding, even visceral suspicion of people who show any interest in the Bible. As such, let me give some account of my own rather layered history with the subject of this book.

Personal Bibles

I grew up on the northern fringe of Sydney, near a national park. My family walked, cycled, fished and picnicked in the bush a lot. My dad, a geography teacher, often pointed out shell middens, carvings and grooves in the rocks. I’ve since read that there are more documented Aboriginal sites in that part of the country, than almost anywhere else. Bordering Deerubbin – as the Hawkesbury River is called in the local tongue – Kuring-Gai Chase National Park is dense with Aboriginal cultural significance.

As a kid, though, I was barely interested. I didn’t know a word like Deerubbin, or give much thought to the Aboriginal history of the place where I lived. As a high schooler in the 1990s, I became aware of political movements for reconciliation, but even then I didn’t make meaningful connections between past and present.

It wasn’t until young adulthood, when I returned from a short stint living overseas, that I learned something of the violence of European colonisation in the Hawkesbury region. Studying history at university, I began the ongoing process of listening to Indigenous perspectives, and probing my own privilege as one born of the colonisers and raised as a Christian.

In terms of the Bible, my family always attended Anglican churches. As a child, I was taken to Sunday school each week, and enrolled in school ‘Scripture’. (Special Religious Education classes were then – and still are – widespread in NSW government primary schools.)

At home, I read a comic book version of the Bible until it fell to pieces. Around the dinner table, we kids not only said grace but sometimes memorised verses from the Bible. My parents had them written on little coloured flash cards. One I still remember came from the book of Isaiah – about how flowers eventually die, but ‘the word of the Lord’ stands forever. We learned the reference by tipping out heads back and rolling our eyes up towards the ceiling (try saying it quickly: ‘eyes-higher’). I realise now that was rather unusual, but at the time I didn’t know any different!

For my parents, Christianity was not an intellectual abstraction or a social convention, but a transformative relationship with Christ. They had both converted as teenagers, and harboured hopes of becoming missionaries. But their plans ran aground when I was five, and Dad was diagnosed with cancer. He survived, but the illness upended his theological study and put an end to any thought of moving overseas. He was pretty shaken by the possibility that he would die in his 30s, leaving a widow and two young children.

Through that experience, I think Dad found a galvanising hope in scripture. The gospel of John, and passages like Lamentations 3:21-24, which speaks of the never-ending love of God, were especially important to him. Upon recovering, he and Mum had two more children, and got on with putting their faith into practice – in their ordinary work, and in their local church and community. Years later, when Dad was diagnosed with cancer again, this time terminally, he found deep comfort in the Bible and often shared a verse or two with those who came to visit him.

As for Mum, she studied theology on and off for many years. After Dad died, she worked as a chaplain in residential aged care. Before that, through my early life, she represented our parish at Synod, and, as a volunteer, ran a playgroup and various other community ministries. I came to see her as the embodiment of a verse like 1 Peter 4:10 – ‘Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.’

Neither Mum nor Dad were ever ordained, but as lay-people they both preached regularly to our congregation. Mum felt ‘called’ to this ministry, and always received appreciative feedback from her hearers. But in the early 1990s, Australian Anglicans were debating the role of women as church teachers and leaders. Some members of our local parish disapproved of Mum preaching. A few even went out of their way to tell me, a young teenager, that women should not teach men – referring to verses like 1 Corinthians 14:34 – ‘Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.’

I don’t remember being part of explicit conversations about how such verses might be interpreted in our own time and place. But in the Sydney diocese of the Anglican church, moves to open the priesthood to women were defeated in the Synod in 1996. That decision remains in place, and by the time I left home, a university student, my mum had stopped preaching.

Looking back now, I see the cost and the courage in Mum raising her voice. I see my younger self learning the lesson that, even in churches, there can be serious differences over the meaning and application of the Bible as God’s word. These differences have both personal and corporate consequences, sometimes lasting decades. Some interpretations get institutionalised, normalised and replicated such that they accrue enormous cultural power.

FOR ME, STUDYING HISTORY OPENED UP A SPACE IN which to begin making sense of this constellation of experiences. My nine years at Sydney University introduced me to new perspectives on the past and how to think about it. At the same time, I became acutely aware that history can be just another thing to fight over.

I began writing this book in 2014, in the midst of a heated debate over the history taught to Australian high school students. A new national curriculum was in the final stages of preparation, with broad priorities including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, and Australia’s engagement with Asia. Then, late in the piece, a two-man government review argued that the new curriculum was ‘unbalanced’: they said it needed re-writing ‘to properly recognise the impact and significance of Western civilisation and Australia’s Judeo-Christian heritage, values and beliefs.’⁷

There was a stir in the media. Politicians and academics weighed in. Watching on, I felt uneasy about the binary way the argument seemed to be unfolding. Was the choice between an Australian history that accepted Indigenous cultures and experiences as central, and a history that took the impact of Christianity seriously? I wanted to probe the ways these themes intersected and informed each other. How was the Bible bound up with the contact of European and Indigenous cultures? And what have Indigenous Australians made of it – politically, creatively, theologically?

Readers, it turns out, have also been interested in these questions. Many have spoken or written to me to say so – it is by far the most common response I receive to this book. I think these questions really matter, even beyond churches and classrooms. We all live with the consequences of how the Bible has been used here in the past – including by colonists who drew on it to assert an idea of ‘terra nullius’ and to justify the suppression of Indigenous cultures, and by Indigenous Australians who drew on it to resist those same injustices, and to envision a fairer society. As biblical scholar Dr Robyn Whitaker remarked in her review in The Conversation, ‘the Bible’s chequered history in this country must be acknowledged in order for reconciliation to continue’.⁸

IT’S WINTER 2020, AND I AM WRITING THIS PREFACE under something like lockdown. The world is grappling with a deadly coronavirus that has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, with no end in sight. Here in Australia, the pandemic has followed on the heels of a horror summer of storms, floods and unprecedented fires. One might well wonder, as one Sydneysider did, ‘And when will the plague of locusts arrive?’⁹

In the face of devastating losses, it’s almost too easy to declare these disasters of ‘biblical proportions’. But in the sense of unveiling or disclosing reality, they have an apocalyptic quality. The burden of suffering has fallen unevenly, exposing deep inequalities in society. It has also underlined our shared vulnerabilities, and the contingency of our lives now.

For those of us who’ve been spared the worst, the disruption compels the question ‘what now?’ Amidst the many possibilities, I wonder how the pandemic will reshape the Bible’s place in contemporary Australian life.

There are already indications of change among the most regular readers of the Bible, in the contours of devotional life. As churches have suspended regular services, most have moved their main meetings online. This must have knock-on effects for the way believers corporately encounter and experience the Bible – including in hymnody, liturgy and preaching. With the shift into digital and domestic spaces, there may be more scope for new forms of worship, still nourished by scripture but perhaps less tied to religious institutions.

More broadly, the pandemic has opened up a disconcerting space in many people’s lives – a space that ordinary activities like going out with friends, or commuting to work, had once occupied. I’ve seen this peculiar situation described as an ‘apausalypse’ – a crisis-induced slowing down, even to the point of stopping.¹⁰ It has been difficult to get to grips with, but perhaps, as lawyer and human rights advocate Nyadol Nyuon suggested, we can make something of this ‘sacred pause’, and, from the wreck of the pandemic, salvage and resurrect an inner life?¹¹ There seems a heightened interest in the contemplative. And, if past pandemics are any guide, we might expect both new forms of solidarity, and a more mystical, inward turn in spiritual life.¹²

The Bible will not always play an obvious part in this, but new research suggests that one in four Australians have been reading the Bible more than they did before the pandemic.¹³ Many people who aren’t conventionally Christian have been arrested by Julia Baird’s recent reflections on faith as a wick for divine light. As she put it in her bestseller Phosphorescence, quoting from the gospel of John, ‘the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’.

As for me, I’ve always found that the Bible rewards attention and time. To read it is like sitting down with both a wise old friend, and a stranger from an unknown place. I find it confronting, difficult, and beautiful; centring and charged with hope. On a personal level, it remains an enduring companion in an unjust world and through this disorienting time of life.

When The Bible in Australia was first released, I had little idea that it would have such a life of its own. I certainly didn’t expect the awards, or to have the challenging but exhilarating task of translating part of the story into an episode of ABC TV’s Compass.¹⁴ I appreciate the attention of each reader, and every invitation I’ve received to speak about the book – from the local library down the road to universities in New Zealand, from small suburban church groups to crowds of thousands at writers’ festivals.

Thank you to all those who’ve supported me between then and now, including my Religion and Ethics colleagues at the ABC, and the staff at NewSouth Publishing. Special thanks to my friends and family, who’ve lived with this project for a long time now – particularly my husband and our children, the third of whom, Heidi, was born the day after I returned the original index proofs. Perhaps one day this book will help her get her bearings in a complex, changing society.

INTRODUCTION:

UNDER THE SKIN

Koby Abberton emerges like a shark on to the sand at Maroubra Beach. Tattooed from shoulder to shoulder, his body bares letters like teeth: ‘My brothers keeper’. The phrase proclaims Abberton’s fierce loyalty to the Bra Boys, the infamous surfer tribe he leads. It defines the us-and-them mentality he and his Maroubra crew have forged in confrontation with ‘outsiders’ and in defiance of police.

‘My brother’s keeper’ comes from the Bible. In the book of Genesis, chapter four, Cain attempts to dodge responsibility for his murdered sibling Abel by asking God: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The question sums up Cain’s disregard for his brother’s life. The Bra Boys have grabbed the phrase and turned its old meaning upside down.

Abberton’s tattoo is suggestive of the Bible’s place in twenty-first-century Australia. It floats in fragments across the surface of popular consciousness. There are traces almost everywhere, even in the hypermasculine subculture of a suburban beach. At the same time its religious elements have sunk into the deep; its older meanings are readily subverted and reshaped. But even in a truncated form, adrift from theology and even faith, the Bible can still mark out identities and provide people with a creed. In the Bra Boys’ case, it even retains secular missionaries. In 2012, Abberton launched a ‘brothers keeper’ surfwear label, with a concept store on Maroubra’s Marine Parade. The shop wall was emblazoned with a mashup of Psalm 23 and Genesis 4: As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil except God for I am my brother’s keeper’. The same sentence was printed on board shorts in a ‘shadow of death’ range, and there is a video on YouTube showing Abberton painting out the design.

The Bible’s changing place in Australian culture, over the few hundred years since it was first hauled across the water and on to a Sydney beach, offers a rich and surprising history. There is even a wonderful true story about the crew of the Gorgon, sailing back to England from the penal settlement on Norfolk Island in 1792. Hauling in a shark they had caught and cutting it open, they were astonished to find inside ‘a Prayer Book, Quite fresh, not a leaf of it defaced’. The book had been inscribed with the name of a convict presumably lost at sea during the original voyage out to New South Wales: ‘Francis Carthy, cast for death in the Year 1786 and Repreaved the Same day at four oClock in the afternoon’.¹

The cargo of the First Fleet included hundreds of Scriptures, in hard copy, unloaded at Sydney Cove and distributed at the discretion of the chaplain. Fragments of the Bible were also transmitted by European colonists through common and formal speech, in various kinds of writing, and even in the inscriptions on convicts’ bodies. A significant minority of people transported to Australia had tattoos based on the Bible. Convict George Dakin, for example, was marked with Proverbs 14:9, ‘Fools mock at sin’. Fourteen-year-old Joseph Dummet had an Adam and Eve tattoo along with the admission ‘the serpent beguiled me & I did Eat’. John Oldershaw had a crucifixion scene above the ominous words of Amos 4:2, ‘Prepare to meet thy God’. Joseph Lamb, a thief, bore a warmer encouragement from the Psalms, ‘Love God for he is good to all’.² Many more were marked with crosses or other scriptural scenes and symbols. From the outset of its Australian career, the Bible has been more than a book. It has belonged not only to the upright or the educated: it is a word for all kinds of people.

The Bible still gets under Australian skin. Whatever opinions people may hold about the state of the churches, the integrity of Christian belief, or even the nature of secularism, it is clear that religion has not gone away. In the early twenty-first century, it is a major topic of public conversation – often a deeply polarising one. The story of the Bible in Australia offers a fresh perspective. It invites us to reconsider some competing myths. One is that Australia, since the convicts, has been a doggedly secular society and culture. Another is that Australia is (or was, or should be) a straightforwardly Christian nation. The often surprising history of the Bible here disrupts both assumptions. It enables a richer, more interesting and expansive story.

BUT WHAT IS THE BIBLE? I’VE BEEN USING THE TERM as if it is obvious, and in a sense it is. According to the

Macquarie Dictionary, it is the collection of sacred writings of the Christian religion, comprising the Old Testament and the New Testament; or a copy of the text of these writings. This definition matches well with common usage, but we need to dive deeper to do good history. After all, in what sense are these ‘sacred writings’? What of the seven books labelled Apocrypha, rejected by Protestants but accepted as Scripture by Catholics? And the Old Testament is hardly old to Jewish believers.

Part of what is so interesting about ‘the Bible’ is that it does not really exist. Or rather, it does not exist in a static or self-evident way: the Bible is a fluid thing, ever-changing. In different times and places, and among different communities, it has comprised different books, in different orders, in different translations and editions. Over centuries, and at a truly astonishing rate in modernity, it has changed and been changed by the proliferating forms, languages, contexts and communities in which it appears. Now more than ever, there’s an ocean of competing answers to the question of the Bible – not least its sacredness, authority, interpretation and meaning.

By the time the Bible was introduced to Australia, the major debates about which books were in and which were out were well and truly over. The question of translation was more or less settled for that era, too. In English, there was the King James or Authorised version of 1611, comprising sixty-six books in two Testaments, sometimes with the Apocrypha bound separately in between (without the status of holy writ). This was by far the most common version that circulated in Australia until well into the twentieth century. However, the King James Bible was rarely if ever the only one. Catholics certainly preferred others – initially the Douay-Rheims, later the Knox Bible and the Jerusalem Bible – approved by the Vatican and incorporating the Deutero-canonical books to make a total of seventy-three.

The multiplication of translations and the publication of all kinds of new editions is one of the remarkable stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But even in the relative calm of the late eighteenth century, and as far from the historic centre of Christianity as the British colonies of Australia, the Bible was already a many-splendoured thing: an object, a text, a source of stories and ideas; a word read, gossiped, preached, tattooed; and seen as everything from a resented imposition to the very Word of God.

FROM SUCH BEGINNINGS, THE BIBLE’S AUSTRALIAN career could only be interesting. It has mattered as a core part of the colonial inheritance from Britain; because of its dynamic place in culture; and because of its transformative role in the life of faith. Or to put it another way, the Bible has mattered to Australia in three main guises – the globalising Bible, the cultural Bible and the theological Bible.

The globalising Bible

The Bible was initially transmitted to Australia from elsewhere, and relatively recently at that. This is important, though not because it is unusual, for the Bible is not really indigenous to any one place or people: as a library of composite texts, it has always been a multi-author, multi-lingual and multi-cultural thing – even in the original Bible lands. The bare fact of the Bible’s introduction from overseas means its presence in Australia has been shaped by major global movements of people, cultures and ideas. The Bible matters because it is a key element of the Australian experience of globalisation. It is part of what connects Australians to other places and peoples.

This globalising quality is a longstanding part of the Bible’s history. The books that comprise the New Testament were themselves written in the midst of Christian expansion. They provide a glimpse into the cultural and theological challenges of initial church growth beyond Palestine into parts of Europe and Asia Minor. The next few centuries of Christian history are marked by its geographical spread and adaptation, including among the peoples of Asia. By the tenth century, Christian traders, travellers and missionaries had carried their faith beyond India to China, and possibly even as far as the trading ports of western Malaya and northern Sumatra.³ If subsequent history had been different, perhaps Asian Christians might have eventually conveyed the Bible to Australia.

As it was, European imperialism introduced the Bible to Australia, and gave it some very significant characteristics. The first relates to its specifically European source. Conveyed to Australia by British colonisers, and reinforced by decades of British immigration, the Bible did not arrive ‘clean’, so to speak, but thick with existing associations and applications, accrued through centuries of British and more broadly European history. It arrived not as a ‘blank text’ open to any possible interpretation, but embedded in a particular if porous community, culture and tradition.

One of the European Bible’s most important features was its long (though not uncontested) standing as the revealed Word of God: it came to Australia backed by centuries of belief that it contained the knowledge of salvation and the ultimate truth about the world. Granted such import and authority, the European Bible had long been considered, debated and fought over. From the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine and the emergence of Christendom to the sixteenth-century Reformations and the re-adjustments of the Enlightenment, there were myriad ramifications for European thought, state and society.

By the late eighteenth century, the Bible’s history in Europe had informed and partly produced much of what Europeans took as basic to their own civilisations. For example:

•the very form of the book, the codex, and a form of modernity intimately associated with the written word;

•a sense of linear time – alpha and omega, beginning and end – and a vision of history utterly unlike that of Indigenous Australians;

•certain ideas about government, society, the environment and