Barbara Deutschmann
1 March 2024
Garry Worete Deverell, Contemplating Country: More Gondwana Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2023.
Garry Worete Deverell has invited us to a “campfire singalong between country, church, and Bible” in his new book, Contemplating Country: More Gondwana Theology. His aim is to explore the meaning of country where he “discerns the voice and activity of the divine.”
For a white, female beneficiary of the colonial project like me, this can be uncomfortable reading. The theologising starts from a very different place than mine. Garry Worete Deverell is a trawloolway man of lutruwita (Tasmania) and his thinking emerges from deep engagement with country. There are lyrical sections on contemplation of country that become a prophetic invitation: “Let us, like country itself, be contemplatives who are willing to die to ourselves—to our hungry and self-serving desire for the phantasmic dreams of modernity—that we might be reborn to that more expansive self that is a deep and abiding kinship with all creation.”
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The book emerges at a significant moment in our history when the charge of colonialism lingers from the 2023 Voice Referendum. The debate crystallised for many the core issue that underlies the politics of Indigenous cultures and peoples in Australia: the architecture of colonialism that has created the national culture, while destroying that of the First Nations. Like history, that colonialism is not dead nor even past.
Deverell’s book reveals the cancerous places that colonialism grows, most of them places we forgot to look. Seen through his eyes, colonialism is everywhere, in place names across Australian maps that overlay Bible terms on local namings, in our national anthem that entrenches terra nullius, and in august church documents such as the Preamble to the Constitution of the Uniting Church.
Deverell also describes “liturgical outbreaks of colonialism” in the Anglican church following the funeral of Elizabeth II, and the coronation of King Charles. His analysis shows that no Australian church is without its colonial trappings. Even churches that have worked hard in intercultural spaces have struggled to match intention with real commitment to change. Deverell’s account of his work with Uniting, Roman Catholic and Anglican churches makes sobering reading.
Deverell argues that colonialism reveals itself above all in misapprehensions and narrow interpretations of Scripture. Like other minoritised groups before him, Deverell discusses the uncomfortable readings of Deuteronomy 7-9, and of Joshua and Judges. He challenges our reading strategies and asks, “Have you ever tried to read a psalm, or any other biblical passage as if you weren’t the victim/hero in the story? Have you ever considered the ways in which you, yourselves might be the enemy?” The effect of this whole book is to place the reader into that uncomfortable position.
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Yet there is much that is potentially liberative in these readings. Deverell’s challenge to us is to hear the readings of Indigenous peoples. It is precisely at this point that the exciting dimension of the book begins. He offers brief readings of such diverse texts as Isaiah 58 and Matthew 5, the Book of Wisdom and Matthew 13, the Song of Songs and Hebrews 5 and 7. These are only briefly sketched and as Deverell himself acknowledges, he is not a Bible scholar. These fresh readings are nevertheless an offering to us in the way they stretch our imagination in new ways.
While it made me uncomfortable, Contemplating Country did not leave me hopeless or resentful. There is much in the book that suggests ways forward. The section on Acknowledgements of Country contains such wisdom that every leader should read it. There are suggestions for dealing with the local church and its appropriated property. Similarly, the list of practical ideas for meaningful participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples within the Anglican church is well-considered.
It was thus disappointing to me and many others that the recent Melbourne Synod rejected an opportunity to support such inclusion, on the day before the Voice Referendum in October 2023. Allies put forward a motion that attempted to progress proposals tabled at the Archbishop’s Council in 2018 and a previous Synod in 2019. The motion was amended by certain caucus members in a way that gutted its force. “We ended up with a sweet little piece of colonial mythology about reconciliation and charity toward Aboriginal people” Deverell later reported (God’s Own Country, ABM, 2024, p93).
This is a very important book for all leaders of faith communities. Indeed, this is a book for everyone.
Dr Barbara Deutschmann is an Old Testament scholar at the University of Divinity. She worships with St Mark’s Anglican Church in Spotswood.
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