Abstract
This article argues that in postcolonial and post-secular Australia, a country in which Christianity has been imported from Europe in the process of colonization in the eighteenth century by the British Empire, institutional Christianity is waning in influence. However, the article argues, Australian culture has a capacity for spiritual awareness provided it is expressed in language and idioms arising from the Australian context. R. S. Sugirtharajah’s concept of vernacular hermeneutics shows that a contemporary novel, The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton, expresses Australian spirituality saturated with the images and values of the New Testament, but in a non-religious literary form.
Highlights
A fundamental question that must be asked by any postcolonial biblical critic thinking about the relationship between the New Testament and Australia is this: What capacity does the postcolonial and post-secular Australian consciousness have in the first quarter of the twenty-first century to receive the message of the New Testament as a guide for living?
It does not read as a treatise on religion in Australia; it reads as a novelistic exposé of the ideas a teenage boy has about religious matters
The final journey back to the shepherd’s hut to protect Fintan when he could have run away brings all Jaxie’s search for self-identity and moral integrity to fulfilment so that he is truly free afterwards to continue on the journey he had begun months before. These journeys are satisfying as the content of a novel; for the postcolonial biblical scholar, alerted by the performantial dimension of vernacular hermeneutics to the role of explorer and the ritual of journeying, these journeys become symbolic of the human search for meaning and life
Summary
A fundamental question that must be asked by any postcolonial biblical critic thinking about the relationship between the New Testament and Australia is this: What capacity does the postcolonial and post-secular Australian consciousness have in the first quarter of the twenty-first century to receive the message of the New Testament as a guide for living?. In the rupture the criminal world makes, the fate of both Jaxie and Fintan is resolved, the former to freedom in a new life and the latter to his final rest In this novel, Tim Winton portrays the profoundly spiritual encounter a young postcolonial child of the Australian culture has with himself, with life and death, with the joys and dark terrors of life, all this provoked by a sojourn of survival through the Australian bush. In the course of three pages of stream-of-consciousness from the mind of the character Jaxie Clackton, Winton probes the inadequacies of contemporary Christian church and religious ritual; touches on both clericalism and revulsion against clerical sexual abuse; and explores prayer, the need for mercy and the manifold ways in which real people exercise their spirituality.11 It does not read as a treatise on religion in Australia; it reads as a novelistic exposé of the ideas a teenage boy has about religious matters. See (Winton 2018, pp. 22–24)
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