Getting off the Verandah: Contextual Australian Theology In-Land and in Story

Abstract

In 1998, Stephen Pickard posited the verandah as an appropriate image from which to explore “Gospel and Spirituality in an Australian setting”. A post-colonial reading of the verandah in Australia reveals it is not an image to support positive encounter between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This article argues that images of lives immersed in inter-cultural relationships provide more productive material for a contextual Australian theology, and one that could be called a “theology of decolonisation”. Using this material from the life writing I am producing of the lives of two English immigrants - Rebecca Forbes and Jim Page, who lived and died amongst the Adnyamathanha people of the Flinders Ranges in the first half of the twentieth century - I will argue that for immigrant European Christianity in Australia, an immersive encounter in the country and on the terms of Indigenous Australians is necessary before a post-colonial contextual theology by non-Indigenous theologians can arise in Australia. I suggest models of decolonisation put forward by critics of both colonising and colonised heritages, and discuss methods in metaphoric and contextual theology to achieve a theology of decolonisation for non-Indigenous Australians.