The Bible in Australia
A Cultural History
Meredith Lake
University of NSW Press, 2018.
Meredith Lake has provided a fascinating and authoritative account of how the Bible, in the hands of preachers, immigrants, suffragists, unionists, politicians, writers, artists and indigenous Australians, has played a contested but highly significant role in the nation’s history. Her opening allusion to the Bra Boy’s tattoo arrests the reader and illustrates how, in twenty-first century Australia, the Bible still ‘floats in fragments across the surface of the popular consciousness’. She then retraces the ebb and flow of Australian culture: the arrival of the First Fleet and the tragic encounter with indigenous people; Federation and the ascendancy of civic Protestant nationalism and White Australia; the 1950s—presided over by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, for whom the Bible defined the Australian people. This culminated in the remarkable 1959 Billy Graham Crusade’s interdenominational meetings attended by over three million people, while a broader radio audience heard his trademark ‘The Bible says’.
However, the cultural revolution of the sixties was reflected in the media landscape, public schools, and growing multi-culturalism. Television soon eclipsed reading as a leisure activity. Church decline, especially in the British-origin Protestant denominations, accelerated shrinking Biblical literacy. Roman Catholic numbers, however, boosted by immigration, have been more stable and now comprise the largest Christian denomination. New migrant groups such as Korean and Chinese, have bucked the trend of declining church affiliation. Pentecostal churches, led by Hillsong, attract a younger generation and have planted over a thousand congregations. Nevertheless, survey comparisons suggest that the proportion of regular Bible readers has dropped by more than 75% since the sixties.
Biblical literacy is also seen to have plunged because Bible reading has disappeared from radio and from public schools. NSW schools are the exception. Lake does not attempt to analyse possible reasons (In fact she seems studiously to avoid any mention of the Diocese of Sydney or Moore College). She does make the telling comment that in the same-sex marriage postal survey debates, the Australian Christian Lobby preferred the terminology of rights and values rather than the language of the Bible.
The book’s attention to the plight of Indigenous Australia is comprehensive, drawing heavily, but not exclusively, on John Harris’ magisterial One Blood. One question not addressed is: Why were colonial relationships with Aboriginal peoples so disastrous, given the different story in the case of Maori and Pacific Islander peoples?
One lesson this reader did learn is that the Bible played a key role in nourishing the cause of Federation—an achievement which now we do not even commemorate, but which was by no means a foregone conclusion. Both before and after 1901, the Bible was cited profusely in debates by both believers and non-believers. In Lake’s words, ‘The Bible stretched like a canopy above the forest of Federal feeling’.
In summary, Lake argues convincingly that, while current levels of Biblical literacy are at an all-time low, the Bible has a powerful history in Australia. ‘In various cultural and theological guises, it has informed efforts to educate the young, to extend the franchise, to meet the challenges of poverty. It has been applied to the formation of trade unions, schools and charities, as well as all manner of religious institutions. In the hands of indigenous Christians, the Bible has nourished movements for justice, for land rights, and for recognition and reconciliation’ (p.365).
Anthony H. Nichols, WA.