‘GETTING OFF THE VERANDAH’:
CONTEXTUAL AUSTRALIAN THEOLOGY IN-LAND.

Tracy Spencer

A paper for presentation at the Australian Missiology Conference,
Melbourne, 26 to 30 September 2005

ABSTRACT

In 1998, Stephen Pickard posited the verandah as an appropriate image from which to explore ‘Gospel and Spirituality in an Australian setting.’ [1] He argued against centric notions of spiritual formation, in favour of formation in a safe intersection of home, openness and community, represented by the coast, or the verandah. He draws on feminist critiques of the gendered nature of ‘lone journeys to the interior’ for spiritual transformation, and supports [equally] gendered notions of spirituality nurtured at ‘home’. In my paper, I challenge both the image and conclusions of Pickard’s paper, drawing on a post-colonial analysis of both the history and meaning of the verandah in Australia, and 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. Narratives of the lives of these two subjects form the text from which I am developing an Australian contextual theology within my research. Using this material, 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, and discuss methods in metaphoric and contextual theology to achieve a theology of decolonisation.

Rev Tracy Spencer (Deacon) is an ordained Deacon in the Uniting Church in Australia, currently undertaking research for a PhD (Theol) through Flinders University, developing a contextual and narrative theology based on the lives of Jim Page and Rebecca Forbes, produced through oral histories and post-colonial life writing. Previously she has worked in ministry in remote South Australia, and will soon take up an appointment at the Alice Springs congregation of the Uniting Church.

Ph. 0885344127

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Introduction

Acknowledgment of traditional owners and inhabitants of this land.

I grew up in a place called Murrumbeena, which I knew meant ‘land of many frogs’ – or swamp – in an Aboriginal language, but I did not know, and did not think to find out, the name of the people whose language gave me my location, what happened to them, or where they might be now. And so I begin with my apology.

Secondly, I want to acknowledge the work and generosity of Stephen Pickard, whose 1998 paper ‘The View from the Verandah: gospel and spirituality in an Australian setting’[2] provoked my response in this paper titled ‘Getting off the verandah’: contextual Australian theology in-land. His theses are elaborated in two further papers, which Stephen generously made available to me, and his several comments on earlier drafts of this paper have contributed to the final form.[3]

The first image I’d like to introduce to you is of an inland verandah embracing Winbar Station Homestead in Western NSW, on the Darling River, circa 1913.

PP Winbar photo

Frank Warwick, now an elderly man, lived in this house when he was about five years old, and gave me this copy of his photograph. His father was the manager of Winbar Station, and his mother, Edie, supervised the household staff, as was the customary division of labour in the pastoral industry at this time. Frank is speaking to me about Becky Castledine, an English immigrant who, after working in Sydney for several years, moved out west – ‘Back O Bourke’ - to Winbar station on the Darling River, where she worked as a housemaid, and met her husband. Becky is one of the subjects of my current PhD research. Jacky would become her husband when they married in 1914 in Bourke before the Registrar with two policemen for witnesses.

Play recording

Oh yes. Becky would probably have worked very much with Mum. Oh yes she would’ve worked very much with her in the house, but Jacky wouldn’t have.

No

He wouldn’t have very often come up near the house. If he’d wanted to see Dad he’d have let him somebody know ‘I want to see the boss’ and he’d have looked him up. [4]

No, no.

At Winbar, Jacky was working as a colt breaker. He was a man of full Indigenous descent: anthropologists would refer to him as a ‘tribal’ man.

PP ver and ab

Franks brief lesson in spatial, racial and gendered station geography reminds us that few, if any, places in Australia are not inscribed by colonialism. And that includes the iconic Australian architectural feature of the verandah, from which we might survey the terrain, or step off to get a closer look.

Our Unfinished Business

It is my contention that an Australian contextual theology requires an up-close postcolonial reading of our history, icons, and current context, to take account of the ‘unfinished business’ whitefellas like me have with the Indigenous people of the land on which we live. I borrow that term, and theme, from the 2002 conference of that name, held in Melbourne, which celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Mabo decision. The ‘Unfinished Business conference claimed its theme was:

About the identity of all Australians; about how we defined ourselves in relation to our history, about how we claim our Australian-ness, as people from diverse origins, living in peace and harmony with each other.[5]

Since the historic fact of asserting the doctrine of terra nullius implied in the ‘progressive appropriation of the Australian continent by the British government in the name of the Crown’ between 1770 and 1829,[6] Indigenous Australians have suffered the injustice of dispossession, and non-Indigenous settlers and Australians have lived with their implication in this original sin at the heart of the Australian nation. Non-Indigenous ‘belonging’ in Australia remains an ‘unsettled’ category: Fiona Probyn borrows Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s phrase to describe settler belonging as an expression of ‘epistemic violence’ that accompanies colonialism;[7] Deborah Bird Rose argues that Australia is ‘wounded space’ for its settlers, who live in the rupture of immigration and dispossession of Indigenous people, and yet yearn for healing and completion. [8] Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs have coined the term ‘uncanny’ to describe the ambiguous sense of being familiar and unfamiliar with this country at the same time, and argue that reconciliation can never be ‘settled’, but its very ‘unsettledness’ can activate engagement in the predicament of postcolonial realities.[9] Even Pauline Hanson, in response to Aboriginal land rights claims exclaimed ‘Well where the hell do I go?’[10] Keith Windshuttle’s arguments minimising acknowledgment of the extent of colonial violence are judged ‘immaterial’ since the ‘appropriation [of land] by settlers and the Crown still amounted to an act of dispossession if only because those who took possession of the land considered it to be alienable.[11] It took until 1992 for this devastating error to be admitted, despite widespread awareness of the fact by settlers throughout the colonial period.[12]

A Postcolonial Approach

If the contextual issue at the foundation of the term ‘Australian’ is one of unethical and illegal dispossession, then theology addressing this context requires an appropriate analytic strategy. This methodology is similar to that which led Latin American Liberation theologians to Marxist analysis to appropriately address their core contextual issue of economic injustice.[13] Edward Said and Spivak, have described ‘postcolonialism’ as a reading strategy that allows a contrapuntal reading of history – that is, history told by both the oppressors, and the oppressed, is read in the context of one another, so that the nexus of ideology and power in a colonial setting may be broken, and a new liberating discourse emerge.[14]

The term ‘postcolonialism’ has itself been applied broadly and variously: Bill Ashcroft et al use a hyphenated spelling to denote cultures affected by colonialism[15] whereas Michelle Grossman’s collection uses an unhyphenated spelling to similarly denote that ‘colonial ways of knowing’ ‘continue to linger in contemporary discourse’.[16] Others critique the oppressor/oppressed binary of Said’s postcolonial theory, arguing that Australia is one of a small group of ‘settler colonies’, experiencing the ‘double bind’ of settlers who are both oppressive of Indigenous occupants, and themselves oppressed by the metropolis to their colony. [17] This produces a complex subjectivity, further specified by class and gender, for the dominant group of non-Indigenous Australians. Using postcolonial theory in Australia requires the nuanced sensitivities that Homi Bhabha brings to the hybrid subjectivities of the subaltern,[18] where, as Spivak asserts, a ‘pure subaltern’ voice cannot be heard because of the necessary constraints that hybridise the subaltern voice in order for it to be heard in the dominant discourses.[19] In a positive sense, the processes of ‘transculturation’ which describe 'how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture’[20] explains the dynamism and resilience of Aboriginal cultures summarised by Michael Dodson:

'alongside the colonial discourses in Australia, we have always had our own Aboriginal discourses in which we continue to create our own representations, and to re-create identities which escaped the policing of the authorised versions...Self-representations of Aboriginality are always also acts of freedom.'[21]

A postcolonial strategy of contrapuntal reading, then, evokes several, not merely oppositional, readings of history from varying subjectivities produced by Australian postcolonialism.

Colonialism On the Verandah

So, to the verandah, where Pickard hopes such contrapuntal conversations can take place. Pickard’s project is to use the metaphor of the verandah as a culturally relevant description of the Christian God, and a subsequent model for the community of God, the Church. He says: ‘In speaking about the verandah God I have implicitly described a vision of what the Church is called to be’,[22] a place where ‘East meets West, North meets South’. [23] It is an image if not of an open sanctuary, at least of an open and potentially permeable boundary.[24] From Frank Warwick’s testimony, it is unlikely that Becky and Jack – a white women and an Indigenous man – would ever have met on the verandah at Winbar Station.

There is no doubting the power and the appeal of the simile of the verandah for Australian identity …which itself is reason to pause and consider why that might be. Verandahs are variously referred to as places of leisure and social life, liminality and transience, the link between family and landscape, between interior and exterior. They are pragmatic, and/or fashionable.[25] They are described as places where women read and sew, men talk about public life, and visitors, traders and swagmen are entertained without having to be received into the inner sanctum of the house.[26] They are theorised as a place of protection, security and safety – from animate and inanimate threat – which assumes that beyond the verandah lies hostile country.[27] In the myth-making imagery of the Australian settler and pioneer, struggles were waged against the climate, the country, and its Indigenous peoples. The verandah is built on to the rudimentary hut once the settler presence is established. Pickard’s paper picks up the idea that verandahs participate in the householders ‘safety and security’, while only vaguely articulating the perceived threat beyond it as ‘the unknown…fears and dangers that threaten to extinguish life.’ The title of Pickard’s paper – a view from the verandah – signals the other major axis of meaning for the verandah. It is a structure that has to do with seeing: Tim Winton anthropomorphises the verandah as an ‘eyelid’.[28] It is the linkage of this inarticulated ‘threat’ with a sense of vision, which I think best enables us to deconstruct the meaning of the verandah in postcolonial Australia. It has to do with seeing, being seen, and not being seen.

…Mediating Social Relations

The verandah was introduced to Australia by Lieutenant-Governor Major Grose in 1793, but it was not for several decades that verandahs became commonplace.[29] They were, in fact, displays of international colonial power and status; the English, and other colonial powers, encountering and adopting their form in the process of colonising India, the Middle East and the Caribbean. The precise etymology and immigration of the verandah are unclear[30] although Portuguese Vasco de Gama applied the Spanish term, veranda to a roofed and trellised structure opening off an interior courtyard in an Arab traders dwellings in Calicut, India.[31] This verandah, like related screened balconies, enabled those inside the structure to observe those outside, without themselves being seen. The verandahed bungalow form readily taken up by the British in India reflects Middle Eastern influences and suggests a ‘stationary tent’, allowing ventilation, trading space and traces of transience.[32] Grose, a veteran of several colonial postings, introduced the verandah to Sydney as a thoroughly colonial artefact, albeit one which already in its history hints at the ability of colonised space to influence and transform its colonisers.

Stephen Pickard, and other commentators, all note the colonial context of the verandah, however few consider its roles in colonial relations in Australia. Philip Drew, in passing, notes the pastoral verandah operated as a boundary between races and classes of people: 'On homesteads it separated the boss from the workers, Aborigines from the white overseer.'[33] The colonial front verandah in Sydney was a place ‘from which the activities on the parade ground before it could be observed [by the Lieutenant-Governor] and, possibly, … where daily business could be conducted with the rag-tag and bobtail of the settlement without admitting them to the house.'[34] The back verandah, with none of the public engagement of the front verandah, primarily figures as a place of domestic work, storage or children’s’ pastimes. In Rosa Praed’s colonial novel My Australian Girlhood, ‘Verandah Talk’ consists of male conversation between friends and family, concerning public and religious matters, which women and children observed, but did not participate in.[35] While the verandah ‘extend[ed] the domestic into social life; it is marginal to both’[36] and Tanya Dalziell argues that the colonial woman who observed others from the verandah complemented rather than challenged the pioneering man. Dalziell concludes that expansion of gender roles requires women to ‘move[] beyond the verandah’, returning to it only to recuperate health or family.[37]