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AUSTRALIAN BIBLICAL REVIEW
ISSN 0045-0308 |
BOOK REVIEW Published in Volume 68, 2020
MEREDITH LAKE, The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History (Sydney: NewSouth, 2018). Pp. 439. Paperback. AU$39.99.
This is a highly readable, well-researched and engaging book. Its title perfectly captures the aims of the project, which is to offer a cultural history of the Bible’s reception in Australia from colonial settlement to the present day. The book is a fuller expansion upon Meredith Lake’s earlier The Bible Down Under (published in 2016 by Bible Society Australia). Lake wastes no time in plunging the reader into the many cultural associations of the Bible within modern Australian history. From the outset she argues that the Bible was already a centuries-old dynamic (and contested) library of composite texts before arriving in Australia. But it continues its life on Australian soil no less “a fluid thing, ever-changing” (3), “a many-splendoured thing: an object, a text, a source of stories and ideas; a word read, gossiped, preached, tattooed” (4).
The book is neatly divided, first into four parts, which are each in turn equally subdivided into three chapters, making for a dozen evenly spaced, and paced, chapters. The first part covers Australia’s colonial foundations (17–105), the second follows the so-called “great age of the Bible” (107–93), the third enters upon Australia’s journey into nationhood (195–275), and the fourth tackles the challenges of Australia’s rapid detraditionalisation in the new millennium (281–369). This four-part structure makes it easy to map the Bible’s process of Australian inculturation onto events in the modern nation’s chronology.
Lake carefully shows that the story of the Bible in Australia is far from a straightforward, untroubled, narrative. Some examples from the book helpfully illustrate the point. In the first part, Lake accurately describes the less than felicitous circumstances under which the Bible is introduced to Australia’s Indigenous communities. Acknowledging the dispossession and disease that European settlement inflicted upon Indigenous Australians, Lake points out that “[t]he actual course of colonisation varied, but this was the basic context in which many Indigenous Australians first encountered the Bible” (45).
In the second part, Lake describes a turning point at the end of the 19th century (the end of the “great age”) when attitudes and beliefs about the Bible began to change in Australian society because of the inroads made by science (for instance, Darwin’s theory of evolution) and, particularly for the Bible, the challenge posed by higher criticism. While neither literalist interpretations of Scripture nor devotional Bibles disappear from Australian life, the cultural Bible reaches its peak. “One factor in its rise was a growing popular appreciation of the Bible’s historical-critical production” (191).
As a result, it becomes all the easier to understand, in the third part, why 20th century Australian politicians, decidedly less prone than their American counterparts to use religious imagery, can nonetheless still appeal to the Bible irrespective of their personal religious beliefs or political allegiances. “[T]he Bible has been a substantial source of political rhetoric and imagination. Leaders on all sides of parliament have explicitly appealed to Scripture to bolster a particular political claim, or to put forward a particular version of the Australian community, its values and its story” (247).
These turning points, carefully sign-posted by Lake, prepare the reader for a final turn in the fourth part. As Australia continues to detraditionalise at an accelerating pace in the new millennium, a new relationship towards the Bible opens up: Australianising and indigenising the Bible (318–39). As much as the Bible affects, and continues to affect, Australian culture, the reverse is now also true. Australians, and particularly Indigenous Australians, are beginning to interpret the Bible for themselves and to offer important perspectives in return. One important Indigenous contribution that directly impacts academic biblical studies and theology is an appreciation for the land, particularly at this precarious moment in humanity’s relationship towards the earth’s ecology. “Indigenous readings not only challenge imperial assumptions about the inferiority of non-European societies, they may help overturn Western theologies of environmental domination” (344).
It is easy to see why Lake’s book has already been the recipient of many accolades and prizes (notably, the 2019 NSW Premier’s History Award and the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award). While the genre of academic biblical studies tends to aspire towards esotericism, there is so much here that biblical scholars can appreciate from the author’s skilful balance between jargon-less writing informed by responsible research when writing for a general readership. It is also a book that may help to gently guide many an earnest student who is genuinely curious about the Bible’s continuing persistence in Australian society, but daunted by a discipline that biblical scholars seldom demystify for others.
Review by
Emmanuel Nathan
Australian Catholic University
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