One Blood

Book Review (John Harris)

This is an impossible book to review in any meaningful sense, haven taken me over a year to read, and clocking in at almost 1400 pages. But it's also a very necessary book. So, in that spirit, let me undertake to at least give an impression of the whole.

Harris has undertaken to write the history of "Aboriginal encounter with Christianity", and dares to subtitle it "A story of hope". This book gives a vast sweep of the history of Christian mission in relation to Australian Aboriginal people from first colonisation up to the present (well, 1990, which was the present when it was first published)

The first edition of this book came in 1990, and a second edition in 1993. That revision was turned into an ebook in 2013, with more revisions in 2019. I mention all this just so you realise that the book is by its own admission 30 years out of date.

Harris writes with a huge amount of historical research, and yet at times he is also selective by way of representation. That is, he's not selective because he particularly wants to leave in or out things that suit his purposes (though I'm sure various sides would accuse him of just that), but simply there's too much to talk about and at times it's best to represent some parts with case studies.

Overwhelmingly the impression one gets here is that colonisation was an unmitigated disaster for the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. There's no rosy "colonialism wasn't that bad; it was good for them!" nonsense trotted out here. And yet, what is interesting is how Harris compares the attitudes of Christians in the colony to their non-believing (or perhaps non-practicing would be a better description) counterparts. For the majority of the colony, Aboriginal people were either the lowest civilization on earth, destined to die out, not worth considering, or they weren't humans at all. Christians had a marginally better view - Aboriginal people were human, and had souls. When the bar is so low, it's not hard to be better.

And this theme runs right through. Contemporary progressive liberals love to blame Christianity for everything that has happened to Australian Aboriginal people, and Harris is more than willing to make clear the failings of missionaries. They got so much wrong, did so much damage. Yet, and this is an important "yet", on the whole missions to Aboriginal people had mitigating and ameliorative effects - they genuinely sought to care for them (even when wrong-headed), and shielded them from the unmitigated impact of colonisation. Things would have been much worse for Australian Aboriginal people if not for Christian missions.

In particular, this kind of apologetic makes a mockery of the idea that Aboriginal people would have been better off without Christian contact. The contemporary attitudes of secular white folk would have, with Christianity absent, resulted in greater devastation, greater loss.

The first half of the book is full of misery. It's also highly repetitive. Not because Harris tells a bad story, it's just that he moves around the country chronicling early mission endeavours, that almost all involve:

• missionaries who conflate Christianizing with Europeanizing, and get frustrated when Aboriginal people don't want to settle down and become farmers

• application of strict Euro-centric moralism

• the interference of secular colonists to sabotage mission efforts, exploit Aboriginal people further, and deprive them of land

• violence

• disease and death

• failure

Harris also, and this is a natural feature of the longitudinal story he tells, charts the impact of colonization as a whole - the loss of land, impact of violence, and overall decline of Aboriginal populations. This takes a different turn when you eventually reach the 20th century, which is devastating in different ways. It's in this period that Aboriginal people are legally incorporated into various systems (i.e. the Acts of Protection) that essentially make them enslaved subjects of a paternalistic state, and subject to systemic deprivation of liberty and their own labour. This is the government missions, the co-opting of Christian missions, the Stolen Generation, and the Stolen Wages. All of which amounts to 20th century slavery. Which only ended within living memory in this country.

There are beacons of hope here and there. Every now and again you read of absolutely heroic examples of Christian virtue and determination. Some of the Western Australian Catholics fall into this category. And it's not just them going out and saving souls or something. It's them fighting against the elements, and overcoming the indifference & hostility of colonizers, and their own church colleagues, for the sake of Aboriginal people's welfare.

Also of great interest to me, and really something I knew nothing about (as so much in this book), was the impact of WW2 on the Aboriginal population in the Northern Territory. Whereas the NT had its own peculiar history, and Aboriginal people there were far more isolated (and thus somewhat more protected), WW2 changed that irrevocably. Among many other impacts, that Aboriginal people were paid on parity with non-Aboriginal people, meant that it was harder to simply send them back to a state of poverty and dependence upon less-than-subsistence rationing. Social changes lead to active investment in development; and broader changes lead to further social activism and political change.

Harris is optimistic, and he's entitled to be; in his final chapter he looks at the shift from a 'mission' age to a church age - the indigenisation of church among Aboriginal peoples so that Aboriginal people are leading, running, organising their own churches, independent of non-indigenous people. Only in this way is there hope to leave behind the paternalism of the past.

It's one of the great flaws of the Australian education system that it has historically taught so little about the history of our nation. Yes, that has changed in the several decades since I went through the system, but I dare say that even today it's heavily weighted to a Eurocentric story of colonisation, and a narrow selection of foci on bushrangers, the gold rush, Australia's involvement in the world wars. There has been a growing emphasis on our First Nations peoples, but unless people are actively willing to seek out and engage significant historical writing, we remain in broad ignorance.

I know it's not strictly true, but I can't see how you can come to grips with the history of European colonisation in Australia, and not come to the conclusion that vast injustices were done, and have never been properly acknowledged, nor appropriate attempts made at restitution. Our society as a whole is in denial and ignorance. Christians, too, remain mostly ignorant of this particular kind of history, which is why Harris's book is essential. We must wrestle with the past to understand the present. We must do so without unduly exonerating past sins, but undertaking to understand people in their time and place. Why did they do what they did, how did they understand it, what alternatives did they have, and how does this make the world in which we live and give us the options we have, as well as shape what we ourselves may choose to do, and why?

Photo by Greg Spearritt on Unsplash