What does it mean to be Australian? In the Vietnamese boat people era, a young teacher at a Perth school split her kids up for a soccer match. One of the boys said, “Hey, Miss, do you think it’s a good idea for all us Aussies to be on one side and all the Viets on another?” The teacher blinked as she looked down at the kid. He was Vietnamese, but he’d been here for 18 months. The non Aussies had only been here 6 months. What had this kid picked up in only 18 months that made him comfortably Aussie?
The first Europeans struggled in Australia. They couldn’t cope with trees that dropped their bark, not their leaves. Middles Eastern deserts are glamorous, but they wanted Australia to have an inland sea. The Europeans looked on Australia as cursed by God, the land terrible, the animals an abomination and the aboriginals not properly human like they were. The convicts are not the key to understanding who we are as Aussies. It is the currency lads and lasses, the so-called cornstalks born from the drunken, desperate couplings of male and female convicts, who give us our character. At Sydney’s first general muster in 1800, 12 years after settlement, there were 958 Australian born children, of whom 398 were orphans or totally neglected by their parents. This could have been a disaster, but God looked after these wiry, tanned, blonde bleached children. He looked after them through each other, and through the local aboriginals, who were horrified at the way these new people looked after their children. God was raising up a new nation. The street orphans were taught by the aborigines to see the bush as a place of food and water, not of fear. They could swim, ride horses, were fast and fit. They had no desire to end up like their parents in chains. There was plenty of work for them in a new colony. Twelve year olds rated as adults and were paid accordingly. If they were mistreated, a mate would help them move on to something better. By 1810 children were getting schooling, and more than half could read and write. They were sober, hard working, proud that they weren’t convicts, and would happily take on anyone who didn’t say that this was the most wonderful place on earth. They loved taking down the new chums, especially those who thought they were better than them, because they were English. They resented the misuse of authority and tended to find work in the most newly settled country, away from the convicts. They were at home in the bush, would share anything with a mate and would work extremely hard, when there was a point to it, but would quite happily move on after a year or two. Us Aussies have inherited a lot of their characteristics.
Their awareness of God wasn’t in dark churches with English clergy, and a god who represented England. They experienced God in creation, and through the occasional clergy who mixed it out in the bush, and didn’t look down on them.
They learnt to laugh at themselves and hardship. In Australia you can work hard, and it all goes up in smoke, or is lost in a drought or gets flooded away. They didn’t carry grudges against mates and respected good work and skills.
Of course there is the negative side too to this naivety. When they finally got hold of their own land it was usually too small to make a living off, so there was often the absent father, away working, while the mother did all the back breaking work at home with the children. Australians might have been wonderful mates, but they weren’t very good at intimacy, clumsy with their inner selves.
We’ve outgrown feeling inferior culturally to the rest of the world. We’re more sure of ourselves and out place. We still love taking down people who think they know everything. The mateship is still there deep down, and the selfless help in times of disaster. We worked together well this last year, in battling Covid. Australians do bring gifts to the world. And we still need to hear the gospel in words that make sense, and come from people of integrity.
We’ve come a long way from thinking that indigenous Australians had no language, or culture. The first white Australian children knew that wasn’t true, but they didn’t write the history, in the push for land and settlements. The desire to share the gospel always got mixed with white culture. Pastor George Rosendale lived in Hopevale, north of Cooktown. He died in 2019. In the 1980’s he started to think a lot more carefully about how God had always been at work in their culture. He’s what he said:
‘God did not say to me as an Aborigine, ‘Preach as a white minister’. All He says is go and tell the Good News about Christ Jesus, his life, death, resurrection and his judgment. It is a privilege He has given to everyone, to be part of his plan of saving humankind.
When I discovered all of my people’s teaching and laws I used it for my work in preaching and teaching and I found I had good results.’
‘There is the story of the black and white cockatoos. They were brothers. One day the white cockatoo found the black cockatoo sitting under a shady tree looking angry and upset. ‘What is wrong, brother?’ ‘I’m angry with dad because he made me black. Why didn’t he make me like you? I’m going to change myself’. He went to his uncle’s country and asked him for honey and clay. ‘Get as much as you want, there’s plenty there’. He got the clay and honey and went back home. He powdered the clay and rubbed honey all over himself and put the powdered clay on. He looked at himself and said, ‘Now I look like my brother’. His grandpa got so angry with him that he called on the monsoon to bring rain. It washed all the clay off him.
Later his brother came and spoke to him. He reminded him about his father’s love for him. He took him to the father and made things right again. Today the black cockatoo is happy. He’s singing when flying and feeding. Jesus our Big Brother has made things right for us. He has broken the barrier that kept us away from our Father and each other. (Eph. 2:1 1 – 22; Rom. 5: 1 – 1 I.) This story is to help people to understand the importance of reconciliation. Our people have done this for years. My mother told us her story, how her parents and all her clan were shot by troopers at Battle Camp when she was eight, but she and her grandmother were able to escape. Then later on they caught Mum and sent her away. She thought that her entire family had been killed like other families, but later she found that they had not shot her really young siblings, but sent them away. Her baby sister was fostered by a white couple. I came across her, my aunty, in 1991 for the first time. It was a great reunion for us, but my mother never met her, and died wondering what happened to her.’
Mother often told us these things and they were painful stories to tell. But she would always say afterwards, “But children, I have found love and forgiveness in Christ, and I want you children to treat everyone the same, to love and to readily forgive. It was the greatest sermon I’ve ever heard in my lifetime.”
This Australia Day we give thanks for how God used indigenous people to help bring up the first group of white Australian children. We also acknowledge the painful things done that white Australians are unaware of, and we commit ourselves to reconciliation and working together with our indigenous sisters and brothers in Christ.