14 July 2009

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Authors of a new book launched at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas this weekend readily acknowledge that the ideas of Sacredness and Australia do not sit comfortably beside each other. Indeed, in many areas of Australian commentary, these two concepts would remain oxymoronic.

In Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature, Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden acknowledge that the sacred is difficult to identify in a white federate, modern nation enshrined in mythical imagery of the masculine mate, hard physical labour and the hedonism of beach, sport and material plenty.

The authors steer away from the cliché that the sacred has never been prominent in Australian identity by admitting that most spectacularly the Anzac myth, but also sporting idols and other national fantasies, have developed the rituals, memorialisation and sanctity usually associated with more traditional religious observance.

“The twentieth century stands in the minds of many Westerners as the century when the gods finally died, or at least hid impassively behind the clouds of war, holocaust, and mass deplacements of peoples,” they say.

Ashcroft, Devlin-Glass and McCredden map a transformation of the sacred which began to occur in Australian art and writing in the nineteen century, originating in the colonial encounter with a new and threatening land: “While national mythology produced the self-confident notion of Australian identity, the literature which arose from that dimension of Australian life best described itself by terms of exile and displacement.”

The authors then move on to argue that, in the second half of the twentieth century, Australian imaginative writers uncovered a new sense of the sacred which was peculiar to their location. They say: “Writing after the savageries of two world wars, and as indigenous people began to speak back to their colonisers, Australian writers began opening up new worlds of understanding about the land and human relationships within it. This is sacredness imagined as intimate relationship to place, not pre-eminently a universal or transcendent discourse. This is sacredness imagined as earthed, embodied, humbled, local, demotic, ordinary and proximate.”

Bill Ashcroft is Professor of the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Between 2005 and 2008, he was Chair Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. A founding exponent of post-colonial theory, his 16 books include the ground-breaking text The Empire Writes Back (co-authored with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin).

Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden are both Associate Professors in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Melbourne. Devlin-Glass specialises in literature and publishing while McCredden writes widely in the areas of Australian literature and culture, Indigenous writings and post-colonialism.

Publication details: Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden, Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2009).

Review Copies: Australian Theological Forum Limited / ATF Press