Category Archives: Unitarianism

Books are a bit like buses: there can be nothing for a long time, and then two arrive together. This book Just Relations was published in 2015 and three years later Sue Taffe’s A White Hot Flame was published, both of them dealing with Mary Montgomerie Bennett, aboriginal activist (1881-1961) active from the 1920s through to her death in 1961.

Mary Montgomerie Bennett was a most unlikely activist. She was born in London, the daughter of a Queensland pastoralist and an East End actress mother and she spent most of her early life in England, her way eased by the wealth generated by the Queensland holding ‘Lammermoor’, near Townsville and Bowen. She lived in Australia between for the first six years of her life, but not on the station but instead in Stanthorpe and Tenterfield, Sydney and Hobart. She returned to England with her mother for another five years, before returning to Australia again for a further five years. This time, she would spend vacations between the ages of 12 and 17 with her father on Lammermoor, returning again to sell the property with her father in 1910. Yet Lammermoor, and her idealized view of her father’s own interaction with the Dalleburra people whose land it was, shaped her writing and politics throughout her adult life.

While in London, she became involved with the London-based Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society and was also confronted in her views by the outspoken Aboriginal activist Anthony Martin Fernando, who stood outside Australia House with skeletons pinned to his coat to protest the treatment of Indigenous people in Western Australia and Australia generally. After her husband’s death she travelled to Australia in 1932 and began working on Mount Margaret Mission, near Kalgoorlie, as a teacher. She continued her lobbying work, both in London and in Australia. She particularly fought against the Western Australian Aboriginal protector A.O. Neville whose blatant policy of ‘absorption’ and ‘die out’ was adopted by other state governments, to be replaced after WWII by ‘assimilation’, which continued the policy of child removal. Over time, she shifted her emphasis and political allegiances from humanitarianism to human rights, and from feminists to activists and internationalists.

Alison Holland’s Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights is a fairly academic book that examines her connections with various networks and lobbyists over time, as Barnett’s emphasis shifted from humanitarianism as a political project, to human rights as an international campaign. Holland contextualises her discussion of Mary Bennett’s ideas within Michael Barnett’s discussion of this philosophical shift from humanitarianism to human rights in his Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (2011). This emphasizes the international context of Bennett’s work as she developed networks with other people working in the political space. Although originally working within the ‘missionary’ mode, with an emphasis on education and the rights of aboriginal mothers, near the end of her life she joined with other political indigenous and non-indigenous activists, especially from the southern states, working to raise the profile of government policies and their abnegation of human rights, an increasingly potent international idea. This narrative is very much a political one, as was Bennett’s own writing, and it ranges across international, state and national levels. It was very much a crusade in writing and discourse mode, as she collected evidence, wrote submissions, appeared before commissions, maintained correspondence and wrote articles. Anthony Martin Fernando may have had his coat with toy skeletons: she had her files and her pen.

The book starts with a discussion of dissent at both imperial and Australian levels (with an emphasis on the former), then moves to a more chronological survey of Bennett’s life and the change in her emphasis over time. The chapters are

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Contextualizing Dissent: Humanitarians and the Aboriginal Problem
• Chapter 2 Defining a Reform Agenda: Mary Bennett and the Humanitarian Moment
• Chapter 3 Freeing Women: Righting the Wrongs Done to Aboriginal Women
• Chapter 4 Domestic Rules: Ignoring the Rights of Mothers
• Chapter 5: Mt Margaret: Promoting Adaptable Education
• Chapter 6: An Inhumane Dictatorship: Challenging Policy in Western Australia
• Chapter 7 Hunt and Die: Saving the Race from Extinction
• Chapter 8 Defending Fathers and Sons: Human Rights for Australian Aborigines
• Chapter 9 Demanding Justice and Freedom: Critiquing Assimilation
• Chapter 10 At War with Evil: Dying in the Fight
• Conclusion
• Epilogue

Holland starts her book with the rather startling scenario of Bennett’s papers being confiscated by government officials after her death in 1961, highlighting the government’s discomfort with her life-long and increasingly internationalist activism. She returns to this scene in the epilogue, and suggests that it may have been part of ASIO surveillance as part of the ‘fabric of the times’. In any event, Holland argues, by confiscating her papers (which were returned but later lost), it was a

profound personal violation because her papers were inextricably connected to Bennett’s spirit and self-definition. They were deeply rooted in her own past and family story as they documented those of others, and they were critical to her crusade because, above all else, she was a writer…There is no doubt that Bennett’s crusade was a mental fight and her pen her sword which never slept. She saw her task as the pursuit of truth and the evidence of the department as it (ab)used its power to defeat Aboriginal lives.

p. 381

This is a fairly dense book, very much embedded in the politics of activism and political groups. The list of abbreviations at the start of the book was much appreciated as her action moved increasingly into the political sphere. It is, as the subtitle denotes, the story of a campaign and issues, many of which have been vindicated and are still relevant today.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: I did a talk at the Melbourne Unitarian Universalist Fellowship about Mary Montgomerie Bennett to both celebrate Women’s History Month and in the context of current debate about the Voice Referendum

Sourced from: purchased second hand.

2014, 371 p & notes

It seemed rather appropriate, if somewhat transgressive, to read this book over Easter. As a Unitarian, I don’t celebrate Easter but there’s a lot of God going around at Easter, particularly this most recent one which coincided with Passover. The author Bart D. Ehren is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, and he has written over thirty books about Christianity. He used to be an evangelical Christian, but is no longer. In fact, it sounds as if his distancing from his faith is very similar to my own, when he describes the way that he found that he could subscribe to less and less of the Nicene Creed. The exact same thing happened with me.

In this book Ehrman traces the historical development of the idea that Jesus was/is God.

He starts his book by noting that the divisions between the divine and human were not clear-cut, either in the Greek or Roman worlds in which Jesus operated, or indeed within Judaism itself.  In Greek mythology, there is constant slippage as gods become temporarily human, and humans become permanently gods.  In the Old Testament, there is the Angel of the Lord who appeared to Abraham, Hagar and Moses, and humans like Enoch who became angels. There’s the Son of Man figure and Wisdom and the Word, and the King of Israel.

He then turns to the question of what/who Jesus thought he was, and whether he talked about himself as God. He starts by considering the methodological problem of dealing with the source texts.  Paul’s letters were written twenty to thirty years after Jesus died, but Paul himself never met Jesus.  The gospels themselves were not written by eyewitnesses, and they were written between 35 and 65 years after Jesus’ death, based on oral stories. He notes that Matthew, Mark and Luke have both stories held in common, and some unique stories that do not appear elsewhere.  He characterizes Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet,  who predicted the end of the current evil age, who believed that God would intervene soon to destroy everything and everyone opposed to him. God would then institute a new kingdom on earth, and he (Jesus) would be king in that kingdom.   This was not a unique view: it could be found in the teachings of other apocalyptic-oriented Jews of his day.

He then turns to the resurrection.  There are many discrepancies between the gospels, so many that it is almost impossible to make a single narrative that combines the ‘facts’ of all four gospels.  We don’t really know whether he was buried, or whether there was an empty tomb.  But we do know that some of Jesus’ followers believed that he had been raised from the dead, that some of them had visions of him, and that the belief that he had been raised from the dead led them to consider him, in some sense, God.

The earliest Christians thought that Jesus had been ‘exalted’ and lifted up and given divine status after his crucifixion i.e. that he was a human who became God.  Others moved the moment of ‘exaltation’ further back in Jesus’ life:  the moment of baptism with John the Baptist and the dove, the moment of birth in the stable; the Annunciation.

Others- and this view came to dominate- saw him as already God, who became human i.e. became ‘incarnate’. This was the big change, and it occurred in the first twenty years after Jesus’ death. Jesus came to be seen as a pre-existing divine being, who became human.

He turns to Paul’s letters and John’s gospel at this point.  In particular he looks at Paul’s second letter to the Philippians, where the text suddenly breaks into a quite different rhythm and vocabulary. (Who, although he was in the form of God did not regard being equal with God something to be grasped after etc.) This, he suggests, is a poem that Paul is quoting.  In the book, the poem is presented broken up into poem-like metre, and it’s amazing how typography can change the way a test is read.   Likewise, he looks at John 1 (the ‘in the beginning’ prologue) and its reflection of Old Testament texts. I found this part fascinating: the idea that the gospels are a palimpsest of oral and poetic traditions, that can be traced backwards and identified by concepts and language that do not appear elsewhere.

He then shifts to the different heresies that arose in the second, third and fourth centuries:  the divine/human nature of God and Jesus;  whether there was ever a time when God existed but Jesus didn’t; whether they are one unitary being or two (or even three) separate entities, and the resultant concept of the trinity.  He then turns to the Nicean creed, our mutual stumbling block, which he demonstrates as not so much an affirmation of faith, as a refutation of the various heresies that were circulating the Christian world.

A good summary of his argument throughout the book appears in the epilogue:

To use the older terminology, in early Christianity the views of Christ got “higher and higher’ with the passing of time, as he became increasingly identified as divine. Jesus went from being a potential (human) messiah to being the Son of God exalted to a divine status as his resurrection; to being a pre-existent angelic being who came to earth incarnate as a man; to being the incarnation of the Word of God who existed before all time and through whom the world was created; to being God himself, equal with God the Father and always existent with him. (p.352)

This is almost the mirror opposite of his own beliefs about God (and a trajectory I have also followed), where Jesus became “lower and lower” until he understood him as a human being, no different to any other human being.  He now understands Jesus as “a true religious genius with brilliant insights”, but a man of the first-century Palestinian Jewish apocalyptic milieu.  He says that he resonates with the ethical teachings of Jesus (as do I) but that these, too, were delivered in a first-century apocalyptic format.  He argues that the views of Jesus have changed over time, and continue to change as Jesus is recontextualized, on an ongoing basis by each generation.

I enjoyed this book, which is very clearly set out with discrete sections and subheadings, and clear previews and summaries topping and tailing each chapter.  He interweaves his own personal spiritual journey through the telling, which I identified closely with.  I don’t know if I’ll read other books of his, though, because from their titles alone, they seem to be further elaborations on the themes in this one.  This book was a New York Times Bestseller, and perhaps that’s the level that I’m happy to leave my reading at.

Source: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: it’s Easter

My rating: 8.5