Spiritual histories on stolen land: a religious history of sovereignty and land rights

Greg Dening was a deeply spiritual scholar. Though he walked away from the priesthood in 1970, he had been formed by his years in the Jesuit order, his practice of Saint Ignatius Loyola’s ‘Spiritual Exercises’ – the daily discipline of ‘spiritual readings’ – permeated his writing and teaching. Dening was a master of his craft. Yet towards the end of his career, he wrote of the ‘most enlightening experience [he] had in historiography.’ That is, of standing on a 100,000-year-old beach at Lake Mungo, learning from Muthi Muthi and Barkindji elders. ‘To listen you have to be silent.’ Dening was changed.

In this lecture, I seek to understand First Nations struggles for sovereignty and land rights through the lens of religious history. I show how disputes over First Nations land rights could be understood by the 1980s as a religious contest around the meaning of ‘true religion’. Aboriginal spirituality has long been denigrated by settler Australia as ‘pagan superstition’ or ‘primitive religion’ rather than ‘true religion’. In a surprising turn of events, however, First Nations people turned even Christian churches into strategic allies on the question of land, religion and sacred sites. I suggest that settler recognition of First Nations’ spirituality as grounds for sovereignty has been a form, however limited, of religious ‘conversion’. I close with some suggestions of what it might mean to tell spiritual histories on stolen land.

Dr Laura Rademaker is an award-winning historian of Indigenous Australia, missions, religion, gender and Christianity at the Australian National University. Her research explores histories of cross-cultural exchange and cross-cultural and community-based approaches to history. She is author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (2018) and co-author with Mavis Kerinaiua of Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up (2023). She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Australian Historical Association’s Hancock Prize for most outstanding first book and the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia’s Paul Bourke Award for an outstanding Early Career Researcher.