Racial violence and other national sins

In recent weeks, there has been renewed discussion* in both the secular and religious media of the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and more recent arrivals to this land. Stimulated by Dr Peter Adam's comments in the second annual John Saunders Lecture, entitled Australia - Whose Land?, it has centred on the question of how the beneficiaries of dispossession should relate to the dispossessed. Is it enough to say sorry? Should there be practical repentence - i.e. restitution - as well? And what does the Bible suggest that Australians Christians and their churches should do about all this?

I don't mean to try and answer these questions - but rather to add an historical note on these themes. John Saunders, the colonial Baptist minister from whom Dr Adam took his cue, readily expressed his concern about how the British treated Aborigines during the 1830s. But he was by no means the only colonial clergyman to do so. The comments of his contemporary, the Presbyterian leader John Dunmore Lang, are also well worth considering. In a sermon preached on 2 November 1838, a day appointed by the colonial Governor Gipps as a day of fasting and humiliation on account of the late calamitous drought, Lang said this:

'Now, my brethren, ...standing as we are in the immediate presence of God on this day of fasting and humiliation on account of our social and public, as well as our private and individual sins; let us ask ourselves seriously and in earnest, whether, as the European colonists of this territory, we can lay our hands upon our hearts, and plead not guilty concerning the Gibeonites, I mean the wretched Aboriginal inhabitants of this land? Alas! we are verily guilty concerning these our brethren; for not only have we despoiled them of their land, and given them in exchange European vice and European disease in every foul and fatal form, but the blood of hundreds, nay of thousands of their number, who have fallen from time to time in their native forests, when waging unequal warfare with their civilised aggressors, still stains the hands of many of the inhabitants of the land!..

If God visited the slaughter of the Gibeonites... on the whole house of Israel... much more then will the Lord avenge the blood of the wretched Aborigines of this territory, who have fallen unnecessarily before the progress of European colonisation, on the European inhabitants of this land! ... They are still bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh - formed originally after the image of God, like ourselves...We may rest assured, therefore, that these Gibeonites, so to speak, are especially under the divine protection...

Yes, brethern, every district of this land of our adoption has been defiled with the blood of these innocents; and who knows but it is for this that the Lord has been pleased, a second time, ‘to call drought upon the land…' If so, we have reason this day to humble ourselves mightily before the Lord our maker, as the sinful members of a sinful community.’ - John Dunmore Lang, National Sins the Cause & Precursors of National Judgements: A Sermon preached in the Scots Church, Sydney on Friday November 2, 1838, James Tegg, Sydney, 1838

Interestingly, the other 'national sins' for which Lang considered the drought a punishment were ‘injustice and oppression, on the part of the rich and powerful, towards the poorer classes of the community' - namely the convicts - and the proffanation of the Sabbath.

* See, for example, the Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Anglicans and blogs including Hebel and I woke up this morning with a frappacino in my hand...

Pic: Myall Creek massacre and memorial site.