Colonialism and the Fate of Place

The concept of place and related ideas concerning ‘home’ have been subject to significant scrutiny in recent years by professional Geographers.Footnote 9 Cresswell identifies at least three approaches to place. The descriptive approach is typical of regional geographers where the concern is with the distinctiveness and particularity of places. A social constructionist approach remains interested in the particularity of places but the concern is uncovering the underlying social processes ‘by showing how places are instances of wider processes of the construction of place in general under conditions of capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism, post-colonialism’.Footnote 10 This second approach is clearly indebted to Marxist, feminist and post-structuralist forms of interrogation. A third phenomenological approach is less interested in ‘places’ and more interested in ‘place’ as a fundamental feature of human existence.

The three approaches are interconnected and all contribute to our understanding of place. Place remains a contested concept. Post-colonial critiques of religion are clearly indebted to the social constructivist approach to place. On this account, place appears as a dangerous and imperialist site of conquest and assimilation. This arises where enlightenment and colonial assumptions about space as an infinite expanse available for occupation dominate. The result is the collapse of place into space. Place as such vanishes. The philosopher Edward Casey has stated it succinctly, ‘for an entire epoch, place has been regarded as an impoverished second cousin of Time and Space, those two colossal cosmic partners towering over modernity’.Footnote 11 As a child of this colonial spirit, it was axiomatic that the Church of England in Australia would leave a distinctive footprint on antipodean soil, a footprint necessarily encoded with a colonial tread. Australia was essentially a colonial space to be tamed and inhabited in however a benevolent fashion. The doctrine of Australia as Terra Nullius — empty place — relies on such conceptuality. It belongs to the dynamic of conquest and assimilation of foreign places as ‘non-place’ or as a place in the process of construction. Yet, even this is construed as an issue of transplantation rather than inculturation.

Place and Globalization

In the shrinking world of globalism, what happens to place? It seems that ideas of place sit uncomfortably alongside notions of fluidity, networks and interconnecting flows associated with globalization. This development has contributed to the loss of a sense of place. This has been associated with new forms of colonialism operating covertly on the back of a highly mobile and self-consciously global world, where market dominance is the fundamental paradigm. In this context, place disappears or rather place becomes ubiquitous. Particularity of places is always under threat of dissolution or assimilation. Rapid networks of communication generate a sense of immediacy and feedback. In terms of the Anglican global communion, it may mean that we are able to misunderstand each other more quickly than ever, that perception of each other as fundamentally similar — because of shared liturgical, doctrinal and governance provisions — in fact proves to be a chimera. The global world might be a story less about being pulled apart but of deeper and problematic connections. Is this a blessing or a curse? Minimally, it points to the ambiguous nature of the shrinking global Anglican Communion. It can generate a new appreciation of ‘diversity communion’ and it can also become the basis for new forms of neo-colonial alliances. What it does mean is that place and any particular place can become the site for creative recovery of local identity because at one level all places are invested with a new significance in the wake of an anti-imperial global connectivity. On the other hand, all places are susceptible to alliances that threaten to dissolve local identity. Place emerges as an ambiguous concept and highly vulnerable.

Diversity Globalism and the Retreat to Place

A positive reading of ‘diversity globalism’ invests all places with renewed significance. Ian Douglas thus counters Phillip Jenkins’s Next Christianity globalist vision with an alternative vision:

This radical diversity globalism invests places with renewed significance. It offers a positive rational for continued enculturation of the Gospel. How does it fit with the realities of the Anglican Communion? The matter is complex, for whilst some liberals and moderates view the years since Lambeth 1998 as an era of Anglican neo-colonialism undermining the diversity of globalist vision, others of a more conservative persuasion view the same period as a new decolonized era opening up new possibilities for liberation and respect for minorities.Footnote 13

The danger of the new diversity globalism is that it might promote a retreat into place as a protected space, which runs counter to the new Pentecost spoken of by Douglas. Here, place is construed as a retreat from alien forces with a concomitant tendency to create new exclusions and tight borders. On this scenario, globalization can be generative of new tribalism as well as neo-colonialism.Footnote 14

It seems that our need for roots persists amidst the homogenization of place. But it can lead to new assertions of homeland and territory where place becomes a heavily bounded concept. It is not surprising that such conceptions are subject to critique and reformulation in post-colonial theology, and new notions of boundaries and home have emerged.Footnote 15 Such approaches give priority to life at the boundary as the location at which new and creative opportunities for life together exist. In the Gospels, it is remarkable how often Jesus walked the boundary and in doing so reconnected people with each other and God.Footnote 16 When the accent is on life at the boundary or intersection, traditional notions of territory are reformulated to take account of the fact that it is both at and across boundaries that new home places are constructed and new patterns of human interaction arise. This leads to the notion of ‘in-between spaces’ as a counter to more sedimented conceptions of place, which involve ‘parcelling out a closed space to people’. By contrast, a ‘nomadic spaciality’ ‘distributes people (or animals) in an open space’.Footnote 17 It is associated with an affirmation of cultural hybridity as preferable to cultural hegemony.Footnote 18 The notion of the place ‘in-between’ is an important ingredient for a reformulated ecclesial sense of place down-under, which I will return to in the next section of the article.

A Global Sense of Place?

This raises a fundamental question. Is it possible to have a global sense of place whilst remaining rooted in the local? This is pertinent to the life of the body of Christ, which is both a universal and a local phenomenon. Such an approach endeavours to mediate between the ‘whole history of place as a centre of meaning connected to a rooted and “authentic” sense of identity forever challenged by mobility’ and the ‘erosion of place through globalization and time-space compression’.Footnote 19 Is there then a third way that (a) retains the importance of rootedness but is not bound by colonial attitudes to place as site of conquest, and (b) is not overwhelmed by global movements that appear as threat to all places and seem at first sight to represent new forms of colonial conquest of the market? This has led one geographer to develop an ‘extroverted notion of place’ as ‘open and hybrid — a product of interconnecting flows — of routes rather than roots’.Footnote 20 On this account, place is marked more as process, defined by the outside, a site of multiple identities and histories, a uniqueness marked by the quality of interactions, of ‘routes’ rather than ‘roots’. What some had earlier argued generated ‘non-places’,Footnote 21 this more positive assessment of place as dynamic interconnected flows of people in relation to places accentuates routes but only in relation to specific locales.

Recognition of the global emphasis on mobility and routes does not necessarily displace the need for roots. Rather, there exists a ‘dialogical relationship’ between the two with ‘roots’ ‘signifying identity based on stable cores and continuities’ and ‘routes suggesting identity based on travel, change and disruption’.Footnote 22 A sense of place is constituted through such a dialogical relationship. It is associated with boundaries as ‘permeable borderlands of exchange, blending and transformation’.Footnote 23 Might this be sufficient to overcome the subtle and not so subtle influence of neo-colonial conquests of economy, social life and even the form of the Christian community? This seems to me to be a fundamental issue for the Anglican Communion. On the one hand, we cannot wind the clock back — there is no protected place as such — but on the other hand, to do justice to God’s ways with the world, a recognition and acknowledgement of particular places is axiomatic to the Gospel. These are issues for the Australian context. What would it look like for Anglicanism in Australia to recover a sense of place that was both global in intent and consciousness but at the same time fully embedded in the local place as an incarnate and resurrected ecclesiology might require? How might recognition of ‘in-between spaces’, open territories and notions of home be deployed in the service of an antipodean ecclesiology that was truly inculturated and indigenous?

Preliminary Assessments: The Ecclesial Potentialities of Place

In this section, I have briefly examined the concept of place as it has functioned in contemporary geography. Some of the implications of this discussion for ecclesial life and colonial Anglicanism in particular have been flagged. What does appear incontrovertible is that place is an essentially contested concept.Footnote 24 A number of themes flow through the discussion.

First, I note the dialectical relationship between place and space. The two terms are not the same but they belong to a similar field of enquiry in geography. The Western preoccupation with special categories to the virtual exclusion of place is in the process of correction. Place and space operate in tension with each other. This means that notions of space as a vacuum to be filled and assimilated to alien presence have to be kept in tension with a concept of place as a rich web of engagement, leading to the discovery of new ways of being.

This is associated with a second feature of recent reflections on place. This concerns place as a human construct and place as an elemental form of life together. In the former aspect, place reveals itself as the result of certain values and ideological impulses. In the latter emphasis, place is recognized as an indispensable feature of being human prior to its constructed quality.

A third matter concerns the relationship between ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, reflecting the human need for sites of habitation and the restless and fluid movement connecting sites. Roots and routes are key elements in a dynamic sense of place that obtains in our contemporary world.

A fourth matter concerns place as ‘in-between’ existence. In this approach, place is a liminal concept and primary emphasis is on boundaries, meeting points and intersection as locations for new possibilities for personal and communal life in God’s world.

Each of the above four areas have implications for ecclesial life; how it might be reconceived and what practices this might involve. Minimally, our preliminary examination of the concept of place suggests that the recovery of an ecclesial sense of place will lead to a more dynamic and prophetic ecclesiology. The idea of the church of Jesus Christ as a pilgrim people required to engage with new places prior to imposing new forms of church culture, of a community of faith embodying both sacred sites and sacred journeys, of a church that is at home in a liminal in-between existence beyond prevailing forms and structures, all present some profound challenges to the way the Anglican churches of the colonial empire have shaped their presence and engagements. In the next section, I want to pursue the above themes relating to place in relation to the Anglican church of Australia. I am particularly interested to see what value there may be in the idea of the church as in-between place, the resonances it may have with Terra Australis and the possibilities that arise for a more dynamic Anglican ecclesiology down-under.

Place, Space and Spiritual Sensibilities

In the Christian tradition in Australia, the theme of land has become important in recent years, usually in relation to indigenous spirituality.Footnote 25 Yet the significance of place for the development of the church in Australia is in its infancy.Footnote 26 The recent examination of a Christian theology of place by John Inge provides some important markers for such an exploration. Inge develops a relational understanding of place as ‘the seat of relations or the place of meeting and activity in the interaction between God and the world’.Footnote 27 He explores the way in which place attains a sacramental character through the particular interactions that involve people, place and God. It leads him to consider the conditions necessary for the emergence of holy places and shrines, which maintain continuity through time. At the heart of this recovery of place is a reading of the Scriptures that point to the significance of place, both in the life of the people of Israel and radically through the incarnation of the divine Word made flesh. Inge maps out a way forward for a positive appreciation of the significance of place in religious experience and as a factor in theological understanding.

Inge’s approach connects with the reflections of the Australian architect, Philip Drew.Footnote 28 Drew argued that Anglo-Saxon Australian cultural identity has been formed largely in relation to the experience of living on the fringes of the continent. This explains why Australians look outward rather than inward and why our spaces are linear rather than centripetal. This outward and lineal orientation for Australian identity was linked by Drew to the verandah in the Australian experience. For a variety of social and environmental reasons the first Europeans in Australia sought what Drew referred to as a ‘safe openness’, a ‘balance between looking out — a measure of openness — and shelter, or refuge, whose solution was the verandah’.Footnote 29 Thus, for Drew, the verandah is a ‘primary metaphor’ and he used it to explore the ‘characteristic Australian expression of edges and open boundaries’.Footnote 30

Drew argued against what he called the ‘centric myth’, which he associated both architecturally and culturally with the dominant European cultural tradition. This was the tradition of ‘centralised space, the conception of a closed centric world’. In Drew’s view, this European attitude ‘distorted perceptions of Australia at the same time as it failed to match the geographic reality’.Footnote 31 Drew proposed that Australians were pre-eminently verandah people, looking outward, not into the centre of Terra Australis Incognitio.Footnote 32 This was certainly reflected in the development of architecture in Australia in housing, shop fronts, pubs and grander colonial buildings. All except churches.

Drew’s analysis has been an important catalyst for my own explorations of place and ecclesiology.Footnote 33 It offers a way through two often-competing approaches to fundamental religious experience. On the one hand there is a strong and dominant approach that focuses on spiritual authenticity being gained through the way of purgation, associated with a return to the centre and a companion desert spirituality. This has been a theme in the Australian writers, Manning Clarke (history), Patrick White (literature) and more recently David Tracey (cultural). On the other hand, there are more recent counter-proposals from a feminist perspective that draw attention to the importance of divine interaction at home in the everyday, on the fringes or at the margins.Footnote 34 Both these approaches to religious experience draw upon significant streams in the Christian tradition. The centric orientation has been a feature of Christian asceticism (with a strong focus on denial and purgation and a tendency to undervalue materiality and bodily life in its conception of holiness). It has been associated with a theology of transcendence — the Divine is the mystery beyond the horizon of present existence. The spirituality of the everyday is funded by a theology of immanence and finds the Divine erupting in ever new and surprising ways in the ordinary — the tradition of Brother Lawrence springs to mind.

However, without wishing to dismiss these two spiritual traditions it seems to me that neither takes seriously the sense of place referred to by Drew and characteristic of those who inhabit the continent of Australia. The majority of Australians to this day have their cultural and social identities shaped not by one fundamental reality, that is, land, but three — land (continent), ocean (we inhabit the largest island continent) and sky with its infinite extension into space. Furthermore, since the majority who live on this continent live on the coastal fringes, the fundamental experience for such people is not one of living on the edge or at the margins in relation to a mysterious centre. Rather, the fundamental experience is one of living at the point of intersection, the intersection of three great realities of our physical environment. This constitutes one of the givens of our sense of place. The companion language to intersections is intervals and corridors. The geography of the eastern seaboard, where 80% of Australians live, is an extensive land corridor from the tip of northern Australia to Melbourne in the South, a distance of over three-thousand kilometres. This corridor is bound by ocean to the east and the Great Dividing range to the west, a distance usually no wider than sixty kilometres. This is the matrix within which our spiritual identity and life has to be crafted. The impact of this particular place on the shape and texture of our spiritual lives has yet to be uncovered.

What has this to do with Anglican ecclesiology in Australia? First, the regionalism that afflicts Australian Anglicanism and has been a major factor in the development of an independent diocesanism may be significantly influenced by place as much as any imported ecclesiastical party spirit. The Church of England developed where the centres of population were established. These places were strung out along the coast at the estuaries of magnificent harbours. The colonial church was in fact a church in many quite different colonies. Regionalism was a matter of survival. Second, the orientation of the coastal dwellers was outwards to the ocean, to home base, to England on another shore. Again, the strong links to the mother country were a matter of survival and comfort in a strange place. Significant links between these different regions were more difficult to sustain compared to perceived connections to origins abroad. Third, the continent itself was perceived as alien and strange by comparison with the place of origin. Under conditions of extreme isolation and alienated from home base,Footnote 35 the most pressing need of the quasi established church was to transplant as much as possible of the Church of England within the confines of the separated colonial settlements. Such a transplant could not involve creative adaptation, for the place itself was fundamentally alien and in need of charting, taming and ordering. Not only would this inevitably happen on a regional basis, it would also occur with as little disruption as possible to the inherited forms and patterns of worship, belief and practice.Footnote 36

The fundamental need was reassurance and comfort in an alien environment. The church was shaped by a sense of social, cultural and religious dis-placement. Its sense of place was construed negatively in the interests of creating a home away from home. Accordingly, the space was filled with European exotics, and local indigenous forms were largely ignored.Footnote 37 This was certainly the case with the development of the Church of England in Australia. In this colonial expansion of the church, engagement with the place was determined by underlying beliefs that here was a space that required European impress and assimilation. The dialectic between place and space, between listening and discovery of what was present and creative engagement leading to a new synthesis was muted at best. The sense of dis-placement was profound; the need to recreate in the colonial space a cultural form that closely mirrored home base was paramount. This certainly meant that the spiritual rhythms of the new place could not easily emerge in the ecclesial consciousness. An implication of this was that place as an elemental form of life gave way to place as a social construct. In an alien environment this was indeed an urgent matter. The experience of dis-placement meant that the transplanted Church of England was distinctly out of place in the new environment.

Not surprisingly, the architecture of the Church of England was also transplanted and exhibited the signs of an established and secure church in a tough colonial world. Generally, ecclesiastical architecture followed international trends in neo-gothic revival. In this context, accommodation to local conditions (e.g. climate and landscape) was not prominent.Footnote 38 The failure of local adaptation, architecturally, was of a piece with a general failure of the Church of England to transcend its establishment social and cultural European world. What the Church has been manifestly unable to do is develop an orientation and outlook more in keeping with the nature of the place. For example, whereas the inherited Georgian geometric box architecture was modified by the development of the verandah, this was not a significant feature of holy places of worship.

Retrieving Verandah as Ecclesial Place

Perhaps a verandah ecclesiology is precisely what is required for a truly inculturated form of Christianity in Australia. Something of this sense is captured by the Australian theologian Bruce Kaye in the short title to his book ‘a church without walls’.Footnote 39 In Kaye’s view, the basic challenge for Australian Anglicans is to become an outward-looking and open community, actively engaged with society and its concerns. The verandah is a place without walls and barricades but offers posts and railings to lean upon.Footnote 40 It does not dissolve the importance of boundaries and the dynamics that occur across bounded spaces. The verandah motif may provide an imaginative construal for the kind of ecclesial place Australian Anglicans occupy. The verandah, like the place of our habitation, is a place of intersection between outer world and inner house. It is a corridor or interval, which catches the breeze — a safe and hospitable place, orientated outwards but mindful of the deeper recesses from within and from which it draws life. An ecclesiology shaped in relation to this image feeds a notion of the church as an open sanctuary offering safety, nourishment and energy for work.

Certainly the key element here is our placement at the interstices of life, in the middle, in-between. The notion of the land down-under is relative to those who are on top. But the particularity of our place is otherwise. We have to take stock of our place amidst the great cosmic realities, land, sea and sky, inhabiting a corridor bounded by salt water and the driest continent upon earth. This in-between place was well understood by the aboriginal peoples of Australia for over fifty-thousand years. Europeans are relative latecomers and our degree of integration with our place is in the early stages. This fact alone makes the dialogue between indigenous and recent arrivals imperative.

Can the verandah motif provide a rich enough idea for a properly inculturated church? Perhaps we have to move beyond a verandah ecclesiology in order to respond to the need for reconciliation with indigenous Australians.Footnote 41 From this perspective the verandah metaphor is vulnerable on two points. First, the verandah is derivative from the main body of the dwelling. The pre-existing structure is aligned with the colonial home. As a result, to invoke the verandah metaphor is to maintain a certain ideological dominance of prevailing European values and attitudes that are no longer appropriate for genuine meeting and reconciliation. Second, to occupy the space of the verandah is to assume the stance of one who gazes upon another at a distance.Footnote 42 Thus, the verandah motif appears problematic as a metaphor for renewed ecclesial life in Australia because of its associations with colonial power and detachment from indigenous Australia. On this reading, the attempt to create a home away from home has resulted in an Anglicanism still welded to the mother-house and at some distance from the local cultures. What seems to be required is a ‘contact zone’ — a ‘neutral zone’ that is free from ‘traces of colonial discourse’.Footnote 43 Though such zones may function as a ‘detached verandah, detached from colonial centres and colonial power and even from hard boundaries’,Footnote 44 I remain unconvinced by the notion of ‘contact zones’. The phrase has its own baggage associated with militarism and sporting prowess, as well as privileging the idea of space rather than concrete place.

In response to such a critique it may be sufficient to draw attention to the remarkable variety of verandahs in Australian culture and the manner in which they actually draw people together rather than maintain distance. Indigenous people too have their own versions of verandahs. This is not to ignore the fact that increasingly in Australia the verandah of private dwellings has been relocated from the front to the back of the house. This retreat from public to private place has a variety of names e.g. patio, entertainment area, sundeck, courtyard. It is a feature of suburban life.Footnote 45 Yet the matter is more complex. Beyond the domestic verandah there are numerous other structures and places that function in a verandah-like way in contemporary culture e.g. places of meeting where race, ethnicity, class, gender, social status are no longer barriers to social encounter. Sports ovals, beach, esplanades, pathways and shopping malls come to mind.Footnote 46 The migration of the verandah to the public places of our life may constitute ‘the great good place’ that creates the possibilities for encounter and communal sensibilities beyond the enclosure of our private worlds.Footnote 47 In this sense, the verandah depicts a third place beyond work or home where new forms of interpersonal life might arise. The metaphor may yet offer some rich possibilities that move us beyond the constraints of colonial ideology. How the Church might respond to such in-between public places and attempt to re-envisage its own life within such liminal existence is a project that awaits us. The emergence of new forms of religious fundamentalism and enclaves of spiritual life hermetically sealed from the wider culture may look attractive, but in terms of our discussion such features of religious life constitute resistances to an ecclesiology of the in-between, as developed here. Appeal to ‘emerging church’ and so-called ‘fresh expressions’ may not in fact break through such resistances but embody them in new forms of tribalism.

It is also the case that verandahs are inevitably tied to homes and such places are freighted with meanings and established relations. And home itself is a powerful and complex biblical image for salvation.Footnote 48 By contrast, the quest for neutral places where relationships are less clear and consequently open to new possibilities are manifestly not home, and people don’t live there but pass through them. In the biblical tradition they are analogous to roads and are implicated in journey motifs. The Emmaus Road is one such well-known neutral contact zone. There exists an inevitable tension between home base (albeit of a more open and inviting kind) and the neutral space beyond the ‘fence line’ — between, as we have already observed, roots and routes. A verandah ecclesiology makes some modest moves towards a more open engagement from the home. This will necessarily involve a creative move beyond the verandah and/or the reconstitution of the Church as in-between existence. But the dialectic between fence-line and home base, between routes and roots is critical and the verandah as liminal place will play its part. When the fence line or frontier becomes the space occupied by our verandahs, then a new home is in construction at the point of intersection.Footnote 49 The dynamism inherent in this reconfiguring of church is consonant with the migration of the sacred in contemporary society beyond the established ecclesial walls into new and unchartered places that await careful engagement by the churches.Footnote 50

However it is at this point that we need to recall the limitations of metaphor. Metaphors cannot stand alone; they require a conceptual framework within which to operate. It is the choice of an appropriate framework that is critical and it is precisely at this point that deeper engagement with the theological tradition is required.

My own deployment of the verandah motif as a place in-between connects with a post-colonial sensibilityFootnote 51 and can be fruitfully linked with a minor yet clear theme in the Christian tradition. The place of the in-between has been developed in relation to pneumatology and more recently in relation to Holy Saturday.Footnote 52 The breeze-way of the verandah church with its obvious appeal to the activity of the Spirit may find a creative correlation to the Holy Saturday tradition of existence between old life and new, under threat of extinction and anticipation of new possibilities. For in this tradition, the possibility of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead lies within the gift of the Father through the agency of the life-giving Spirit. The mode of God’s presence in the Holy Saturday tradition is one of vulnerability and openness to an as yet unfulfilled future. There are resources here for the development of a trinitarian dynamic woven into church, discipleship and the particularities of place in Australia. Such an interweaving seems to be precisely what a grounded trinitarian ecclesiology requires. It will require nothing less than ‘the long days journey of the Saturday’Footnote 53 of the Church of the in-between God. It requires an ecclesial ethic that embodies resilience, patience, respect and resolve.Footnote 54

The project for Australian Anglicans depends upon the discovery of a richer sense of place and a commitment to the theological task in that place. Clearly such an account of ‘place’ is not to be equated with land as such. Minimally, it includes the entirety of the physical environment. This is necessary but not sufficient, for the dynamic of place can only be uncovered theologically as it includes environment, human interaction and a construal of the presence of God.Footnote 55 Place is thus a dynamic concept that grounds reflection in the local but is orientated towards more universal categories. A Christian theology of place necessarily strains towards the universal; it is freighted with universal intent. The value of a focus on place is that it facilitates a critical deconstruction of inherited identities and opens up new possibilities for re-conceiving the nature of ecclesial existence.