Re-Storying Australia's Soul

 New Year’s Eve, Sydney Harbour December 31st 2024  Robbie Williams and a chunk of the million strong crowd of revellers belt out the words of John Farnham’s stirring The Voice anthem, ‘We’re not gonna sit in silence, we’re not gonna live with fear!’ At the time I wondered ‘What resolutions sprang from that for 2025?’ There’d be a thousand possible I reckon.
 
Now that the smoke from $8M fireworks has drifted away, I’m asking myself what I’m going to use my voice for here in Oz. I decided if I’d had a chance to write a slogan across the Harbour Bridge that night, it would have been RE-STORYING AUSTRALIA.

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is a history-loving Professor with a difference. She was a high achieving student who left Australia in the early 2000’s to pursue an academic career at Oxford and Cambridge. “Growing up in a secular home…I had been an atheist and a critic of religion for much of my life. I was especially hostile to Christianity,” she writes in the opening chapter of her recent book ‘Priests of History – Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age.’   I’m sure you’ll be challenged if you listen to her tell her own story.    (see below)

Living as a true millennial questing for self-discovery, self-fulfilment and personal happiness without any grounding in any larger narrative, she describes herself as living an ‘ahistorical life.’ This meant dismissing any possibility there might be any enduring stories around the place that might promise keys to the meaning of life.  So she was bent on a course to compose her own biography in a carefree ‘choose your own ending’ style.
 
No God to bother with.
 
Or was there?  It gradually dawned on Sarah that, if life is about self-invention, then her passionate pursuit of history was kind of irrelevant. The book tracks the steady invasion of the overarching Christian narrative that had shaped her native country – something she had previously ignored. It was far from being a fumbling search for a crutch to lean her ahistorical life on, but rather the surprise result of her serious engagement with atheism.

The thrust of her book is that we are living in an age that is disconnected from the past – we have lost the ability to engage meaningfully with what has gone before. We don’t ask why history matters or try to understand what the story is that has brought us to the present.
 
More than that, she saw new generations being coached to distrust history and to use it as a weapon in the culture wars – being told the past was something we need to liberate ourselves from, not learn from. In Priests of History she argues that neglect in passing down our shared narrative has crippled our ability to talk about the complexities of the past.
 
That presses my buttons!

Over the last four decades or more, historian Professor Stuart Piggin has conducted an epic exploration of the Christian contribution to Australia’s past that provides a narrative to help us truly understand ourselves. Twenty years ago, he stirred me to write a PhD thesis to explore practical ways of countering this increasing ignorance of our own history. This provoked my book Tell Me Another, encouraging the art of honest storytelling as a way of engaging our fellow Australians in understanding our important spiritual odyssey.
 
So, my way of not sitting in silence is to keep mining out, refining and crafting our Australian faith stories in my role as The Outback Historian. By making them accessible, I’ll be working to help new generations come to grips with the past they know so little about and to interpret it with skill.
 
I was delighted that Sarah brought the stories of Aboriginal Civil Rights activists William Cooper and Doug Nichols onto the international stage as examples of being a ‘priest of history’ – exposing these overlooked chapters as a way of better understanding our shared journey to the present. Better still, I just had a visit from a keen young history teacher who told me he’s been using these exact stories in his classroom. Here's one I filmed at the school at Cummeragunga on the Murray River.
https://www.theoutbackhistorian.com.au/stories/a-visit-to-cummeragunja

In the next month I’ll be working with a gifted communicator - O J Rushton to create an online training academy which will equip you with skills in purposeful re-storying your everyday conversations with work mates, families, neighbours, students and friends. We’d love you to join us.

Watch this space!