The book, A Kimberley Collaboration” The Story of the Boab Network 2008 – 2018, will be launched in Floreat, on Sunday 17 November with author Rev Dr Robert Hoskin from Melbourne and Boab Network members.
The book is a history of the Boab Network. This group of volunteers originated from All Saints Floreat Uniting Church, but now involves people from the wider community and other states who work together with the Mowanjum Aboriginal Community, near Derby in the West Kimberley.
by Dr Alison Atkinson-Phillips, 2019, University of WA Press
I was surprised by this book. I know Atkinson-Phillips’ work from previous associations, so it wasn’t the high quality readability that surprised me. It flows beautifully and carefully.
I also knew it would be compassionate. As she travels to survivor memorials around Australia, Alison records the persons involved with empathy and the aesthetics of each site with sympathy. I often found myself quite moved, not because of any journalistic milking of my sympathy, but in the competent record of the story.
Why was I surprised? I just didn’t think that I would like the book all that much. It is a survey of record and I thought it would be laborious in detail and philosophy. Yes, it records in detail who did what and why, as a good researcher should. Yet it is skilfully framed within a history of memorials.
I half expected that the subject of memorials might be irrelevant to where I am at. However, as the story was placed out and the distinction between memorial and monument emerged more clearly, I found parts of myself.
After a short hiatus, Revive magazine is back in print with a brand new look. We’ve made a few changes to the structure and layout of the magazine, as well as the distribution; we’ll now be printing four times a year, instead of six.
One of my favourite additions to Revive is the recipe section on page 25. Not because I love cooking (actually, I hate it!), but because I love church morning teas. My brother, Phil, often jokes that being at a church event is the only time we ever get to eat curried egg sandwiches anymore. And I think he’s probably right.
Wesley College, a Uniting Church WA school, received the prestigious Australian Education Award for Boarding School of the Year on Friday 16 August in Sydney.
The Australian Education Awards celebrate the outstanding achievements of the country’s top performing schools.
“It is often said, the health and heart of a school is measured by its boarding community. This award reflects the wonderful work that happens in our boarding house, but also acknowledges the innovative facilities of the College as a whole,” said Ross Barron, Headmaster of Wesley College.
“To be named as one of Australia’s best schools is a magnificent honour and a tribute to our staff and their commitment to every student.”
St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School (Brisbane) was co-winner of the Boarding School of the Year Award.
The award recognises the most outstanding boarding school in Australia based on a range of criteria including:
Rodney Steer, Head of Boarding at Wesley College, joined Wesley in January 2019 and said he was not surprised to see the college receive this award.
“Having worked for most of my adult life in boarding schools across the country, it is my view that Wesley boarding is the finest in Australia,” he said. “Our focus is not only academic excellence, but each boy’s personal growth and wellbeing, in a nurturing environment that understands the importance of community and relationships.”
Wesley College was also a finalist in the 2019 Australian Education Awards including Best School Strategic Plan, Department Head of the Year (Claire Leong) and Innovation in Learning Environment. And in 2018, Wesley College was named as an Innovative School by the Educator, the leading Australian resource for senior educational professionals.
By Diana Butler-Bass, Harper One 2018.
Reading small chunks of Grateful has been my morning reading for the last month. Gratitude, I learnt, is often missing as a spiritual practice in a selffocused world.
More and more people are finding this experience of God beyond the walls of traditional religious institutions, but often miss the church community itself and its shared spiritual practices such as gratitude. Gratitude can easily get buried in rote liturgy with religious words that have lost their meaning. Many claim gratitude in their daily lives, but Bass finds that claim to be at odds with the discontent that permeates modern society and dominates our political discourse.
This highlighted a gap, she argues, between our desire to be grateful and our ability to behave gratefully—a divide that influences our understanding of morality, worship, and institutional religion itself. In Grateful, Bass challenges readers to think about the impact gratitude has in our spiritual lives, and encourages them to make gratitude a “difficult and much-needed spiritual practice for our personal lives and to inspire us to work together for a better world.”
Directed by Randall Wright, Heritage Films, 2018
This review was published in the April 2019 hardcopy edition of Revive. Sadly, Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, passed away yesterday. We keep all those who knew and loved him in our thoughts.
In this heartfelt documentary, we are invited to spend time in a L’Arche community. This film is not so much the life story of Jean Vanier, but a peek into his everyday life and the community he founded.
The L’Arche community was founded in France in 1964 and aimed to do away with institutions for people living with disability and build life together instead. People with varying levels of ability live together in community, sharing day-to-day activities and becoming friends – equals – rather than residents and staff.
After visiting an institution for people living with disabilities in 1963 France, Jean was deeply affected by the suffering of those who lived there. He left his job teaching at the University of Toronto and moved to France to live with the people he met, helping to revolutionise the care system in the western world.
The violence, he says, was hard at first, but over time it became a place of peace.
Meredith Lake knows how to tell a story with soul. She’s the award-winning author of The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History and one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Uniting Church National History Conference. In her latest venture she’s hosting Radio National’s new show, Soul Search. It’s about what we believe and the difference it makes in our lives. So who does Meredith speak with on the show?
I get to speak with a whole range of people – so far including soul singers, poets and Indigenous activists; mindfulness experts, theologians, even a life model and a liturgical designer!” she said.
By Father Rod Bower, Penguin Books, 2018.
Born to a young unmarried mother through to his adoption, Father Rod Bower shares his struggles to establish his identity in the midst of bullying and his stepfather’s early death. He finds acceptance within Anglo-Catholicism, eventually going to seminary, ordination and appointment to the Gosford Parish with a deep passion for social justice.
His theology of billboard signs reveals a deep empathy for Jesus’ mission to the marginalised which in the modern context involves challenging attitudes towards ‘illegal’ asylum seekers, Islam, LGBTQ and climate change. Fr Rod Bower demonstrates how billboards gives the church a platform for sharing the Gospel in the public square, exposing the ethical failings of Parliament.
By Peter FitzSimons, Hatchette Australia, 2018
When the Murray-Darling River system is news, raising questions about how well we know our own environment, Peter FitzSimons’ Burke and Wills has particular relevance. FitzSimons tells of their expedition from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860–1861. He makes it possible to have an empathetic response to the participants, with their strengths and weaknesses, hubris and blindness.
Australia is a very urbanised nation, despite traditions about the ‘bush’. Part of the romance of the bush is that others go there and we did not have to learn the hard lessons about the environment they faced. Europeans also mostly had closed minds to what Indigenous Australians could teach them. It remains so.
Given the jealousies and characters of the participants, it is amazing that the expedition managed to achieve its goal. The party had separated and established a base camp at Cooper’s Creek, so a smaller group could travel faster and reach the goal. It was tragic to miss the rendezvous (by hours) which led to the deaths of Burke and Wills. They were so close.
Morningstar Press, 2018.
Rev John Queripel is a retired Uniting Church minister in NSW with a varied career in congregations and chaplaincies. He is known for his social justice concerns and his scholarly approach to understanding Christianity today.
His latest book is informed by scholarly understanding of the differences between factual writing about what happened and the power of metaphor and myth to convey deep meaning. For many modern readers it will be a new experience to read the chapters that describe conditions in Judea when the
gospels were written and which show the very different agendas of the only two New Testament writers who provide more than passing reference to the birth of Jesus.
The chapters guide the reader through the strange world of first century story and myth to an appreciation of the meaning of the stories about Jesus’ birth for us today. We may also reflect, sadly, on the way many churches celebrate Christmas giving prominence to magical stories of a baby, but little focus on the transformative life and teachings of the man who gave rise to such stories.
For more about other publications by John Queripel at www.facebook.com/JohnHenryQueripel/
David Merritt