ABSTRACT
Aboriginal religion in Australia is in a time of transition; new songs are being sung on old songlines while the old stories are informing new narratives of identity and culture. Though it remains true that parts of the ancient song cycles of the Law and Dreamings are still heard on remote country in the deserts and tropics, gospel tunes are also widely present, evoking spiritual concerns in another voice, and linking Indigenous people to global, if not necessarily Western, traditions and worldviews. Likewise, the Adhan's call to worship increasingly competes for the hearts and minds of Indigenous people in many parts of Australia. Hip hop, too, sounds in the ears of the young – even in dusty remote communities and townships, as well as in the outer suburbs of Australia's coastal cities – signifying the attraction of non-religion for new generations born into the breakdown not only of the old certainties of culture, but of an enervating and growing despair in the wake of the collapse of the project of ‘self-determination’ and the subsequent political ‘mainstreaming’ of Aboriginal life. Interpreting this flux, this mix of renewal, return and departure, is crucial to understanding current quests for new ways of being Indigenous, and of the ongoing and creative interaction of Indigenous religions and cultures with late modernity. No single theory will account for these broad and diverse transitions, and in this regard thick descriptions of case studies are necessary to help us understand the concerns, actions and decisions of the many Indigenous actors utilising old and new stories and songs to graft meaning onto what is otherwise a postmodern and neocolonial circumstance. The complexity of these case studies is found in the fact that they are no longer able to be delimited to one single location or to one ethnolinguistic community – or even to one religious or cultural tradition. In what follows, the intimate connections of the leadership of the remote community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory to national networks and projects of Indigeneity and Aboriginal Christianity provides an illuminating window into narratives of revitalisation and reconstruction that may inform broader analysis. 1 Furthermore, it is proposed that the categories of religion and nonreligion are best deployed not as combatants in some ideological contest, but as complementary lenses in understanding the persistence of religion and spiritual worldviews alongside the emergence of secularisation in Indigenous Australia.
