ARTICULATING ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women's Fiction (Cross/Cultures 45). By Elaine Lindsay. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Reviewed by Anne Elvey Elaine Lindsay's study of spirituality in the writings of Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley and Barbara Hanrahan, is set in two Australian contexts: one theological and 'malestream'; the other secular and feminist. Relying on Australian literature by male authors such as Patrick White and sometimes also drawing on Australian Indigenous spiritualities, the white 'malestream' theological context that Lindsay describes has sought to develop a distinctively Australian desert spirituality, thereby neglecting the potential contribution of writings by Australian women to an articulation of an alternative spirituality. For its own reasons the secular feminist context has also largely ignored the spiritual dimension of writings by Australian women such as Astley, Jolley and Hanrahan. More surprisingly perhaps, Australian feminist theologians have also bypassed fiction by Australian women, referring instead to North American writers such as Alice Walker to express their own spiritualities. It was her recognition of this last point, that provided the impetus for Lindsay's book. Rewriting God sets out to explore the ways in which the writings of Astley, Jolley and Hanrahan might contribute to an articulation of alternative Australian spiritualities. The spirituality with which Rewriting God is in dialogue is principally Christian. Lindsay opens her study with a discussion of a paradigm of Australian spirituality she identifies as 'malestream' being developed by Christian authors such as Eugene Stockton and Tony Kelly. Lindsay's approach to the articulations of this 'malestream' paradigm is generous. Nevertheless, she highlights the negativity of much of this writing especially with regard to 'the image of man (the word is used intentionally) against the emptiness and the elemental and uncompromising power of the land' (10). She is rightly critical of appropriations of Indigenous spiritualities and the conscription of Aboriginal Australians as agents of white redemption. The overt sexism of some of these 'malestream' writings is brought out by judicious use of quotation that allows the texts to speak for themselves. Occasionally, however, I found this problematic; allowing the more offensive quotations to stand felt like an endorsement of these voices. But in the wider context of the book this was clearly not the case. Setting the scene for her reading of Astley, Jolley, and Hanrahan, Lindsay offers an outline of Australian women's spirituality. Although not stated in the chapter title, Lindsay makes clear that the reference is to non-Indigenous Australian women whose spirituality is formed within, in relation to, or in tension with Christianity. She writes: It is a fundamental point of my argument ... that many women and men experience Christianity differently, and that this is in large part due to the different ways women and men have been treated by mainstream churches and the lessons they have imbibed about their respective genders from church teaching: to put it baldly, men have been empowered by the church and women have been reminded of their subservience. (47) Drawing from a number of existing collections by Australian feminist scholars of religion and theology, Lindsay maps this difference. 'Women,' she writes, 'are not interested in claiming Australia for Christ or in reading God into landmarks and heroes' (57). Rather, she argues, women are 'concerned with the nature of God as revealed in the behaviour of people towards each other, and with the personal articulation of the experience of God' (57). She claims that white Australian women are less prone to appropriating Indigenous spiritualities than are their 'malestream' counterparts. Lindsay's comment, however, concerning the way in which non-Indigenous church women have failed to include Indigenous women in ways that are culturally appropriate deserves more than a footnote (87 n.134), although she does makes clear the potential openness of the particular women's spiritualities she is sketching to the spiritual and cultural practices of other women, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. In each of the three chapters on the work of Astley, Jolley and Hanrahan, Lindsay follows a similar pattern. She offers a brief biography of the author, paying particular attention to the influence of Christianity in their life. She then describes aspects of spirituality in the author's work, focusing on the author's representation of interrelationships between the divine, nature and humankind. She looks, too, at the ways in which her findings compare with Christian understandings, as well as the Australian 'malestream' and women's spiritualities described at the start of the book. Finally Lindsay surveys the critical and scholarly reception of these authors and finds that, in the case of Astley and Jolley in particular, the spiritual dimensions of these works have received little attention. Lindsay writes of Astley's work as displaying 'a fierce humour, verging on prophetic anger' (p. 140). This 'prophetic' voice highlights the value of compassion for humans founded in a divine loving kindness. Human kindness or the lack thereof is reflected in the relationship between nature and Astley's characters. The land has agency; the quality of relationship to the land reflects the quality of inter-human relationships. But neither formal Christianity nor the land itself are agents of salvation, nor is the 'malestream' dream of the desert. According to Lindsay, 'the only effective way Astley offers of assuaging the burden of being human is recognition that there exists a source of divine goodness whose continuing presence can be intimated from the natural world and who calls people into loving community with each other' (134). For Jolley, music, books and nature are 'agents of transformation' (197-8). Lindsay suggests that while Jolley, in discussing her writing, 'asserts the primacy of love' (180) and its capacity to assuage suffering, her fiction portrays an ambiguity with respect to love. 'Love is not a pure and abstract quality which will bring about the salvation of the world' (175). Significant is Jolley's sensitivity to the complexities of human lives and her consequent reticence about passing judgement on her characters. 'Divine responsibility ... is not required of humans' (176). While institutional Christianity 'may have little sway over Australians, Jolley's books do suggest that the Bible has a profound cultural significance for believers and unbelievers alike...' (187). But Lindsay identifies in Jolley's works a reticence to name or characterise the divine, a reticence she associates with her Quaker heritage. Instead, her writings suggest 'a spiritual force within the land' which has 'distinctly female undertones' (193). Reading Jolley highlights for Lindsay the anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism of Christianity: 'In declining to image the divine as human, Jolley effectively removes humankind from its self-proclaimed position at the centre of the universe and reincorporates it (though some might say reductively) into the life-flow' (200). Discussing Barbara Hanrahan's work, Lindsay emphasises the way in which Hanrahan characterises her art and her writing as a spiritual or religious quest. Lindsay looks at three strands of Hanrahan's writing, her autobiographical fiction such as The Scent of Eucalyptus, her gothic fictions, and her fictional biographies. Her reading of these is supported by her reading of Hanrahan's diaries. Hanrahan presents everyday life as fantastic; mythic; archetypal. While Christianity is characterised as largely impotent, the domestic world and suburban gardens become sacred spaces. Her grandmother Iris becomes an Earth mother and sky goddess figure. Wise women/ witch characters appear in the 'virtual absence of salvatory male figures' (244). In the gothic fiction, 'evil is portrayed as an ongoing elemental force which exists independently of humans, although it can manifest itself through them' (248). Threading Hanrahan's work is an uneasiness with the body and a sense of the divided self. Lindsay reads her writing as a working out of this sense of division within the self. In the biographical fictions, 'healing of the self comes not through self-study, but through ministering to others' (256). Interestingly, Hanrahan's 'impatience with the body ... does not extend to the rest of physical creation' (245). Hanrahan displays contemplative delight in detail and a ritualistic style of narration which, for Lindsay, illuminate the everyday. Rewriting God begins with a question concerning the way in which fiction by Australian women 'might be more relevant to Australian theologians and spiritual writers than imported material' (ix). To some extent this question sets the parameters and language of the inquiry. Occasionally I found the language problematic and certain related questions were unasked. Although Lindsay noted explicitly, for example, that her work toward an Australian spirituality was white and in conversation with Christian traditions, I felt that this nuance was often elided in the course of the study. Recent work by Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Anne Pattel-Gray has challenged white Australian feminists to interrogate the whiteness of their own work. Lindsay's book might have been strengthened by setting the quest for an Australian spirituality more explicitly in the context of Aboriginal displacement and dispossession in Australia. While aspects of this emerged in her critiques of 'malestream' desert spiritualities and in her readings of Astley in particular, I wonder if any discussion of spirituality in Australia can adequately begin outside this context. How does an acknowledgement of the Aboriginal displacement which underscores the placement of any non-Aboriginal spirituality as 'Australian' inform our constructions of an 'Australian' spirituality that neither ignores nor appropriates the spiritualities and claims of Aboriginal peoples? Lindsay's open-ended conclusion leaves room for future explorations of such questions. There were other occasional uses of language which I found troublesome. In her reading of Astley, Lindsay refers to a God 'who sends a natural disaster as a dreadful warning, who destroys people as punishment, and who saves others as proof of his goodness' as a 'God from the Hebrew Bible, not the New Testament' (107). The juxtaposition of Hebrew Bible and New Testament with the former the site of a judging capricious God (see also 135) repeats a problematic Christian stereotype. The Hebrew Bible displays many images of the divine; there is a judging God, but there is also divine loving-kindness and wisdom. Further, the so-called 'New' Testament also has its characterisations of divine judgement. Both Jewish and Christian scriptures, moreover, in their continuity and difference, are marked by the androcentrism and anthropocentrism of the contexts in which they arose. This androcentric heritage of Christianity left me feeling uncomfortable with Lindsay's use of 'God'. She makes an explicit choice to broaden the use of the term 'religious' so that, to some extent, the categories 'religious' and 'spiritual' are interchangeable. The notion of 'rewriting God' has a similar resonance; the term 'God' is retained in order to be re-imagined. But even as they are called into question, the masculine resonances of the term 'God' remain; this becomes explicit when Lindsay without qualification uses 'his' with reference to God (140). I could not be sure whether in the context her use of the masculine pronoun was a slippage or intentional. Second, while Lindsay is critical of Veronica Brady's reading of God into Jolley's work, the sections on 'God' in her readings of Astley and Jolley were the least convincing given the lack of interest these writers, particularly Jolley, show in naming 'God' in their writings. The treatment of this aspect with respect to Hanrahan's work was done differently and I think more successfully. Third, I felt that although Lindsay referred to occasions on which goddesses figured in the works this aspect of the divine could have been more fully explored. What worked particularly well, however, were Lindsay's readings of the authors' understandings of the spiritual power of nature, of human inter-relationships with nature, and of the ethics their fictions suggest in relation to human suffering. A particular strength of this study is Lindsay's reading of individual texts in the context of an author's body of work. Weaving together biographical contexts and close readings with a feminist theological sensitivity, Lindsay makes a strong case for reading Astley, Jolley and Hanrahan as spiritual writers. She challenges Christians seeking to articulate an Australian spirituality to read Australian women's fiction as sources for stories counter to the 'malestream' fixation with desert and struggle. The value for me of Lindsay's study is that it prompted me to return to the writings of Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, and Barbara Hanrahan with a new perspective, not so much to see them as resources or sources for articulating an Australian spirituality, as to read them with an eye to the workings of compassion, the challenge and celebration of the everyday, and the land as context, mirror, and agent in relation to human lives. See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (University of Queensland Press, 2000, reviewed last issue) and Anne Pattel-Gray, The Great White Flood: Racism in Australia (Scholars Press, 1998). Anne Elvey is an honorary research associate with the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research at Monash University. Her research interests are in the area of postcolonial, ecological and feminist theology and biblical interpretation.