At the beginning of Blood, Bones and Spirit, two maps, which could be overlaid one directly upon the other, show the contemporary East Kimberley region in north-western Australia. On the left hand page the region is marked with the names of European towns and stations, on the right hand page with the names of the Aboriginal communities whose place it is. The two maps in a sense act as a metaphor for a mapping that occurs throughout the text: two quite different ways of interpreting the world meet with varying degrees of conflict and appropriation when Aboriginal cultures in the East Kimberley encounter Western Christianity. Although this study is specific to a particular place in north-western Australia, Blood, Bones and Spirit addresses a key contemporary concern, not only understanding and redressing the past and the on-going violence of colonisation, but to be attentive to the particular ways in which indigenous peoples and others throughout the world are negotiating with, re-interpreting and resisting colonial practices for their own survival.

Roberta (Bobbi) Sykes has a poem entitled 'Rachel' commemorating the death of an eight-month-old child on Palm Island Reserve (off the north-east coast of mainland Australia) in 1974 after a doctor's refusal to treat the child. The poem begins by recalling the arrival of the Bible in Australia as accompaniment to and agent of colonisation. Moving through a description both of the dead child, whose name Rachel comes from the Bible, and of the doctor's neglect, the poem suggests that those who brought the Bible to this land 'need to take a closer look.' Focusing on the tragedy of the child's death and the racist underpinnings of the doctor's neglect, the poem also highlights the ambiguity that surrounds Aboriginal experience of Christianity in Australia, where Christianity has come to be experienced in both colonial and counter-colonial ways by its Aboriginal adherents.

In recent years, publications such as A Spirituality of Catholic Aborigines and the Struggle for Justice (Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Apostolate, 1993) and the Rainbow Spirit Elders' Rainbow Spirit Theology: Towards an Australian Aboriginal Theology (Blackburn: HarperCollinsReligious, 1997) attest to some of the ways in which Aboriginal Christians in Australia have been articulating their experiences of and reinterpreting their practice of Christianity 'Aboriginal way.' McDonald's approach is different. Blood, Bones and Spirit is an anthropological study undertaken as doctoral work at the Australian National University. It looks not at those Aboriginal Christian traditions, for example in the Uniting, Anglican, and Roman Catholic churches, where Indigenous participants are actively reworking the Western traditions brought by the missionaries. Rather, Blood Bones and Spirit considers the emergence of Aboriginal Christianity within two evangelical Protestant churches, the United Aborigines Mission (UAM) and the Assemblies of God (AOG) congregations in Halls Creek, a small town in the East Kimberley area. The UAM and AOG adherents there are Gija and Jaru people. Occasionally, McDonald also makes analytical comparisons with the practice of Aboriginal Christianity within the Roman Catholic community of the region.
While McDonald identifies as post-Christian, she comes 'from a long family line of Christian missionaries and evangelists' (p.xi). As well as her work as a health professional in Aboriginal communities, this evangelical heritage shapes her interest in Aboriginal Christianity and informs her measured critique of the colonising discourses of contemporary Christian evangelists in the Kimberley. Although there have been anthropological studies of Aborigines and Christianity in the past, 'Aboriginal Christianity' as such has not been a subject for anthropological investigation. The readiness to acknowledge Aboriginal Christianity as a possibility within Christianity parallels the emergence of Asian, Black American, liberationist, and feminist (theological) movements that challenge and reveal as partial the universalising claims of Western Christianity (pp. 8-9).

McDonald for her part is concerned less with why many Aboriginal people become Christians than with what meanings they make within Christianity. She asks: 'How did a land-based people who celebrate in ritual their embodied relationship to a fecund universe, embrace a Hellenistic Mediterranean religion of displaced peoples?' (p. 2). Blood, Bones and Spirit considers the ways in which a universalist religion of placelessness, as she understands Western Christianity to be, affects and is in turn affected by the encounter with Aboriginal spiritualities of place.

While this book is written in a clear and engaging style, it is not always an easy book to read. For this reader, McDonald's descriptions of the overtly colonising discourse of the AOG missionaries were particularly disturbing. She makes note, too, that what might seem more benign traditions such as Roman Catholic, Uniting Church and Anglican, may continue the colonising process in more subtle ways. On the surface the UAM appears less conservative than the AOG and its attitudes to traditional Aboriginal cultural practices appear somewhat less negative. Nevertheless, the accommodation of Aboriginal cultural practice to white Christian expectations does not correlate directly with the level of conservatism and overt racism underlying and expressed in those expectations. Differences between the experience of the adherents in terms of their town or station background and their earlier experience of colonisation are also key factors affecting the way in which Aboriginal culture is valued and maintained in the context of the competing expectations and claims of Western Christianity.

For McDonald, however, many of her informants expressed attitudes to their own race which suggested to her that they had internalised the racist attitudes of the contemporary colonising missionaries. In particular, both missionaries and Aboriginal adherents used the language of 'black' and 'white' to describe respectively the pre-Christian sinful person (black inside and out) and the Christian person (white inside). In addition, McDonald describes an ongoing demonisation by the AOG missionaries of Aboriginal cultural practices. It can be difficult to judge the internal attitudes of another - this involves in a sense speaking for the other. Nonetheless, the evidence that McDonald presents, replaying in part the ongoing tragedy and injustice of colonisation and in particular the shame engendered in Aboriginal people through exposure to racist ideologies, is deeply disturbing.

But Blood, Bones and Spirit also challenges an easy understanding of Aboriginal experience of Christianity. Through taking up and interrupting her narrative of Aboriginal Christianity, McDonald offers a simple but complex picture of difference, conflict and meaning-making where the experience of belonging to a local Christian congregation is part of a multifaceted set of negotiations between kinship responsibilities, the threat of the state through police, courts and other government agencies, and the demanding but sometimes mediating influence of local churches or assemblies. In chapter four, 'Maddy Jarra's World History', McDonald suggests that '[t]raditional Dreaming narratives are unable to account for European colonisation' (p. 78). This inability sets the scene for the complex interplay between colonising Christian narratives and the narratives of Aboriginal adherents whose contemporary stories cannot be easily categorised as colonial products.

Importantly, McDonald contrasts what is significant for Aboriginal adherents with what is meaningful for their pastors. For example, where Aboriginal adherents might focus on health, their pastors applaud heavenly salvation as a higher good. In the latter view, for example, healing of the body is sought not so much for the health of the adherent as to display divine power and glory. Throughout the course of her book, McDonald develops a series of comparisons which distinguish Aboriginal Christianity from the experience, worldviews, and expectations of the pastors and the universalist Christianity they represent. Centrally there is the contrast, and indeed this catalyses McDonald's study, between spiritualities of place and a universalised religion of placelessness that gave meaning to displaced peoples of the first-century CE Mediterranean. McDonald also identifies other key differences between Aboriginal and traditional Christian understandings. For example, the way knowledge, spirituality and personal power is situated in the body differs: for Aboriginal adherents the 'binji', (munda), the diaphragm and stomach area is a corporeal focus which both parallels and contrasts with the Western emphasis on heart and mind (pp. 116-7). Western Christian notions of individual salvation are at odds with the values of responsibility toward one's local kinship group and country. Inter-relationships with local, protective ancestral powers, which accompany Aboriginal spiritualities of place, are at variance with a belief in a universalised and salvationary Holy Spirit power which accompanies a religion of placelessness (p.103). Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Christians model differently the relationships between the divine and the human which parallel relationships between pastors and ordinary adherents. McDonald argues that for the Aboriginal Christians she encountered the boss/worker model (drawn from the experience of station life and in which mutual obligation plays a part) prevails over the military model presented by conservative Christianity in which obedience follows command (pp. 135-8).

Further, McDonald notes:
The churches have been successful in suppressing traditional religious practices such as initiation ceremonies and death rituals which are expressed through performance and spectacle. They have been markedly less successful in suppressing (or appropriating) the beliefs and values which underlie these practices. Beliefs and values cannot be seen, and values in particular are rarely articulated. Both Aboriginal people and missionaries tend to interpret the other's behaviour by situating it within their own cultural context and judging it according to their own standards of appropriate behaviour. As a result, there is a great deal of unrecognised misinterpretation and miscommunication between Aboriginal people and missionaries. This protects Aboriginal beliefs and values from close scrutiny and evaluation by missionaries and other agents of change. (pp.148-9)
The layers of difference, which the contrasting expectations and experience of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Christians represent, form the basis not only for conflict between missionaries and Aboriginal people, but also for the development of an alternative Aboriginal Christianity in which kinship responsibilities, relationship to country and the pursuit of land rights retain their salience in Aboriginal life. McDonald concludes her study: 'Rather than accepting a religion of exile (that is, a salvation religion) as compensation for dispossession and displacement, Aboriginal people in northern Australia are choosing to repossess their land instead' (p. 201).

Another significant aspect of this book is the way in which it moves between McDonald's reading of Aboriginal culture and experience and her consequent re-reading of the early Mediterranean and Hellenistic origins of Christianity. Methodologically this approach enriches the study by allowing the anthropological eye to turn its gaze upon the cultural foundations of Western Christianity. The final chapter offers an excellent summary of the ways in which Western religious traditions, specifically Christianity but also more recent feminist, ecological and new age spiritualities, perpetuate a desire for another world which is at odds with Aboriginal spiritualities as McDonald presents them. Her reading of Aboriginal Christianity informs her appraisal of these traditions very well.

While I found Blood, Bones and Spirit engaging, it raised a few questions for me. First, I wondered to what extent McDonald's articulation of the contrast between Aboriginal and Western Christian worldviews reinstated the kind of dualistic framework that has undergirded Western philosophy and theology. As McDonald herself indicates, this dualistic mode of thought can be found in contemporary Aboriginal distinctions between 'blackfella' and 'whitefella' and between 'Aboriginal way' and 'gardiya way' (p. 182), and it is perhaps from here that she takes them for her study. Second, I felt that the voices of her Aboriginal informants were somewhat muted by the weight of interpretation traditional in a scholarly study of this kind. The book carries twelve pages of coloured photographs, one of the hilly country around Halls Creek, the remainder of local Aboriginal people mostly engaged in everyday food-gathering and other subsistence activities such as cleaning out a water hole. While the photographs are beautiful in themselves, and in a sense offer portraits of the people among whom McDonald conducted her study, I was unclear about precisely how these images were meant to complement the text, except perhaps to affirm that despite the ravages of colonisation the Aboriginal people remain embedded in country. But I was left wondering in what ways McDonald's Gija and Jaru informants benefited from her study. There seemed to me to be less transparency on this point than, for example, in Deborah Bird Rose's Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (1992).

Nevertheless, this is a timely study. In Australia the percentage of Aboriginal people who claim adherence to Christianity is significantly higher than that of the non-Aboriginal population. If we are to respect this aspect of contemporary Aboriginal life, we need to avoid assuming that Aboriginal Christianity is a carbon copy of Western Christianity. Blood, Bones and Spirit offers a nuanced approach to the question of the way in which Gija and Jaru people make sense of a religious tradition, namely Christianity, which emerged in a situation quite different from both their pre-colonial and colonial experiences. McDonald claims that within the AOG and UAM Aboriginal adherents remain colonised. At another point she presents a narrative of post-colonial resistance within the local Catholic community (p. 88). But none of this is over-simplified. The continuing efficacy of Aboriginal spiritual practices, the uses of Christianity by Aboriginal adherents to counter the extra-Christian colonising practices of the State and to alleviate some of the violent legacies of colonisation, as well as the prevailing importance of the land suggest that the ongoing processes of colonisation are not absolute, but neither are they to be ignored.

Anne Elvey is an Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research at Monash University. Her research interests include ecological, feminist and post-colonial approaches to biblical interpretation. She has also studied at the United Faculty of Theology and the Melbourne College of Divinity.

Bobbi Sykes, Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988) 17.