It is important for the Church to delve more deeply into the history of the indigenous communities it serves, and to listen more deeply, in order to fully understand and adequately respond to the present reality of the Aboriginal people, says Fr Jim Knight SVD, who lives and works in Central Australia.

Fr Jim, who joined the Divine Word Missionaries in 1957 in Marburg, Queensland, has stepped down now from his role as Parish Priest at Santa Teresa, an Aboriginal community about 80 km from Alice Springs. But he will continue to live and minister in the community, while also exploring the history of the Arrernte people of Central Australia and their contact and growing relationship with European people over the decades.

“I enjoy just being with the people. And now I have more time to do that,” he says.

“I first came to Santa Teresa in 2001, so over the years I’ve gotten to know the people and they’ve gotten to know me and now I have time just to be with them and listen to them and hear their story of what happened to their people and how we got to where we are today.”

The Aborigines around Alice Springs and the area that is now known as Santa Teresa first encountered Europeans around 1872 when the Telegraph line came through. In 1876 two cattle stations were established, and it was this development that brought a clash of worlds, as the cattle and sheep trampled native lands, food sources, and water holes, and confrontations erupted over the Arrernte people’s right to kill animals on land they considered to be their ancestral homeland. Eventually the Arrernte were driven from the land into the towns, where the effects of their dispossession remain evident today. Lutheran missionaries arrived in 1877 and Catholic priests in 1929 to minister to the Aboriginal people, leading to the formation of indigenous communities, such as Santa Teresa.

Fr Jim says the history of dispossession in places like Santa Teresa is not always evident to the casual observer. But if we seek to understand the situation of indigenous people today then we need to a much deeper and  more systematic understanding of where the disadvantage and dispossession have come from.

“I think that’s important for the Church,” Fr Jim says. “And it’s important for us as SVD as well. That’s what I want to do, to delve more into that history. I try to read about it as much as I can and I’m going to look through different archives and hopefully do some writing.

“I believe the Church should be doing this in a more systematic way. Individuals do it, but there has to be a more common and systematic understanding. It needs to be done in an accumulative way as well, so that it’s not just one person putting information into a box somewhere which might well be lost with their passing from the scene.”

Reflecting on the challenge that Pope John Paul II issued to the Church when he visited Alice Springs in 1986, that “… the Church herself in Australia will not be fully the Church that Jesus wants her to be until you have made your contribution to her life and until that contribution has been joyfully received by others”, Fr Jim says almost 30 years later, the report card on progress in this regard is not good.

“I would say it would be a score of about 3 or 4 out of 10,” he says. “There is still a long way to go. The Bishops have said, and continue to say, that this is important. If you go through the statements of the Bishops, it’s tremendous, starting right back with Archbishop Polding, but it hasn’t filtered down in any sort of comprehensive way.

“There are individuals, both priests, religious and laypeople, who have a conscience about it, and do something about it, but unfortunately, there’s not enough gathered knowledge to develop their achievements going forward.”

Fr Jim says the way we have traditionally understood Mission in relation to our indigenous brothers and sisters has changed over the years.

“When the first priests arrived, they understood saving souls to mean baptising people, and that if you weren’t baptised you were lost, you went to hell,” he says.

“From a Vatican II perspective, it’s not all about baptism. There are many different ways that somebody can desire baptism. It’s becoming a member of the Church, a Church that takes on the cares the joys and the sorrows, successes and failures of everybody, and the Church becoming an alive community with a mission.

“So when you look at it that way, you see that there is a specific mission for the people of Santa Teresa. It’s not just the missionaries coming to impart what they know to you. The people of Santa Teresa also have a mission that must be recognised.

“And it’s not up to us to explain that mission for them. It’s for them to explain it to us.”

Fr Jim says that underlying the reality of Mission is to understand and own that Mission is a two-way relationship.

“It’s both giving and receiving,” he says. “And in some ways over the years we have taught Aboriginal people that you can’t give; you just receive; that there’s nothing you can give us. And you can’t build a real relationship on that.

“That’s the underlying issue really. And the central challenge for the Church.”