(This post follows on from  A Town Called Bell)

We were riding our bikes back into the town of Bell after a long ride over the back roads. It was mid afternoon and we were tired and looking forward to getting back to the caravan park and having a shower. Then we saw it: a small wooden church – Catholic – and a sign: Bell Biblical Garden.

Biblical Garden?

Never thought such a thing could exist.

As tired as we were, curiosity got the better of us.

We put our bikes under a tree and went and had a look at the Biblical Garden – as it turned out, a garden tended lovingly by the local priest.

In a parched land devastated by years of drought, a flourishing garden was a sight alright: an oasis in a desert. Normally a garden like this – there were small ponds too – was nothing special. 

In this town it was.

The garden was constructed around the theme of the judgement of Jesus and his crucifixion – a graphic, timeless scene which has echoed through Christianity since its very inception: an apostle of tolerance, peace and love, convicted on trumped charges and then forced to drag a heavy wooden cross passed jeering crowds and then nailed to the cross and left to die, slowly, painfully.

Many conclusions might be drawn from this parable: the connivance of the rich (the Jewish priests) against the poor; the ugliness of military rule (the Romans) over a captive people (the Israelites); the brutality of the masses whipped up into a frenzy of hate and hungry for scapegoats.  

Wandering around the garden, I was amused by some of the exhibits, e.g. a colourful tiled portrait of Jesus and before him, two cows and a sheep fashioned out of corrugated iron.  A Jesus on the cross rendered in barbed wire.

The Biblical Garden was unmistakably Australian, at least as far as appearances went. 

At a certain point however, I was troubled by an underlying sense of incongruity. Of something missing.

What about the fate of the original inhabitants of this country?

Why no mention of this in the Biblical Garden?

In this Australian Biblical Garden with its corrugated iron cows and sheep and its barbed wire Christ?

What was the point of endlessly venerating the ancient injustice of the trial, torture and crucifixion of Christ if the church – and its believers – remained indifferent to other examples of injustice that were a lot closer to home?

Perhaps I was extra sensitive to this issue.

Riding a bike over the unsealed back roads of Australia, passed endless wire boundary fences and huge swathes of empty land, I often thought about the original inhabitants of this country.

I loved being consumed by the emptiness and solitude, the endless horizons and the total absence of people.

Yet there was also the nagging thought: what did this country look like before the white British cleared all the trees and bushes – and exterminated the Aborigines?

When he conceived the idea of making a Biblical Garden, I suppose the priest knew his congregation. They wouldn’t attend his services if it meant having their semi-religious veneration of the ‘pioneers’ of this country challenged by another, very different interpretation: Philistines, fuelled by racism and alcohol, shooting down the aborigines. Violent men not an iota better than the Romans and the Jewish priests.  

So in his sermons, the priest probably stuck to the usual script: Christ died for our sins. The injustice of his fate reflected our collective guilt. A guilt which we could only free ourselves from through faith. The world was full of evil because there were so many sinners and unbelievers.  

 When the land was taken from the Aborigines (who had inhabited it for tens of thousands of years) did any of the men who shot and raped them ever confess their crimes to the priest?

Unlikely.

After all, they regarded the Aborigines as subhuman. 

How would the priest have reacted had he received such a confession?

Advise that the guilty party that they beseech the Lord for forgiveness?

Or treat it as a misdemeanour, something equivalent to murdering Jews – the timeless crime of the Christians in Europe justified by blaming them for the death of Christ?  

 The ways of The Lord were truly mysterious….

I had arrived at Bell Biblical Garden feeling exhausted. By the time I got back on my bike, the tiredness had lifted and my mind was invaded by conflicting thoughts. This continued even after returning to Bell’s camping ground and having a shower and something to eat.

It took a startlingly beautiful sunset to quell the questions, the unknowns, the thoughts.