Exodus and Deuteronomy

Chapter 3. “God's Perfectly Effected Purpose, or His Purposely Effected Neglect”: Exodus and Wilderness in Australia

39 Roland Boer ChAPtEr 3 “God's Perfectly Effected Purpose, or his Purposely Effected neglect” Exodus and Wilderness in Australia It is conventional wisdom that the exodus was a formative myth—appropriated , reshaped, and often bowdlerized—for one colonial venture after another. The “Pilgrim Fathers” to North America saw themselves as God’s chosen people escaping the persecution of “Egypt” and setting out for the “Promised Land.” The Dutch immigrants—the farmers or Boers—to South Africa made use of the myth in their own way, as did the emancipation movement in the United States, as did the Jews who set out for Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Everyone, it seems, wants to identify with Moses’ call to “let my people go,” to be God’s chosen people, setting out from dreadful oppression (but also the fleshpots, lentils, leeks and cucumbers; see Boer 2008b) to a land flowing with milk and honey. But what happens when that land is not so lush, where instead of milk and honey one finds harsh deserts and all that seems to flow is the venom of the most poisonous snakes in the world, when one is sent from a former freedom to a new destination to be a slave, however brutal that freedom might have been? So it seemed to the British soldiers and (mostly Irish) convicts sent to Australia—largely since the American colonies had rudely thrust the British away—in the late eighteenth century. Exodus was certainly not the image, story or myth that came to mind. This essay explores that curious absence of the Exodus motif in early Australia . Or rather, it revisits, reworks, and reflects upon a piece I wrote over a decade ago (Boer 2001).1 In some cases I reprise sections of older text or cut sections that no longer represent my interest in this topic; in other cases new 1. No substantial changes were made to the chapter in the revised edition of Last Stop in 2008 (Boer 2008a). 40 Exodus and Deuteronomy words and sentences weave their way into that text. The methodological backdrop is postcolonial criticism, although I have toned down and in some cases dispensed with the swathes of theory that characterized my earlier engagement . Edward Said still appears, as does his combatant, Michael Walzer, and one may espy the traces of Homi Bahbha, Ella Shohat, Arif Dirlik, the Boyarins , and even Deleuze and Guattari within the text, but I will not discuss most of them directly or at length. In their place others come to the fore, such as the “explorers” Ernest Giles, E. J. Eyre, Thomas Mitchell, and Charles Sturt, or the writers Barron Field, A. D. Hope, and Henry Lawson. Above all, I am interested in the various mutations, absences, and inversions that happen in the way the biblical motif of exodus is appropriated in Australia.2 Wandering Arameans A lost and wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien. (Deuteronomy 26:5) I begin with Edward Said (1984; reprint 1988), for he is responsible for igniting the contemporary debate over Exodus with a strong critique of the use of the biblical Exodus story in contemporary Israel. Basing his argument on a review of Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution (1984), Said points out that Walzer’s appropriation of the biblical Exodus as a religious, non-Marxist model for mildly left social democratic movements is deeply troubled. Although Said spends little time with the biblical story itself (except to point out that the Israelites were, according to the story, by no means oppressed in Egypt), and although he deals mostly with Walzer’s efforts to justify Israeli oppression of the Palestinians , what interests me here is Said’s point that the Exodus cannot be separated from the story of invasion, occupation, and oppression in the “Promised Land” of Canaan, that the image of God (Yahweh, El, Elohim, even Baal) that comes through is one who bloodthirstily commands total annihilation of the Canaanites and others, a motif found throughout the laws in Leviticus and Numbers. Said is in fact reacting to a tradition of nonbiblical scholarship in which it has been argued that the biblical story of the Exodus is one of the originating 2. It is disappointing to note that such crucial works as Richard White’s Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 (1981) or Geoffrey Serle’s From the Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in...