a bonobo humanity?

St Andrews Anglican Church, Walkerville, South Australia

When did Australia become a country? It wasn’t in 1788, when the first flag, a British flag, was unfurled over the land. And it wasn’t 60,000 or so years earlier, when the first humans stepped onto this land, for they of course had no concept of countries, or nations, in the modern sense – though I note that many forward-thinking Aboriginals have employed this modern notion to promote their diversity (‘we are 250 nations’), their languages and even their ‘finders keepers’ rights. 

The official view, and that of AI (never lies), is that –

Australia became a nation on 1 January 1901. when 6 British colonies – New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania – united to form the Commonwealth of Australia. This process is known as Federation, where the colonies became states under a new federal constitution.

So we’re a 125-year young country, unlike Britain, the national age of which is doubtless a matter of controversy, but certainly it’s many many times older than Australia. Other countries too, but not too many of them, can, or like to, date their age to more than a millennium. Still, the concept is new, considering the 300,000-year history of Homo sapiens. 

I was thinking along these lines while wandering lonely as a cloud through the inner-city suburb of Adelaide that I’ve recently come to reside in. It certainly isn’t one of the poorer neighbourhoods, and there are some rather glamorous, not to say ostentatious piles within strolling distance. It occurred to me, though, that many of them seemed to copy semi-gothic styles while obviously being of relatively recent construction, while others, particularly churches and municipal buildings, were more authentically 19th century – probably among the first structures built in the area, and the only ones not demolished and replaced by the nouveau riche. I was interested enough in one of these buildings, a church, to have a closer look. It’s pictured above. A plaque attached to the building provides interesting detail:

St Andrew’s Anglican Church of Walkerville is among the most significant churches in South Australia. The building’s Victorian Academic Gothic appearance is of exceptional aesthetic value and is the result of three distinctive construction periods. Designed by architect E A Hamilton, the sanctuary and transepts were built in 1857. Architect J H Grainger designed the current nave, while architects Messrs Grainger & Naish designed the replacement tower. These works occurred between 1877-1879. The Tower was fitted with six imported bells, which were installed in 1886. The bells were cast by the well-known company Whitechapel Bell Foundry – the same foundry that created ‘Big Ben’, which is located in the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster in London. St Andrew’s Anglican Church was entered into the South Australian Heritage Register as a State Heritage Place in 2006. 

So very British, or even Scottish, as St Andrew is the patron saint of that country, if it is a country. I’m not sure if this is a typical example of late 19th century British architecture, or if it has a more colonial feel due to the local materials used in its construction, but it certainly stands out from the other buildings in the neighbourhood. And it’s anachronistic in another important way. 

Adelaide has been called ‘the city of churches’, surely for a century or more. The term isn’t used so often these days, as many of the churches have since been repurposed, sometimes as dance venues, or as community gathering places of various kinds. Others have been left to stand as monuments to history, or Heritage Places, as the above plaque puts it. I don’t know if St Andrew’s Anglican Church still functions as a religious meeting place – I’ll have to come by on a Sunday morning to check it out, but I looked around the site enough to feel that its busiest days are definitely over. 

The Australian Bureau of Statistics conducts a census every 5 years. The next one will be later this year. The census question on religion has ‘remained fundamentally the same in structure for over 100 years, appearing in every national census since 1911’, according to AI (never lies). This gives a fair amount of reliability to the data. In recent decades Australians have been abandoning Christianity with unseemly haste (according to some). Around 38.9 % of the population reported having ‘no religion’ in 2021, up from 30.1% just five years earlier. In those same two censuses, professed Christians were at 43.9%, compared to 52.1% in 2016. A very pacific, almost nondescript, reduction, it seems to me in terms of its effect on the populace. I should point out that in the 1911 census, the Christian percentage was around 96. The new results will not be released until next year. My guess is that the percentage will be well under 40. We’re all going to hell, it seems – and I’ve heard that’s not a place where nothing ever happens.

Anyway, we have monuments, and memories, and works in the form of scriptures and biblical exegeses, for the historically and nostalgically inclined. More importantly, the loss of Christian religion hasn’t brought with it a loss of humanity or general well-being. We’re creating our own purpose in life, a complex process which involves far more than the survival and thriving of our own species. With greater knowledge comes greater responsibility – how can we manage it, without getting too serious?