Salt by Bruce Pascoe

Author:Bruce Pascoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

PEACEABLE KINGDOM

Just sixteen years of exposure to Christianity and my intellectual curiosity was snuffed.

I realised this last week when I arrived for work in a strange capital and to stranger accommodation. I was unsurprised by the weird décor, but too tired to talk to the people I was supposed to meet and too awake to sleep. So I read the walls.

The art displayed in motels, hotels, corrugated-iron red-desert demountables, the prim spare rooms of friends of the arts, and caravan parks holds a grim fascination that has replaced the hole left after my tentative faith finally took flight – presumably fleeing to a more willing audience at Hillsong, where it was certain to receive the full Mexican wave and swoon; the postures of certainty and the conviction of the chosen.

There were two old prints of animals and children in a style as familiar to my generation as the Hoover twin tub. The borders ran with a text I must have seen a thousand times in my life. You see it in people’s homes, old wares shops, the maudlin manse, school halls and virtuous hospitals: The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid and the calf and the lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

Both pictures were similar and the texts almost identical. The art depicted benign lambs and leopards, innocent goats and a milk-fed, chubby child leading a dangerous animal. Even the cows looked like they’d never kicked over a bucket or thought of butting the dairyman. It was called the Peaceable Kingdom of the Branch.

The rest of the furniture was all old colonial bumf, so I read these texts with mild interest simply because there were no jam tins handy. And then I saw in the background what I’d never noticed before. In one print, almost hidden by a bridge, was a group of figures. I stood on the bed to get a closer look. Yes, I did take my boots off. I was paying, but I can’t stand vandalism. I was brought up in a family where at least two aunts owned a variety of these same prints and despised children who stood on beds.

I had never finished reading these texts in the past because I could sniff out a biblical passage from ten metres and was intent on eluding the entrapments of the mild Christ and his devout followers. When I visited my aunts as a teenager I was already protesting against the Vietnam War, where we were told we had God on our side, and fighter planes were embellished with the Christian cross. Or Marilyn Monroe. Both intrinsic to our cultural campaigns.

I had to peer at the texts because the faux Victorian lamps were mere decorations. Up close I could see that the tiny tableau beneath the bridge was dominated by men in tricorn hats who extended their hands in Christian kindness to a group almost bowed in devotion: Native Americans with feathers, skin tunics and awed, supplicant faces.

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