Author Archives: Church Mouse

One of my memories, and it haunts me still, even after as long as thirty years, is the death of an old Hungarian man who died in a nursing home without family or friends. He died a destitute and there was no-one to claim his body. I expressed the wish to bury him and I had to wait several weeks for the Government Contractor to accumulate enough bodies of derelicts from Sydney streets at night, to dump in a common grave. In white society, to be destitute is to be derelict. And to be derelict is a social shame.

St Vincent’s Church, Redfern

St Patricks, Church Hill, Sydney

The one subtle bequest of the colonizer to posterity is the myth. The myth, the enslaving myth that is a very special sort of downright lie. It is like a pernicious virus that pervades the human psyche. In the Aboriginal world it is invasive, the instrument which allows the original Invasion to occur afresh every day.

… Continue reading →

The Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference Statement on the Distribution of Wealth in Australia has been nearly five years in the making. When it was begun, Rupert Murdoch was embracing Catholicism. Alan Bond was walking tall within its fold. The really poor Australian Catholics felt uncomfortable in the church. Pat Dodson, the one and only Aboriginal Catholic priest, had not long withdrawn from the priesthood, finding church authorities too abrasive on Aboriginal culture.

It is not insignificant that this statement is now being published by Collins-Dove, a company recently acquired by Rupert Murdoch.

The “Universal Church” was and still is seething … Continue reading →