their capacity to steal and maim and kill was permanently inhibited. Whatever the case, the existence of these sanctions made it clear that country was sacred, that all life was sacred, and no one had a right to usurp, abuse or damage that sacred gift. Of course, when the Christian children of Abraham arrived, they had no such sense of the land or its inhabitants as sacred. For them, country was just a thing that could be used and abused to get rich. So, they set about destroying our methods of agriculture, our animal husbandry, and our land management and replaced them with their own. They removed from country all the people who had successfully lived in that country for 5000 generations. They killed and poisoned us. They put our children in orphanages, where they prepared us to be slaves in the homes of white people and punished us for remembering or transmitting our spirituality. They taught us the principles of capitalism and insisted that our traditional way of life was either evil or childish, or both. Across 235 years, they laid waste to the land and its animals, to the point where Australia now leads the world in its commitment to both animal extinctions and the destruction of ecosystems. As the climate warms, each year we must deal with more intense floods, wildfires and hurricanes. And, as the recent referendum on an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament demonstrated, the nation will still give little quarter to Indigenous peoples or our wisdom. There is yet a Sabbath for the people of God (Hebrew 4:9-11), a place and a time in which we might dwell peacefully and well in the gratuity of the land. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Christians might locate that Sabbath rather differently than many settlers, however, for we have a rather different conception of both time and 87
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