Writing Modern History of Religion: One Man's Experience-Mine

[RonPrice]

THE SIXTY YEARS OF BAHA’I HISTORY
IN THE NORTHERN TERRITORY AND THE NORTHWEST OF WA: 1947-2007
AN INTRODUCTION

Since we do not really know when Alex MacLeod, a medical aid Sargent, gave out Baha’i pamphlets in Darwin in the late 1940s; since it could have been as early as 1946 or 1947, then, this history of the Baha’i community in the north and west of Australia now goes back to at least 60 years. The contents of this posting covers the period 1947 to 2007 depending, as I say, on how one defines this beginning of Baha’i history in that remote region. As far as I know, although Baha’i teaching efforts had been initiated in Western Australia on the west coast as far north as Carnarvon in 1970 there were no resident Baha’is north of Perth at the end of the Nine Year Plan: 1964-1973.

When the global Bahá'í community celebrated the Most Great Jubilee in 1963 and entered the first Plan of the Universal House of Justice in 1964 the NT had some twelve believers. This number doubled during the Plan: 1964-1973. In the four million square kms from Albany to Derby(excluding metropolitan Perth), to Mt. Isa in Queensland and down to Whyalla and Port Lincohn in South Australia during that Plan: there was one Bahá'í in Albany, teaching work had been initiated, as I say above, as far as Carnarvon, Alice Springs had several Bahá'ís, several localities had opened in the NT and Whyalla in South Australia formed its LSA in 1972. Such is the broad picture in which the history of the Bahá'í Faith in the NT and Northern WA: 1947-2007 began in its first twenty-five years, 1947-1972.

In 2004 I posted a series of instalments at Baha’i Library Online. These instalments tried to present as detailed a picture as possible of these first fifty years of Bahá'í history in the NT, 1947-1997. Since leaving the Northwest and the north of Australia in late 1987, I have done little to continue writing the history of the north that was my interest from 1982 to 1987. What is contained in those instalments is largely the third draft of that history which I finished about six months after leaving the northwest of WA and moving to Perth in December 1987. I have made a few cosmetic adjustments to that third draft and added an addendum for the period up to 2007 to complete the sixty years.

In 1991 and 1992 I sent all of my notes, gathered in the north and in the first three years in Perth(1987-1990), to the LSA of the Baha’is of Darwin. I slowly pulled myself away from writing this history. It is quite unlikely that this history will be published in my lifetime. The history is far too brief. Indeed, it is more like an introductory booklet. I see that document, some 10,000 words, as a resource base for future Baha’i historians and people who are interested in reading the story. In 1996, I asked the LSA of South Perth to keep a copy of this slightly revised third draft and addendum in their archive. I was able to pull myself away from this history completely and this ‘first sixty years’ is now my last contribution to the history.

“The bush” in Australia leans toward the “desert” and absorbs some of its meaning. There are, then, many words for this vast tract of land, some four million square miles that cover the base of this history: semi-desert, savanna, outback, elemental wilderness, even terra nullius. In recent years it has been popularized, the values of the bush that is, in films such as Mad Max, Crocodile Dundee, Breaker Morant, Gallipoli and in the last decade since I moved to Tasmania another batch of films which popularize the great back-‘o-beyond. For a century painters have developed a distinctively Australian style to capture its beauty, its silent eloquence and its vast emptiness: Russell Drysdale, Sydney Nolan, William Dobel and Albert Namatjira.

The half-desert country in this particular history, where the Baha’i Faith spread in the years 1946 to 2007, has affected the imagination of Australians in much the same way as the sea has affected the British. It certainly affected my imagination. I think that is why I have had trouble disengaging myself from writing this history, even though my heart has not been in it really since I left the north and west of Australia nine years ago in 1999.

I leave this history to pens more capable than mine, with enthusiasms and energies that can be channelled into what I’m confident will be a compelling second half century of Baha’i history. Hayden Williams1 wrote in one of his poems that the great Australian outback was “a lonely place unvisited, longing to be filled.” Let us now see what those mysterious dispensations of Providence will bring to what that explorer and author, Ernest Favenc, called “that arid desert parched beneath a rainless sky.”2
________________________________FOOTNOTES_______________________
1 Hayden Williams, “Island Half-discovered’, quoted in Pilgrim Through This Barren Land, Cavan Brown, Albatross Books Pty. Ltd., Sutherland, NSW, 1991, p. 23.
2 ibid., p.24. Favenc is the author of The History of Australian Exploration: From 1788 to 1888, Turner and Henderson, Sydney.

Ron Price
15 December 1996
(Updated for: Deal of Days' Deal Talk
26/1/0