Christ as Storyteller: Seeing Christ in the Lands Now Called Australia

Taking the theme of Christ as storyteller as a starting place, this chapter explores the storytelling of First Nations families in lutruwita (Tasmania, Australia) as a practice of justice, healing and reconciliation. It will focus particularly on stories we hold in family and community of my father’s grandmother Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834–1905). Known in her lifetime as the ‘last’ Tasmanian Aboriginal and as the founder of a Methodist Church at Nicholls Rivulet, her traditional Spring Song was recorded on wax cylinder and remains a celebrated example of First Nations’ storytelling. Drawing on the experience of welcoming Christians and others to the church building at Nicholls Rivulet, I reflect on what it means to tell Fanny’s story today, to listen to the story she tells, and to invite others to do so too. We have some record of how Fanny Cochrane Smith understood her Christian faith in the light of her heritage as a First Nations woman. But stories, held and heard, are integral to Aboriginal ways of knowing and being and, for First Nations Christians, when we lean into and connect with ‘story’ we are indeed seeing Christ.