Christ as Work/er?: Labour and Redemption in Kylie Tennant’s Foveaux

Kylie Tennant’s novel Foveaux opens with the 1912 Eight Hour Day parade through a working-class district of Sydney. It traces the fortunes of the area and its people through the subsequent quarter century. This chapter argues that a Christ-shaped theology of work is implied in Australian traditions of the Eight Hour Movement and captured vividly in Tennant’s novel, underlining the need for further theological consideration of the place of work in human life. It sketches the approaches to and experiences of work in the lives of Bramley Cornish, Jimmy Rolfe and Linda Montague, and shows them each variously asking the question that powered the Eight Hour Movement, as it also informed Christian monasticism: ‘What are we working towards? Why are we working?’ In contrast to some commentators who discount a social justice agenda as ‘over-realised eschatology’, Tennant’s picture of the cost of capitalism, and the integrity of the ordinary worker-Christ, is congruent with the landmarks of Australian tradition as well as the agenda of liberation theologians, and suggests a vision of a new society within contemporary Australia.