Description
For many decades, Veronica Brady has been a gadfly to political and ecclesiastical princes and their entourages. For those parched for relief from straitening patterns of thinking and self-absorbed myopia, she has been a refreshing breeze, bringing hope to the heart and vision to the imagination.
This book brings together a selection of her addresses that dare to suggest that there is a mystery beckoning us into something new, that is not satisfied with the way things are and that dares to believe that novels and poetry bear witness to this mystery. She calls this mystery “God”, not with any confident triumphalism, but as an “Other” (who speaks through others) that subverts such a corrosive vice seeping through contemporary society. For her, God leads to other places, even to that which is not God. So, from Marcus Clarke to Judith Wright, from Primo Levi to Kim Scott, she drinks in the refreshment of new possibilities which sacred texts have often lost under a pall of imperial conventionality. She discovers in these early and contemporary writers, a way into the potential of “The God-Shaped Hole” where is found the call and narrative of the necessity of remembrance, of balm for suffering and, above all, pathway hints into a respect for Aboriginal Australians and the land of their identity.
Veronica Brady is a Loreto Sister and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her most recent book is South of My Days: A Biography of Judith Wright (1998).
