Chapter 1: A Church Childhood in 1950-1970s Australia

Unlike today, 1950s Australia was crammed with churches of all stripes. Most Australian people attended church each Sunday, because that’s where the whole community met, mingled, and conducted community business. Racism and exclusion of socially unacceptable people from churches was rife, it was difficult to find a job if you didn’t attend church. Australian lay people like my parents founded and ran churches in collaboration with clergy, who they employed. Like many Australian girls, I started doing volunteer work in churches very young, by helping my parents with their church work. My sister and I learned to read as toddlers during lengthy sermons, as we played with hymnbooks under the pews. That accounts for my antiquated vocabulary and my encyclopaedic knowledge of hymn authors, hymn metres, and tune names. My father was a Protestant lay preacher, elder, and Church Vestry committee member who "planted" a new Church with a group of like-minded families in our new suburb in Adelaide, South Australia. I used to help my parents set up the Church every Saturday for the Sunday service, so I'm great at arranging flowers, setting out chairs in rows, polishing brass, finding my way through the mysterious indexes of liturgical books in order to place bookmarks, inserting hymn numbers in hymn boards, laying credence tables, and carefully pouring wine. At a huge church rally in 1950s Adelaide, American evangelist Rev. Billy Graham’s preaching, and George Beverley Shea's rendition of "Just as I am" called me to come to Jesus, so I obediently disappeared into the huge surging crowd, to be found by my frantic parents two hours later, sitting at the feet of the elders. Clearly, Jesus was present in all this, and through the teaching and steady example of my grandparents and parents, he became my friend for life. When my mother started the Church choir, I sang with them, played the piano and organ, and learnt to read music. By the time I was a teenager I was teaching Sunday School, organising Church concerts and liturgies, roneoing and folding church newsletters, and playing the organ for Sunday evening services. After doing my school homework, I started to write religious poetry and compose hymns.

All my virtuous Church experience suddenly became unfashionable when the Beatles, the Pill, and the torrid sexual revolution, hit the shores of Oz. My parents were horrified by this, and kept me closely coralled. Guitars were the rage at highschool, so I saved up, bought one, and strummed Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Nina and Frederick, Peter Paul and Mary, and Singing Nun ditties, but I still continued with classical piano lessons. I was intrigued by the new fashions, but not seduced - I stuck to my Church work. In 1964 I joined the local Anglican Church, which had even more Church ministry stuff for me to learn. The local organist took me under his wing and taught me to accompany Anglican chant and choral anthems. When I (by some divine miracle) acquired a Commonwealth Tertiary Scholarship, a new Church world opened up to me. At St Ann's University College (where my work included setting enormous college dining tables) I trained as an altar server for College Services, and, clad in my black undergraduate gown, I learned to chant Morning Prayer and sing four part Anglican anthems at St Peter's Cathedral. When I married and became mother to four children in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales, my Church involvement with music, feeding people, and teaching, continued, and developed into full-blown theological studies and ministry as a Cathedral Cantor with a community that was unable to sing after their Church burned down.