18 minute read
BEYOND DOMESTIC BLISS
Trinity College’s outgoing Chaplain, the Revd Canon Emerita Dr Colleen O’Reilly AM, highlights the past – and ongoing – struggle of women in the church.
Aperson knows they are getting old when events they have shaped are now history. This has happened to me as a priest who is a woman.
When I was young, the idea that women could be members of the clergy and lead worship in churches was scarcely imagined. It began to be envisaged in the 1960s as women emerged from the postwar era of ‘domestic bliss’ and, equipped with education, started campaigning for the equality of women and men in the workplace, the home, and, even more radically, in religious institutions.
I returned to Australia in 1972 after living in Britain and the United States for some years and found these new ideas had barely arrived. So, with a few friends, I began to work for change in the Anglican Church by forming a political lobby group.
We held street theatre outside the gatherings of the General Synod, the national decision-making body. We wrote pamphlets and papers and Bible study guides to challenge the unquestioned assumptions about the inferior place of women, and we began to take up in the church and at work whatever leadership roles were open to us. Some of us began to study for degrees in theology. Our activism was energising and attitudes began to change, though very slowly and with much opposition.
There were few role models, but we learnt of one woman whose story had been largely forgotten – the Revd Florence Li Tim-Oi. In 1944, she was ordained a priest to minister in war-torn Macao, a neutral colony closed to Western clergy but overflowing with Chinese refugees in need of care and support.
Persecuted by the Communists for 30 years, she was eventually allowed to leave China in 1983 and lived the rest of her life in Canada, where she died in 1992. She was then recognised and celebrated throughout the worldwide Anglican Communion and is remembered every year in the church calendar.
She died just as the first women were ordained priests in Perth in March 1992, ahead of other parts of the Australian church, which did not begin such ordinations until December that year. The debates had been long and bitter, lasting from 1977 to 1992, and are not yet over in some places. Among the Perth women were some who had studied at Trinity College Theological School – the most prominent alumna among them being the Archbishop of Perth, Kay Goldsworthy AO.
Women can be bishops because a friend and I organised for the Appellate Tribunal, the equivalent of the church’s high court, to make a ruling on whether it was possible in Australia. Thankfully, they did so rule and another Trinity alumna, Bishop Alison Taylor, became a bishop in Brisbane. Here in Melbourne, Bishop Kate Prowd gained her theology degree at Trinity, and Bishop Genieve Blackwell studied in Sydney and Canberra before moving to Melbourne.
Trinity College began as a place of residence and learning for young men entering ministry. Today, Trinity’s Theological School has women faculty of world standing, including the Revd Canon Professor Dorothy Lee and Dr Rachelle Gilmour, a lay scholar. It has been a delight and privilege to work with them as College Chaplain.
I hope younger women remember our pioneering generation with gratitude, as I do when I recall those who worked for a woman’s right to vote.
There are still those opposed to the full equality of women because they believe God does not allow women to lead in the church, though they have usually come to accept female leaders in every other workplace.
I believe the ordination of women expands our understanding of who God is and challenges the false notion that God is male. I love my work as a priest and am deeply glad to have been part of the change, even if it does mean my generation of women are now ‘history’.
Where are we headed?
BY EMILY MCAULIFFE Though the world’s attention has been focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, many other global challenges still exist. Three experts share their insights on three global issues – outlining the current state of play and the actions we must take for the wellbeing of people and planet.
BY EMILY McAULIFFE
KATHERINE TREBECK Rethinking the global economy
Dr Katherine Trebeck (TC 1996) is a writer and researcher and an advocate for economic system change. Her aim is to spark different ways of thinking about the economy and its purpose, and to draw attention to the potential impacts on our lives if we don’t.
Step back and look at the world. We’re like hamsters scuttling on a globe, trying to spin it faster and faster. It’s been somewhat effective keeping the world moving in this way, but hamsters can’t run for ever, and the world can only spin so fast.
As a political economist, Katherine can see we need to find a better way to
keep the world, and everything within it, from imploding – literally or figuratively – and to stop spending money and effort on downstream remedies without considering the root cause. And we need to do it quickly.
‘So much effort gets deployed in dealing with the collateral damage of our current economic systems,’ says Katherine from her home in Glasgow, where she’s lived for the past 16 years. ‘A lot of charities, a lot of civil society effort, and a lot of government policy and spending is orientated around helping people and helping the planet survive and cope with the fallout of our current economic system.’
Katherine points to funding to help income-insecure people cope with stress and anxiety, and bushfire and flood recovery (and dealing with the impacts of climate change in general), as examples of time and money being spent on the aftermath of a problem, rather than the problem itself.
‘I just got to the point of seeing how much effort goes into responding to the damage that could be avoided that I thought, surely we can be a bit smarter
And is it where we want to go?
in the way we design our economic systems,’ she says. ‘It surely can’t be that our expectations are so low that we think the best we can do is patch and repair the current economic system with Band-Aids.’
Katherine spent her early career looking into big mining companies and how they affected communities around mine sites in Australia. She then took a similar role at the University of Glasgow looking at how large companies impact communities in Scotland, after moving ‘for a love of the country’. From there, she jumped into social enterprise and then a role with Oxfam, examining poverty and inequality in Scotland.
Katherine was prompted to consider why a rich country like Scotland has so much inequality. Portions of the Scottish population have life expectancies decades below others, and the gap is widening. She began to wonder what current economic models were doing to not just Scotland, but the planet.
And she began questioning the political holy grail of GDP.
‘So often, gross domestic product is seen as a default proxy for the health of a country, the success of a country, its league tables,’ she says. ‘We define development by “how big is a country’s GDP?” And yet, it’s not an automatic route to good lives for everyone.
‘The goal of the economy is more and more growth, but so often the most goes to those who don’t really need more … This set-up also flies in the face of what all the science is telling us about the reality of planetary boundaries.’
On a mission to find a better way, Katherine got involved in a project that set out to devise measures of progress that were more holistic than GDP via the ‘Humankind Index’. Though small, the project was debated in Scotland’s parliament and the thinking behind it was integrated into a framework designed to shape the country’s economy and government. For Katherine, it was a sign that asking different questions of the economy could prompt systemic change.
This led to her taking a lead role in establishing the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership – a group of governments (currently Scotland, New Zealand, Iceland, Wales and Finland) that recognise that success in the 21st century can’t simply be about faster GDP growth, but, rather, collective wellbeing of people and the planet.
Katherine also co-founded the global Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) in 2018, with the aim of bringing together individuals and groups who share her logic on economic change, including academics, progressive businesses and policymakers.
The importance of getting those groups together to engage in discussions about the state of the world and where it’s heading has become more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic. ‘There were a lot of challenges already facing societies around the world and, in a way, COVID has just put those on steroids,’ says Katherine, referencing the gig economy
and lack of job security for many (asking ‘are they earning enough to participate in society?’), and young people’s fear of climate change.
‘I worry what will come out now is governments saying, “We need to just get the economy going again.”’ From Katherine’s perspective, governments need to think about the ‘new normal’ they want to create, set the boundaries within which individuals and businesses operate and have a higher policy ambition than simply helping people ‘cope’.
‘I think rich, industrialised countries like Australia and the UK, which have taken up and are taking up more than their share of ecological room, are quite literally stopping other communities around the world who need to increase their material living standards, who do need more growth, because it still makes a difference to various social dimensions. If countries like ours don’t make ecological room for them, we’re essentially saying, “You stay down there because we want more.” But many countries don’t need more. We just need to distribute things better, have better quality of what we have, and reuse, recycle and share.’
Katherine lives by the mantra that ‘if you are luckier than some, build a longer table, not a higher fence’, and feels that Trinity plays a role in building long tables. ‘I’d hope that that idea of compassion rather than putting up the higher fence is something that Trinity has sparked in a lot of people that they’ve now taken into their professional careers. For me, I’m sure it did to a degree.’
Katherine admits to sometimes feeling ‘pretty scared’ about the future, but the passion and intelligence of the younger generation, which has grown up with the realities of ecological limitations, gives her some hope.
‘There are lots of reasons to be optimistic, but I think we’d be naive to not be very anxious about the future. So, taking action is worth it. We need to act, otherwise it’s not going to pan out right. It’s all up to us. And I mean us, as in, everyone.’
And is it where we want to go?
What can we do?
Katherine says we need to ask harder questions of the economy and its role: Is it an objective in its own right? Or can it be designed differently to serve the outcomes we’re really seeking, such as decent livelihoods, a sense of purpose, connection, a healthy environment, and so on? She suggests that we: • encourage and support businesses that are part of the solution – those that use their commercial viability to help deliver wider benefits • tell politicians this matters – they will move if they have a sense that the population is behind them • join groups like WEAll (weall.org) to link with others, add value and share ideas and hope.
EMMA BELCHER Eradicating nuclear weapons
Dr Emma Belcher (TC 1995) is the president of US-based Ploughshares Fund, where she works to raise and distribute money to people working on the best solutions to address the threat of nuclear weapons.
If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us, it’s that technology has its downfalls. As Emma is speaking to me from her home city of Washington, DC, the Zoom connection drops out and we resort to FaceTime while moving around our respective houses to find the best signal. The tech challenges are easy to brush off, but, during the interview, they become an analogy for a much darker scenario.
‘See how technology can go wrong?’ laughs Emma as she searches for a Wi-Fi connector. ‘It’s the same with nuclear weapons, right? We still have a lot of them, and the problem is that there could be a miscalculation or mistake, or even a misunderstanding by one side of what the other side is doing.’
Emma is a leading expert on nuclear weapons and became a passionate advocate for their control and disarmament after learning about nuclear weapons in high school. ‘I was horrified but
fascinated at the same time,’ she remembers. ‘It seemed ridiculous that humankind created something that we could obliterate ourselves with … with the macabre logic that, well, if I’ve got nuclear weapons, and the other country has nuclear weapons, and we both threaten to use them, that stops either of us from using them.’
Further into her studies and career (which has included advising on national security and international affairs for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and leading the MacArthur Foundation’s Nuclear Challenges grantmaking program) she realised, even more concerningly, how easily a misfire could occur.
‘If you have thousands of [nuclear weapons] ready to go within a few minutes, and you only have a few minutes to make a decision … it’s not hard to see the drastic situation you’re in, where nuclear annihilation could be decided by one or two people within a matter of minutes.’ In the United States, for example, the President has complete authority to order a nuclear attack, without requiring any input from Congress or other government officials.
‘Sometimes, I think, I don’t know why I chose such a depressing topic to study,’ she laughs.
As it currently stands, about 13,000 nuclear weapons exist in the world today, held by nine countries. ‘A lot of people think nuclear weapons went away with the end of the Cold War,’ says Emma, recognising that a lot of great work was done in the 1990s to disarm many weapons. ‘But they are gaining prominence again, and I think not a lot of people have been paying attention.’
The COVID-19 pandemic has exemplified the globalised nature of the modern world and how unprepared we are to respond to global threats. Emma highlights the potential impacts of a nuclear attack, which would cause problems similar to those of the pandemic, plus some. These include disruptions to food chains and the economy, potential changes in climate, and the inability of support services to access disaster zones due to radioactivity. There would be many deaths and the destruction of entire cities, which would become uninhabitable.
All of which begs the question: Why do we need nuclear weapons in the first place, and what is the alternative for countries who see them as a genuine line of defence in the modern world? ‘In order to be able to say, get rid of nuclear weapons, you need to think, how could you maintain security without them?’ says Emma. ‘How might you get to a place where countries can coexist peacefully without the threat of nuclear annihilation? … Trying to solve this difficult challenge presents a call to action for people who are willing to challenge assumptions, ask questions, and bring creativity and a problemsolving mentality to this, because it’s just too important not to.
‘I’m seeing some really interesting people getting involved in nuclear risk reduction with a range of talents and backgrounds. You’ve obviously got the physicists, and people who focus on politics, but we’re also seeing others like neuroscientists who are looking at what we know about the brain and how it responds to pressure, and how it would respond to having to make a decision about launching a nuclear weapon.’
Emma stresses that the people likely to be most affected by nuclear weapons also need a seat at the table. ‘We know that nuclear weapon decisions have traditionally been made by a small population, predominantly men. And I think that by bringing in people with a range of perspectives and experiences, including people in frontline communities who have been affected by production, testing and radiation – bringing a whole lot of different people together to try to solve this problem – is the way forward.
‘We really owe it to ourselves and future generations to try to change the status quo and the trajectory we’re on.’
There are more than 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Around 90% are in the US and Russia, with the remainder in China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and the UK. What can we do?
Emma suggests we all educate ourselves about the role nuclear weapons still play in our world and their effects. Although Australia doesn’t currently have nuclear weapons, Emma points out we’re a close ally of the US, which does, and which protects us with its weapons.
Furthermore, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s plan to acquire a nuclearpowered submarine fleet under a security pact between Australia, the UK and the US involves nuclear technology sharing between the US and Australia. While used only to fuel submarines and not to develop weapons, the technology involved is the same.
There has been debate in the strategic community about whether Australia should develop its own nuclear weapons, and, though unlikely to happen any time soon, this could set a precedent for other countries, potentially paving the way for proliferation of this highly sensitive technology.
Emma says now is the time to become informed about nuclear weapons, their technology, and their devastating impacts, and have a say in what’s at stake. See ploughshares.org
Click to watch Emma’s TED talk on ‘3 questions we should ask about nuclear weapons’
THENU HERATH Ending youth poverty
Thenu Herath is a Trinity College Residential Advisor and CEO of the Oaktree Foundation – a youthled organisation that empowers underprivileged young people to break the poverty cycle.
‘Ivisited Sri Lanka with my family every couple of years from the time I was born, and I have this distinct memory – I must’ve been about six years old – where I saw another child on the streets in Sri Lanka,’ Thenu says. ‘They were homeless and this child looked like me, spoke the same language as me and probably had very similar aspirations to me. But it was so clear that we had a really different life because I was [in Sri Lanka] temporarily. I could go home and pursue a good education, but I didn’t know what would happen to this child, who was very similar to me at that stage. It was from then that I had a real sense that some things in the world aren’t fair.’
Thenu’s family had migrated to Australia during the Sri Lankan civil war, when her mother was awarded a scholarship to study at RMIT. For Thenu’s mother, moving to Australia was a result of hard work, but Thenu knows that, off the back of that, her own birth and upbringing in Australia was good luck. Had her mother not received a scholarship, there’s a chance she could have been that little girl homeless on the streets of Sri Lanka.
Understanding that a life of poverty or privilege can come down to a roll of the dice, from her early years Thenu became passionate about youth development, and, in January 2021, took on the role of CEO at the Oaktree Foundation, aged 23.
‘Oaktree is all about young people wanting to create a more just and sustainable world,’ she says, explaining that the organisation focuses on non-traditional education, teaching young people how to speak up, lead and advocate, rather than teaching maths and English. ‘There’s no one solution to poverty or one thing that causes poverty. Climate change causes poverty, corruption causes poverty, degradation of the environment causes poverty. It’s all connected, which is why we take this model approach of upskilling.’
Oaktree has been operating across Australia for 18 years and all its people – mostly volunteers – are under the age of 27, making it the largest youth-run development agency in Australia. It also works with development agencies on the ground in Cambodia and Timor-Leste, where young people make up a large portion of the population and can therefore play an important part in shaping the societies in which they live.
Thenu gives examples such as helping young people secure a seat on a council or supporting them to advocate for an increased aid budget by speaking with government ministers. Some of Oaktree’s work involves getting in a car and visiting local MPs, asking them to listen to young people in their communities and the issues that matter to them.
‘I think a lot [of change] comes from individual action, but a lot of the major issues that we face at a global level in particular need government action … And I think the risk is that, by only having a certain generation of people making decisions, the decisions will inherently focus on that generation and inherently be very short term. The value of having young people in the room is that they’re always thinking about their own future because they’re the ones who will be there in 50 or 60 years’ time … It can sound cliched, but young people are not just the leaders of the future, they can be the leaders of today.’
