He is the man who said that Australia was bound to have a poor national anthem because the only words that rhyme with Australia are dahlia, genitalia and failure.
He calls himself Australia’s best-known atheist. So what is he doing here?
Phillip Adams is the son of a Congregational minister. At the time of his birth, his father Charles was minister of Maryborough Congregational Church.
I wrote to him pointing out that many of his personal qualities are very Congregational—integrity, a vast social conscience and a tendency to start fires. I asked him whether he considered himself a Congregational atheist. This is his reply.
There is a surviving Congregational Church in Sydney. I found it when I was filming my story for Talking Heads. The minister was a sweet guy who told me proudly that he had doubled the numbers of his congregation—from six to twelve. So that is surviving Congregationalism in NSW.
My father Charles was a Congregational minister. My mother was a young minister’s wife in Maryborough. After their time in Congregationalism they had little but bitter memories of the church.
My father was an extraordinarily weak man. My mother was a beautiful girl. Perhaps she was flighty. She felt picked on by the older church women. That was one source of her bitterness.
He went off into the Air Force as a padre during the war, and he came back in the army. I’ve never known what happened, but obviously something did.
My mother got a job in rationing. She left inhibited poverty-stricken semi-starvation, living off the collection plate, and went wild. She became a naughty young woman, as many of them did. By the end of the war she didn’t want to have anything to do with my father Charles when he came back, and she ran off with the man who would become my step-father.
Charles got into terrible trouble with the hierarchy of the church; he had a drinking problem which was no doubt related to the breakdown of his marriage. I remember waiting for him while he was being rapped over the knuckles by a member of the hierarchy in Balwyn. He left the church, and in a reversal of the biblical story, became a tax collector. He was bitter about the church. He spoke of clerical collars as ‘whitewashed walls around lunatic asylums.’
My mother Sylvia is now dead, and he is too. My wider family were found in various Congregational churches after the war, but they drifted away before Church Union.
I have vivid memories of Dad delivering sermons at Maryborough; I must have been one or two. And I have an apocalyptic memory of the sky being on fire. I realise now that this was lightning. I ran in terror under the darkened sky, under the peppercorn trees. I rushed through the screen door and hurled myself at my father. He was in his dark study, writing his sermon.
30 years later I returned to Maryborough, and knocked on the door of the manse. An elderly lady answered it and said, ‘Phillip.’ She had known my father, and had married the current minister. She took me in to meet her husband. The air of gloom and disaster continued. He was dying of cancer. So all my memories of Congregationalism tend to be apocalyptic.
I made the decision not to believe in God when I was five or six. This had nothing to do with Congregationalism; I was raised by grandparents on an old farm. I just found I could not believe.
Congregationalism for me formed part of a background of alienation, anger and recrimination.
The Honorable Gough Whitlam AC QC (1916−) is a former politician and the 21st Prime Minister of Australia.
When he was once asked how he will react when he meets his Maker, Whitlam replied, “I shall treat Him as an equal.”
While working on this project I was told that Gough Whitlam had been a member of the Canberra Congregational Youth Club run by Frank Wheaton. Wheaton, a participant said, remembered Whitlam as “a big young man with a big outlook destined to play a big part somewhere.’’
So I wrote to the former Prime Minister to ask him if this were true, and, if it were, whether he had any memories of Congregationalism. He phoned me in reply.
Oh Christ, no, Gough Whitlam said. I was taken to church and taken to Sunday School, but never, I think, to a Congregational Church.
I do remember Frank Wheaton. I think it was true that he was the first Congregational minister in Canberra. My father met him, I remember. I think that he owned a school. And I think that he sold the school to what became Trinity in Sydney.
I have no connections with Congregationalism, only with Frank Wheaton, and I met him through my father.
Next: Chapter 25. Three: Into the Uniting Church
Back to index: Index
No comments:
Post a Comment