Threshing Out Grandmother Stories: Reflecting on Ruth 3 in Colonial Australia

The Bible is part of the colonising context in the lands now called Australia. For biblical scholars this raises the question of whether it is possible for Australian settler-colonial descendants to read biblical texts towards decolonising? Seeking to thresh out this question, this paper reads the biblical text of Ruth 3 alongside the emerging field of Aboriginal grandmother stories. Using a contrapuntal reading strategy, I engage the stories of grandmothers alongside my own story, attending to the hauntings of grandmother ghosts. Drawing upon Avery Gordon (2008), ghosts highlight what has been rendered absent within the telling of history. Attending to their haunting may enable transformed memories and counter-histories to emerge. In Australia, policies of removing Aboriginal children from their families have created an ongoing series of displacements that disconnect people, place, and memory. The colonial record and its archives have silenced certain voices, which are now experienced through their haunting presence. Aboriginal writers such as Larissa Behrendt and Natalie Harkin use the record of state archives to learn about the experiences of their grandmothers. They bring together the colonial and family representations of these women in hauntings which offer a counternarrative to the colonial record. I follow their narrations and am confronted by what I do not know or see. Similarly, Ruth 3 is resonant with grandmother stories. There are echoes of other biblical women including Lot’s daughters (Gen 19: 30-38), Tamar (Gen 38), Jael (Judg 4) and the woman of worth (Prov 31). Each ancestress evokes possibility in the interpretation of Ruth’s character and context. In bringing these stories together I ask what hauntings shape my own reading and movement within colonised space.