So there is certainly, I think, a widespread popular curiosity. It is Australia’s intellectual and literary culture which remains largely immured in its deadening secularism, including in fields like Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Theory, which regard themselves as at the edge of the new.

My own thinking took a bizarre theological turn while I was writing my recently completed book 1492: The poetics of diaspora, in which I try to construct a kind of broken mosaic from fragments of autobiography, genealogy, family stories, political history, literary and cultural history. In Ulysses I came across Leopold Paula Bloom referring to ‘all that long business’ about what ‘brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage’. Bloom, choosing the life of diaspora, however anguished and tormented (especially by the chauvinist racist Irish characters – I doubt this aspect of the great novel is dwelled on in the annual Bloomsday celebrations in Australia), reverses the meaning of Exodus, that the flight from bondage in Egypt was a flight towards freedom in the Promised Land.

Elsewhere in Ulysses, Mr Bloom expresses his admiration for Enlightenment figures like Spinoza, whose parents had been Marranos (openly Catholic, secretly Jewish) in Inquisitional Portugal. Thus alerted, I read with delight Spinoza’s 1670 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus with its witty sardonic devastating critique of Judeo-Christianity; and I read as much as I could about the history of the Marranos, those connoisseurs of ambivalence who prefigured modernity.

I began to regret my atheistical, communist upbringing; became fascinated by the Old Testament stories, not only Exodus but Genesis, Judges, Joshua, Deuteronomy; became absorbed by the question of circumcision ensuring for Jews their covenant with God and wondered about my own circumcision (was it medical only or did it possess an unlikely theological significance?); got to thinking monotheism is and has ever been a disaster; and worried my friends, who said John has discovered God and Christ knows where will it end.

I also re-read Edward Said’s wonderful essay ‘Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading’, in which Said that the narrative of Exodus has an inspiring vision of freedom for one people that is yet premised on defeat and even extermination for another, the Canaanites, those who already inhabit the Promised Land. Said sees the displaced and dispossessed Palestinians as the present-day Canaanites of the Middle East, part of a world history where Exodus has unfortunately proven all too influential as a foundational myth in settler-colonies, inspiring Puritans in New England slaying Native Americans, or South African Boers moving in on huge areas of formerly held African lands.

Perhaps Australia is no exception to these religiously inspired settler narratives. What if popular Australian creation stories, the dwelling on our Convict Origins or Suffering and Stoicism (because of droughts, floods, plagues of grasshoppers or mice) or Anzac Legend or the Pathos of Phar Lap or Les Darcy dying on alien shores: what if these myths and legends are secular versions of Biblical narratives? Could the kind of analysis launched by Said be applied and reworked here? Can we in these terms see the Australian Aboriginal peoples as Canaanites?

Yes we can. Imaginative thinkers about Australian history and society like Deborah Bird Rose and Ann Curthoys have in various ways been exploring thoughts like the following. The white settler-colony of Australia reveals the influence of Genesis in the story of the expulsion of Our Convict Ancestors from the British Eden conceived as the mother land (a primal wound in the white Australian psyche, of rejection by the mother). White Australian history also draws on the story of exodus from the British Pharaoh and settlement in a promised land far from British Pharaoh’s shores, where a new society and national narrative can be created. White Australians see themselves in originary ways as victims. They are aware always of their own suffering and hardship and trauma (indeed, Australian society is very skilled in ceremonies of suffering after a disaster of some kind), and so cannot view themselves as victimisers – as responsible for the suffering and hardship and trauma they inflict on others, those they displace and dispossess, the Canaanites.

Another question to be explored. How much has the domination of monotheism – of Literalist Christianity, to use a term from Freke and Gandy’s The Jesus Mysteries – with its constitutive intolerance of Canaanite polytheism and animism, impeded recognition, and valuing of far more sophisticated forms of spirituality like those created by Aboriginal peoples? Open discussion of the foundational religious stories entwined with white Australian myths reaches towards the kind of postcolonial post-secularist theological poetics that can, I think, illuminate key aspects of Australian history, society, psyche, and race relations. Such discussion might also assist in the internationalising of debate, an ease with comparative frameworks, the sense that we belong to world not just antipodean history.