Preaching the Mormon Gospel in Remotest Australia, With Art

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, who reported from the Northern Territory.

The car, driven by Mormon missionaries, trundled along the red dirt road for 90 minutes, before its driver suddenly announced that it was “time for a lesson.”

Like clockwork, the front passenger unclipped her seatbelt, turned around, and half hanging through the back seat where I sat, opened a black binder and proceeded to teach.

The subject was the “Plan of Salvation,” what Mormons see as God’s grand plan to save humanity and help it thrive. The lecturer, Sister Bonnie Jackson, was a senior Mormon missionary, but the volume she was relying on was no ordinary religious text.

This was a special Indigenous edition of the Book of Mormon.

“It’s a crossover between what is cultural for them and the message that we want to deliver,” Mrs. Jackson said, leafing through the pages of pictorialized Mormon scripture, each image painted by a local Aboriginal artist.

Mrs. Jackson and her husband, Elder Kevin Jackson, first arrived in the Australian desert 18 months ago as senior missionaries of the Mormon Church, formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The couple, who are American and in their late 60s, were among 12 Mormons posted on “bush assignment” to Alice Springs and neighboring Indigenous communities like Mulga Bore, Engawala and Atitjere.

The Mormon Church has been in Australia since 1840. Today it has over 157,000 members, more than 200 formal meeting houses, and 300-plus congregations, including a half-dozen outposts in remote Northern Territory Indigenous communities. Although populations are small — between 50 and a few hundred people — the Mormon Church has a substantial presence there.

The Jacksons quickly made themselves known, traveling four hours and over 300 miles every day to spend time with one or 10 or 40 local Indigenous community members in Mulga Bore and surrounding areas. They sang songs, searched for honey ants, talked about Christ, watched religious movies over popcorn, and workshopped art.

“They’re asking me to draw my interpretation of faith, miracles and hope,” Marie Ryder, an artist living in Mulga Bore, said of the Jacksons. “What would I draw as hope?”

It was midday, and Ms. Ryder, an Eastern Arrernte woman, sat on her front porch, surrounded by paints and canvases. Among works depicting dreaming stories and local bush foods was a big stack of commissioned church pieces.

Ms. Ryder said she’d done numerous iterations of scenes from the Book of Mormon, notably the “Tree of Life,” a staple of Mormon iconography. She painted the tree, which is seen as a sign of God’s love and represents a portal between earth and heaven, with different colors and different characters, depending on who wanted it.

“Every elder who came down to Alice Springs has always asked me to paint the Tree of Life with their family,” she said.

“Sometimes, I’ll put bush tomatoes instead of flowers on the tree.”

What had started as a local project to help community members navigate language barriers with American missionaries soon turned into an international art trade with the church.

A member of Salt Lake City’s Mormon historical art department coincidentally had eyes on a piece of artwork from Mulga Bore, whose creator she spent five years trying to track down. After making the connection with the help of the Jacksons, she traveled to Mulga Bore. There, she found many Indigenous renditions of Mormon Scripture and started to fund their production.

Mr. Jackson said local artists had prospered from the trade, especially Ms. Ryder, who was now finding customers in other places, including New Zealand. “We’ve sold for Marie maybe $30,000 worth of art.”

Aboriginal artistic interpretations of religious texts are not limited to the Mormon Church. Throughout central Australian Indigenous communities, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran and Protestant churches often feature Indigenous artwork as stained-glass windows or in book form as part of storytelling.

Historically, Aboriginal languages had no written form. Therefore, said Gary Bird Mpetyane, a Mulga Bore Mormon Church leader, visual symbols were baked into the culture, easily recognizable and instantly relatable.

In his 28 years as a Mormon, he said he had found that people in his community got lost when Scripture was limited to the English language.

“Some people don’t understand properly in English,” said Mr. Bird, an Anmatyerre man who is also an artist himself.

“The American missionaries talk fast, even Elder Jackson. But this way, I can make them understand. They always know what that means.”