An important contemporary movement aimed at indigenizing the Christian idea of God in Australia is called the Rainbow Spirit Theology. In 1994 and 1995 two workshops were held near Townsville in northern Queensland among indigenous Christian leaders, later known as the Rainbow Spirit Elders. The workshops were facilitated by the non-Aboriginal Lutheran theologian, Norman Habel, with the assistance of his colleagues Robert Bos and Shirley Wurst. The principal aim of the workshop, in the words of Habel (2007: viii), was “to organise and record emerging ideas” of the Aboriginal participants “about an indigenous theology”. The Elders were drawn from the Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican and Uniting Churches. During the first workshop, the Aboriginal leaders recounted their “beliefs, ideas and stories”, which were formulated into “statements of faith” (ibid.). These statements were reviewed and revised during the second workshop and eventually developed into a small book, first published in 1997 under the title Rainbow Spirit Theology: Towards an Australian Aboriginal Theology (Rainbow Spirit Elders 1997, 2007).

In this chapter, before dealing directly with the Rainbow Spirit Theology, I review some important anthropological literature on the rainbow-serpent, which was obtained largely in the 1920s and 1930s by three foundational figures in Australian anthropology: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, A. P. Elkin and W. E. H. Stanner. I follow this by analysing the rainbow-serpent in light of an interpretation developed by the anthropologist L. R. Hiatt, who suggested that the rainbow-serpent represents a bisexual deity associated with rain and fecundity.