THIS IS A NEW JOURNAL from an old land.  Australia has been a place of human dreaming for tens of thousands of years, and what you read in these pages is a late fruit of the ancient dreaming.  

 Just two hundred years ago a small fleet sailed into Sydney Harbour bearing a mob of England’s outcasts.  Those ships bore European culture and belief to the Antipodes.  In the next forty years some forty thousand convicts were transported from Britain to the new penal colony.

 With the discovery of gold in the 1850s the fatal shore became the fabled shore.  Fortune-seekers rushed from all points to the land of incalculable promise.  Then in the wake of the great convulsions of this century, the broken middle-classes have migrated to Australia – from Britain and Ireland, from China and Italy, from Greece, Malta, and Yugoslavia, from Poland, Hungary, Latvia, the Lebanon, Mauritius, Vietnam, and Chile and many other lands.  All have brought a heritage with them and all have left much behind.  Hope and grief have intermingled.

The Australian landscape, at its heart, is marked by light and distance, by far and open horizons.  The land is bounded by sky and the great oceans – images traced on the cover of this new journal.  In the ancient and arid land to which they have come through the last two centuries, the new settlers have chosen to huddle in a few cities on the continent’s green edge.  The result is the most highly urbanised society in the world, despite the persistent myth of the Great Outback.  Australia has not been an altogether welcoming place: the brave and the mad and the adventurous have pushed into the heart of the country, but for the most part the immigrants have left the inland spaces to the Aboriginal people.

One of the sailors of the mind who searched for the Great South Land was Pedro Fernandez de Quiros.  He sought a vision which he named “Tierra del Espiritu Santo”, the Land of the Holy Spirit.  But Captain de Quiros never arrived at his destination.  And still today Australian society searches for its spirit, seeking an identity.

In what is perhaps the first radically secular society in history, with no hint of religious inspiration in its origins, the Church in Australia has always been something of an outsider.  The American President seems obliged to speak of God and religion – the Australian Prime Minister would not dare.  In a thoroughly pragmatic society, the theological enterprise has more often than not seemed a flourish or a distraction.  The quest for an Australian theology has barely begun.  Much of our Christian conversation has been too constrained by the vocabulary and vision of our European origins.  Yet there are great opportunities for the Church here, free of many of the chronic rivalries and impasses of the Old World.

The Australian Church lives as part of a fundamentally European society in the Asian-Pacific region.  She is well-poised, therefore, to serve as a bridge between the developed and the developing nations.  Within the Pacific region there are countries and cultures as diverse as Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, Malaysia, and the great agglomeration of South-East Asia; Papua-New Guinea and the island nations of Melanesia and Polynesia; New Zealand and, on the far eastern edge of the Pacific basin, the Americas.   Pacifica hopes to be one meeting point where all these different voices might be heard, and where theology may be shaped to serve the faith in this region and beyond.

Pacifica arose out of a meeting in Melbourne of Roman Catholic theologians.  Much of its initial support has come from individuals, communities and dioceses within the Catholic Church in Australia.  But the theological enterprise in Melbourne is strongly ecumenical, and it is hoped that Pacifica will consistently reflect both its Catholic provenance and its ecumenical associations.

The journal’s title speaks not just of the great ocean around which we have settled in this part of the world.  It speaks of peace, and that which makes for peace.  The point of Pacifica is a fresh peace - between peoples, churches, religions, and theological styles – not cheap peace, but the peace of Christ which may embrace and transform conflict.