Browsing through others’ bookshelves is an interesting, and sometimes fascinating, pastime. Reading tastes vary greatly and perusing another’s library often brings books to your notice of which you are unaware. Recently, staying in a friend’s house, I discovered in his library a hitherto unknown anthology of quotations, a dictionary of clichés, Geoffrey Blainey’s A Short History of Christianity and Australian Classics: 50 Great Writers and their Celebrated Works by Jane Gleeson-White. 

Tucked away amongst those 50 great classics is a brief synopsis of historian Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance – How Distance Shaped Australian History. Born in Melbourne in 1930, the son of a Methodist minister, Blainey studied history at the University of Melbourne, graduating with first class honours at 20 years of age. He finished up as the University’s Ernest Scott Professor of History. In 1993 he became the foundation Chancellor of the University of Ballarat. A controversial and outspoken historian who aroused the ire of many of his contemporaries, Blainey nevertheless entered Australian literary history with the four words that comprise the title of his book, “The tyranny of distance.” It’s a phrase that has had an enduring impact, as reviewer Geoffrey Bolton acknowledges:

“How few of us possess the imagination to coin a phrase which embraces so rich a complex of implications that it passes into the common currency of the language and attains the venerable status of a cliché! It is a fine thing to enter the anthology of quotations and Geoffrey Blainey has attained it.”

In this book, published in 1966, Blainey picks up the idea that distance – Australia’s distance from Western Europe and the distance of one part of the country from another – influences the Australian experience. What made his book famous was not his insistence on the tyranny of distance, a fact everyone knew. It was that distance is the tool, the lens, through which the Australian experience and history must be analysed. In short, distance is not only a tyranny, but an interpreter of what has happened and what is.

The idea of distance as an interpreter of reality is not new. Read the Bible and you will find how much distance aids the interpretation of life and faith. The prophets were not labelled seers for nothing. Most, if not all of them, stood at a distance from the issues and life of ancient Israel and the surrounding world. 

Amos, in the desert of Tekoa, saw more clearly than the religious lackeys of the establishment what the future of Samaria would be. Habakkuk, perplexed by the issues confronting Israel, took himself into his high tower, the better to see and interpret the events unfolding before his eyes. Jesus and Paul each spent time in the desert, constrained by the tyranny of distance, but able, through that experience, to better understand the future shape of their respective ministries.

If distance provides perspective it also saves us from rash and sometimes crazy judgments on what the future will hold. Geoffrey Blainey was noted for his lucid, elegant and accessible prose. He had an ability to make history come alive with fascinating anecdotes. He records the strange event reported by the President of the Victorian Institute of Engineers on March 11, 1896 who told his audience that, in Chicago, a contraption had won a road race by attaining a speed of 16 miles an hour. This horseless road carriage, he assured them, would be as useful as the bicycle. In addition he prophesied that it would not require more expensive roads as it will not destroy the roads as do the feet of the draught horses! If only the venerable President had had the foresight of distance before making his prophecy.

The Church has more than its share of asinine prophets who enlighten their hearers as to the future’s shape. A little distance would save us all from rash prognostications about what the world’s, or even our own, future may hold.

– Tom Cadman looks at life and faith through the lens of literature