The story of the Aussie Bible
by Kel Richards.

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(Sample text is in Word format. Please credit Bible Society NSW as the publisher and Kel Richards as author)

It all began, believe it or not, with an English school teacher named Mike Coles. He was working in the East End of London, where he found that most of his pupils didn’t have a clue what many Bible passages are about. So he began re-telling some of the stories of the Bible in the street language of the East End – Cockney rhyming slang.

The result was published as a book called The Bible in Cockney (Well, bits of it anyway). When I came across this little book I was delighted by the Cockney lingo – but also struck by the fact that Aussie is a distinctive branch of English every bit as colourful as Cockney. This thought inspired me to do for Aussies what Mike Coles had done for Cockneys. The result was The Aussie Bible (Well, bits of it anyway).

This was published by Bible Society NSW and went on to sell well over 100,000 copies. Since then I have been encouraged by the number of people who have told me that this little book has inspired them to go back to reading the Bible again (a real, proper translation of the Bible, that is) or who said they were inspired to start reading the Bible for the first time. And every time they told me this they asked for more bits of the Bible to be re-told in Aussie English.

In fulfilling their repeated requests, I should explain that there are four types of translations (or paraphrases) – some of which sit really tightly to the original text of the Bible (the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic and the New Testament in Greek), and some of which sit much more loosely to that text. Listed from the tightest to the loosest they are:

1. Word-for-word translation
2. Thought-for-thought translation
3. Paraphrase
4. Re-telling

The Aussie Bible belongs in that fourth category. In other words, this is Bible storytelling – admittedly it’s Bible storytelling that aims to stick to the original pretty much sentence-by-sentence, but it’s still storytelling, rather than translating or paraphrasing.

In the first section (“From Genesis”) I aim to re-tell the beginning of the Bible’s account of God’s intervention in human history – hoping that you’ll be inspired to take up the Bible and continue reading the story for yourself.

In the second section (“From Proverbs”) the goal has been to put some of the Bible’s little gems of poetry and wisdom into Aussie English.

In the next section (From John’s Gospel) I turn once again to the main message of the Bible – which is all about Jesus Christ: who he is and why he came (including chapters 20 and 21 of John’s Gospel re-printed from The Aussie Bible, Well bits of it anyway to make the story complete).

Finally, I have re-told the whole of John’s first letter in Aussie – with its great message of love as the key to life, the universe and everything.

The Bible really is God’s message to humanity – and here’s a bit more of it in the bewdy, bottler language of Aussies.

Rip into it – you’ll find it’s as bright as a box of budgies!

Kel Richards