Thursday, November 29, 2012

'Ah Nathanael' - another note on The Tale of Frieda Keysser


I have already noted (Victory over death and despair in a bygone age, 5 November 2012) that John Strehlow's epic, The Tale of Frieda Keysser ranges from 16th century Germany to present-day Australia and covers a wide swathe of Central Australian history. I am most affected, though, by its juxtaposition of the 'epic' with the 'personal'. Much of the book seems like John's personal exploration. And there are aspects of the story that touch me too. Another of my favourite passages reads:

"Not long after Carl's trip to Palm Valley with Gillen, he took Frieda there. Nathanael drove them.

Livistona mariae palms (also known as Red Cabbage Palms), Palm Valley, NT, Photo: C Goodwin 2004
Nathanael - Naemi's son - was a most charming man and even (I suspect) something of a lady-killer. He was at that stage about 23 and had been among the first boys to be baptised on 20 May 1887 by Kempe, who estimated his age then as about 14. Like many young aboriginal men he was dashing, well-spoken, carried himself well, was always well-mannered, witty, pleasant to get on with - and gallant with the ladies. Carl and Frieda were both very taken with him - and despite some ups and downs in their relationship, remained so for the rest of their lives. 'Ah Nathanael,' Frieda wrote to my father in the 1950s when sent a photograph of him in old age, 'and he was so young when I first set eyes on him. Now he looks so old'."

I really love that second-last sentence, finding it possibly the most moving sentence in the whole book. The paragraph itself sums up the book's epic sweep perfectly. It reaches back across the 1880s to the 1950s to me now (I'll say how in a minute), but consider also the backgrounds of the dramatis personae packed into this brief paragraph:

Carl - Pastor Carl Strehlow: missionary at Hermannsburg in Western Aranda country from 1894-1922, he also managed the mission as a working cattle station; author of Die Aranda-und-Loritja Staemme (five volumes); co-author of the Dieri New Testament;
Frieda - wife of Carl Strehlow, but effectively mistress of the Hermannsburg mission community. She married Carl and moved to remote Central Australia from Germany, having only met him once. Through her diligence and observation infant mortality was reversed at Hermannsburg just as everyone else in Australia assumed that aboriginal people were dying out; 
Gillen - telegraph master and Justice of the Peace at Alice Springs, he issued the warrant for the arrest of Mounted Constable Willshire on a charge of murdering aborigines; he was Baldwin Spencer's collaborator (supplier of the raw information) on their seminal books of Australian anthropology, The Native Tribes of Central Australia and The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. He and Spencer's focus was on the Eastern and Central Aranda. The trip to Palm Valley was an infrequent foray into Western Aranda country.
Kempe - Hermann Kempe was one of the three founding missionaries of Hermannsburg (1877). He played a key role in ending police persecution of the aboriginal population and reconciling traditional clan enmities. He supplied plants to Baron von Mueller (founder of Melbourne's Botanic Gardens), who named several plants after him. He also wrote the first Aranda grammar and prepared a wordlist which Gillen used in his researches. Descendants of Kempe find themselves respected at Hermannsburg to this day.
Naemi -Nathanael's mother; widowed young, she became the partner of Eraminta who was shot by Mounted Constable Willshire. She was also Willshire's lover, and John suspects sexual jealousy among Willshire's motives for shooting Eraminta. She was brought down to Port Augusta for Willshire's murder trial but not called to give evidence on the grounds that she couldn't speak English. (I lived in Willshire Street, Alice Springs in 1981!) 
Palm Valley - a narrow valley in the Krichauff Range 123 km southwest of Alice Springs. It is noted for its population of Livistona mariae (Red Cabbage Palms), unique survivors of central Australia’s tropical past.

You see, this paragraph is packed with significance. Then you have John's personal touch - not T.G.H. Strehlow, the great transcriber of Aranda myths, but 'my father'.

And 'Nathanael'? And this is where Frieda's recognition really grabbed me. Because I had a recognition moment too. In 2007 I was driving from Alice Springs with a couple of Aranda friends out to Ipolera, west of Hermannsburg. We were going to do the big circuit, leave Ipolera, go past Gosse's Bluff (Tnorula)

Gosse's Bluff, the meteorite crater, from Tyler Pass
over Tyler Pass and back to Alice via Glen Helen Gorge (Mangama). As we approached Ntaria (Hermannsburg) on the way out, B. pointed out to me the Ellery floodplain. "Over there," he said, "is a place called 'Mirrulantharrakala' [as I transcribed it]." It meant "where the woomeras were exchanged". "All this", he said, "was Rauriwaka's country."

Rauriwaka! I had read about him in T.G.H. Strehlow's books. He was the Honey Ant Chief of Ljaba, who provided T.G.H. Strehlow "with no fewer than 33 myths and traditions, and 569 song verses'" (Songs of Central Australia, page xxxvi). I had experienced a moment of recognition with my previous reading.

But recently I read the above passage in John's book. I knew also that Rauriwaka had been one of the assistants on T.G.H.'s translation of the New Testament into Aranda. His Christian name? Nathanael. 

If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:

Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 August 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

The 370 bus (Mise-en-scene 2)

Seen on the 370 bus going into Broadway:

A girl in an Anglican Girls' School uniform (that is the navy blue jacket and blue-checked skirt) with earphones in and sucking on a Slurpee gets up from her seat and goes to the exit door.

There she says something to a 20-something male. I can't hear it, but she points at her empty seat with her Slurpee straw and he turns, smiles ('Me?') and takes her seat. She has already pressed the bell and gets off at the next stop on City Road.

Perhaps she likes the look of him (he was not the only person standing around the exit), but for a split second it occurs to me: 'respect for elders?' and I feel strangely touched. He wasn't old by my rating but older than her (maybe she was in Year 10) and she gave him her seat. Perhaps it was both.


My other mise-en-scene was 26 June 2012.

Friday, November 23, 2012

One for the historical record

Not so many words today. I thought I'd share our Sydney view across the former Harold Park to Chatswood on the North Shore (see the towers, faint towards the upper left). Balmain is in the foreground. There is a great reach of Harbour in the middle of this somewhere.



This is a view that has always surprised people who entered our house from the street. We expect it will disappear once 6-storey apartments go up in front of us, so this is 'one for the archives'.












Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The Dream of the Red Chamber

One of my little projects last year was to put together some thoughts on the dramatic adaptability of the Chinese classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber [紅樓夢] * & see below

A painting from a series of brush paintings by Qing Dynasty artist Sun Wen (1818-1904), depicting scenes from the novel Dream of the Red Chamber. Public domain

The original five-volume novel is like a Chinese Remembrance of Things Past, as if the author, Cao Xue-chin, tried to get down his entire life and the life of his family. Actually, the novel's family has a son who was born with a piece of jade from the roof of heaven in his mouth, so the book is also allegory, but it also more: a portrayal of  the decline of a feudal family, an account of the customs and manners of an 18th century Chinese mansion, an expression of the long-term workings of fate...


Thinking dramatically and operatically (since that was the scenario put to me) and looking for a principal storyline for an opera, I first latched onto the love story of Bao-yu (Precious Jade) and Dai-yu (Black Jade) and the triangle that is formed by the arrival of Bao-chai (Precious Virtue). That gives you your emphasis on emotions. But then I thought that a truly unique work would cover the influence on the central plot of the wheeling of greater external events. My western temperament cut the story so that it progressed through conflict. But the novel moves in a quite leisurely fashion, with outcomes slowly unfolding, especially novel 2, The Crab-Flower Club, which is taken up to a great extent with description of poetry games and so forth. I've included side-plots which convey the dark underside of the mansion - possible reasons for the Jias' decline - and the cruel foundations on which some of the surface brilliance of their household is built. But if the whole book is too big to be digested into a western stage form, there are shorter, more dramatically-succinct episodes in the novel which could serve as a stage work in their own right.

Why would this would need to be an opera rather than a very ornate play? There would be an interesting challenge for a composer in pitting together music which fulfils two different functions: music which punctuates the cycles of life and the structure and procedures of the society (funerals, weddings, celebrations, festivities, arrivals, departures) as opposed to music (the outpouring of song) which expresses emotion.

I’ve roughed out the sort of plot I could see emerging from what I’ve read so far. It’s built around certain ceremonial events. I’ve tried to convey some of the bigger revolutions happening outside the love story. Further reading might provide better illustrations of ‘something rotten in the Jung houses’ or better tableaux of decline or suggest more skilful ways to enfold information and ‘fast-forward’. On a smaller note, perhaps the chorus could be used to convey the size of the servant body – maybe even assigning a body of chorus to each principal. I was always intrigued by the pecking order among the servants - inside and outside servants (inside is more prestigious), chamber wives (servants who are concubines)...It reminded me of the complicated hypocritical world of slavery in antebellum America where the inside servants were sometimes siblings...

Below is a cast list and a rough synopsis. I’ve conflated some of the characters (without being completely aware of whether this cuts across a Chinese sense of relations) and changed some sequencing, such as the early flogging, the ransacking of the servants' quarter...

A page from the "Jimao manuscript" (one of the Rouge versions) of the novel, c. 1759. Public domain, due to expiry of the copyright.


The Dream of the Red Chamber – an opera based on Cao Xue-qin’s classic Chinese novel

Characters:
Jia Bao-yu (treble)
Lin Dai-yu (treble)
Xue Bao-chai (soprano)
Wang Xi-feng (soprano)
Cousin Zhen (tenor)
Grandmother Jia (alto)
Jia Zheng (tenor)
Aunt Xue (alto)
Xue Pan (baritone)
Aroma (soprano)
Snowgoose (mezzo)
Jia Yu-cun (tenor)
Priest (bass)
The Prince of Beijing (baritone)
Goddess of Disenchantment (sop?)
Servants


Plot
Act One
i
In a country tavern, a poor scholar, Jia Yu-cun, meets a priest, who tells him about the Jia family of the Jung Mansion, to whom Yu-cun is distantly related. In particular, he tells Yu-cun about Jia Bao-yu (Precious Jade), a special boy in the latest generation who was born with a piece of jade in his mouth. The boy has some strange predilections; not only is he lazy (he neglects his studies), he prefers the company of girls and says he finds men unclean. But he is said to be descended from a piece of jade left unused by the Goddess Nu-gua after she repaired the dome of heaven, and is hoped to be a pivotal figure in restoring the fortunes of the Jia family. Jia Yu-cun sees an opportunity to advance himself through ‘family connections’, though the currently-powerful family is supposedly in decline.
ii
The Jia family is burying Qin-shi, a daughter in-law from their Ning mansion, and Cousin Zhen (her father-in-law) has gone to suspiciously disproportionate lengths to make her funeral as sumptuous as possible (much to the resentment of servants who have had their rations further cut). On this 35th day of the 49-day(!) funeral, even the Prince of Beijing has come to express his condolences. As he is leaving, the Prince asks to meet Bao-yu, the fabled ‘boy with the jade’ whose presence is considered very auspicious for the Jias, from whom much is hoped by the royal family. We meet Bao-yu and his constant companion, his cousin Lin Dai-yu  (Black Jade) who has been living with the Jias for some time.

Scenes from Dream of the Red Chamber. Public domain artwork by Xu Baozhuan (1810-1873).
After the Prince has left, Wang Xi-feng, a sister-in-law of the Jung mansion who was been in charge of the funeral, orders 20 strokes of the cane for one of the resentful servants who was late for work. She believes it is even more important than ever now to maintain discipline and ignores the servant’s pleas for mercy for all the good work she has done the family throughout her life.
Into this scene of punishment, Aunt Xue (Wang Xi-feng’s aunt) and Aunt Xue’s children, the brutish Xue Pan and the beautiful but conventional Bao-chai (Precious Virtue), arrive at the Jung mansion. Wang Xi-feng is overjoyed. Her cousin, Xue Pan has just gotten off a murder charge when his case was brought before Yu-cun, the new prefect sponsored by the Jias. (Interestingly, the man Xue Pan had murdered, Feng Yuan, had been trying to steal Lotus, the daughter of the man who became Scene I’s priest when his daughter (Lotus) was kidnapped by Xue Pan several years ago.) After the elders have retired, Bao-chai meets Bao-yu and Dai-yu, and after Bao-chai retires to clean up after her journey, Bao-yu and Dai-yu renew their sense of destined compatibility. Even though it has been disturbed by Bao-chai’s arrival, they dare to think of it blooming into love and marriage.

Act Two
i
In a dream, Bao-yu is led by his heavenly relative the Goddess of Disenchantment to the Illusory ‘Land of the Great Void’, where she teaches him about sex and he dreams he has made love to Qin-shi, his recently-departed niece. Upon waking, Bao-yu tells Aroma, his maid, that he should teach her what the Goddess has taught him. After some pro-forma resistance from Aroma, which includes three conditions: (1) apply yourself to your studies, (2) stop saying the first thing that comes into your head: think first, and (3) forget your fascination with girls’ cosmetics, she agrees to let him have sex with her. As she explains, she fully accepts that she was given to Bao-yu “to be used to the fullest extent”; that is the way things are.
ii
Outside her Bamboo Lodge in the Mansion’s garden Dai-yu is thinking of Bao-yu, and sentimentally gives voice to a line from The Western Chamber: “Day after day a drowsy dream of love”. On his morning stroll, Bao-yu overhears her and playfully teases her, but she resents his making fun of her (feeling that the other girls of the mansion have already teased her enough because of her attraction to him). Before he can make amends, Bao-chai interrupts them. She is interested in seeing Bao-yu’s jade with its famous inscription: “Never Lose, Never Forget, Eternal Life, Lasting Prosperity”. She shows him her golden locket. On it is inscribed: “Never Leave, Never Abandon, Fresh Youth, Eternally Lasting”. The lines match. All three know that, according to the feudalistic concept of marriage, Bao-yu and Bao-chai are therefore destined to marry. Fragile Dai-yu bursts into tears as her own dreams of marrying Bao-yu seem shattered. At a loss over her emotional excess, Bao-yu cannot look for sympathy from Bao-chai who supports the feudal way of doing things.
Alone, he begins reading the book he should have been studying: Zhuaang Zu (one of the most important works of Taoism), and is especially moved by the concept of letting things take their own course; that people cannot go against their nature.
iii
Because he is jealous that Bao-yu is heir to the Jia fortune, Xue Pan tells Jia Zheng (Bao-yu’s father) that a servant girl drowned herself because Bao-yu tried to rape her. Already tired of Bao-yu’s ‘idiosyncracies’ and to assert his authority, Jia Zheng beats the boy mercilessly until Grandmother Jia (Lady Dowager) intervenes. She is against using force to discipline the boy, and hopes that a carrot-rather-than-stick approach will help him mature into the sort of household head that the family will eventually need. Jia Zheng, however, already worried about the precariousness of the family’s position, despairs of Bao-yu ever devoting himself to serious things.
iv
Aroma, Bao-yu’s servant, tells Wang Xi-feng that she agrees with Bao-chai that Bao-yu’s flogging would never have occurred if Bao-yu had paid more attention to his position in a family that needs to restore its fortunes. Wang Xi-feng is impressed by this servant. Flattered, Aroma tells Wang Xi-feng about Bao-yu’s and Bao-chai’s matching amulets.
v
More trouble for the family: Bao-yu’s old wet nurse, Nanny Li, comes to petition the Jias for financial assistance. Her family has fallen on hard times. But the Jias say they cannot help. Nanni Li is resentful of the Jias’rejection of her, a loyal old retainer, even though Jia Zheng explains, “Our fortunes are not as they were. All this is just for appearances”.
Yet, during sumptuous and elaborate celebrations for her birthday, Grandmother Jia raises with Jia Zheng, her son, the question of Bao-yu’s marriage. When Wang Xi-feng suggests an auspicious match between ‘precious jade’ and ‘gold locket’ - that is, between Bao-yu and Bao-chai - Grandmother Jia nods her consent; Jia Zheng assents. Wang Xi-feng and Aunt Xi choose an auspicious day for Bao-yu and Bao-chai to marry.
vi
After Grandmother Jia’s birthday celebrations, Bao-yu goes to see Dai-yu. For his part he continues to feel undying devotion to her, but she feels that something is awry.
vii
In the eleventh month, the withered crab-apple trees in Happy Red Court suddenly blossom, and people rush to see. Nanny Li and Xi-feng take the unseasonal flowering to be an evil omen, while Dai-yu is secretly thrilled when Snowgoose, her maid, interprets the flowering as predicting a happy occurrence soon in Bao-yu’s life (could it be their marriage?)...For some reason, Bao-yu himself feels sad. He is not wearing his jade; nor does he find it on returning home! He becomes more and more distraught, alarming Aroma as he bemoans the realm of human suffering and longs for Dai-yu’s consoling companionship.
viii
Since the jade has not been found in Bao-yu’s house, Xi-feng supervises the ransacking of the servants’ quarters. The family are grateful to ‘Fengy’ for her energetic prosecution of their interests, and she takes the opportunity to outline a scheme by which Bao-yu can be married to Bao-chai. The family’s gratitude to her for continuing to devise strategies that will ensure the “most propitious turns of events”, overshadows the news that a couple of old servants have suicided out of shame for being accused of theft.
ix
Having been informed of the secret marriage plans by Snowgoose, Dai-yu has collapsed and vomited blood. Snowgoose hurries to report Dai-yu’s condition to Grandmother Jia, and Wang Xi-feng. The old lady is furious. If Dai-yu’s illness is caused by love for Bao-yu, she has no sympathy for her. “Parents organise marriages,” she says. The old lady has no time for this talk of ‘Free love’ and ‘free marriage’.
x
Dai-yu burns her manuscript book as well as Bao-yu’s mementoes. Recognizing Dai-yu’s critical condition, Snowgoose orders Dai-yu’s other maids to get her after-life things ready.
The wedding ceremony begins. The family remarks that Bao-yu now seems better and more rational, but he believes he is marrying Dai-yu. Lifting the bride’s veil he finds that it is Bao-chai and collapses. At the same time news is brought in that Dai-yu has died, “in admirable obedience to her love”. But Grandmother Jia extols Bao-chai and proclaims that the family’s fortune depends on them obeying the precepts of society. After the wedding guests have left, Bao-yu learns that the Prince of Beijing has made him a replica of his missing jade, but, unconsoled about mounting losses, he tells Bao-chai that he will continue to mourn for Dai-yu.

Act Three
i
Walking through the mansion’s Grand View Garden, Wang Xi-feng sees the ghost of Qin-shi who makes it clear she was the object of her father-in-law’s incestuous desires and warns Wang Xi-feng of the Jia family’s pending doom. In horror, Wang Xi-feng goes to the temple to pray. She draws some divination lots, and [Aroma] interprets the oracle as a good omen: Wang Xi-feng will ‘return home in splendor’. Snowgoose, Dai-yu’s maid however, thinks that the oracle could mean something else.
ii
The Jias receive news that their family is now under imperial scrutiny and on top of that comes news that Xue Pan has killed a waiter by smashing a bowl over his head. Despite the family’s troubles, Aunt Xue is not particularly worried because Yu-cun the magistrate can always be leaned on. A priest turns up with what he claims to be Bao-yu’s jade, but the family ask him to come back when they have raised the money he demands for its return.
iii
Hearing from Aroma that Wang Xi-feng is ill, Bao-yu and Bao-chai hurry to her quarters to find she is already dead and laid out for her funeral. Jia Zheng explains that her funeral cannot be arranged as ‘sumptuously’ as the funeral Wang Xi-feng arranged for Qin-shi because the Jias have less money now. Bao-yu says the priest can keep the jade of spiritual understanding.
iv
Back in their quarters, Bao-yu asks Bao-chai’s permission to sleep outside; he claims it will help him sleep; in reality he wants to dream of Dai-yu.
v
The emperor grants the Jias a slight reprieve; Jia Zheng will be forgiven his shortfalls but will have to take up a governorship in the provinces; Xue Pan will probably get off but the district governor, suspicious of Jia Yu-cun, must first look into his case, and Bao-chai is finally pregnant, but Bao-yu, who has become more and more impressed by Taiost philosophy, has disappeared.
vi
One day in the provinces, Jia Zheng comes across a figure with a shaved head. It is none other than Bao-yu, but before Zheng can tell the young man he is returning from the funeral of Grandmother Jia, a priest urges Bao-yu to hurry away. They both vanish without a trace.
Epilogue:
Travelling once more through the countryside, Jia Yu-cun meets up once again with the priest he met in a tavern in Act 1. He tells him that The Board of Punishment (sufficiently paid) exonerated Xue Pan, who agreed to turn over a new leaf by marrying his concubine, Lotus (the priest’s kidnapped daughter). Meanwhile, Yu-cun himself has been ordered home and stripped of his rank. The priest tells Yu-cun that the Illusory Land of the Great Voids is the Blessed Land of Truth. There, the good people are favored by fortune, while the dissolute people meet with calamity. But Yu-cun has begun to feel that out in the world the wheel continues to turn, each living thing has within itself the seeds of its own improvement, the seeds of its own dissolution.

END

For an updated brief synopsis, please see my blog of 12 April, 2015





Friday, November 16, 2012

En plein air and a little élan

 
Perhaps the best writing I've come across this year has been in John Strehlow's book, The Tale of Frieda Keysser, which I wrote about at length in my second last blog (5 Nov 2012). It has such energy. It almost comes off the page. I put this down to the fact that John is a dramatist at heart - he has been a theatrical director for years.

There is something to be learnt from this, I figure. More and more I feel the urge to write drama; more and more to make action visible; to create a springboard for actors or singers. "Dramatise, dramatise!" said Henry James, and I think that's good advice. When I bridge the gulf between acting and written prose, I feel I will have created a real electrical circuit.

I hope there's no reverse snobbery in this but I remember some years ago when I went into a well-known Australian bookshop to buy a non-fiction book, I happened to mention to the guy behind the counter that someone was making it into a film. He let out a bad-tempered sigh, "Why don't they f#$%#ing leave it alone? Why do they always have to interfere with good books?" I should have pointed out that he was railing against human creativity, the obviously irresistible urge to keep building on what's gone before, recasting originals in new media. Why would you want to stop this when new angles, new meanings show up? It's why Berio kept re-composing his music; why Liszt made transcriptions of Beethoven; why there's a performance tradition in Shakespeare and sometimes you can leave out whole characters, as Olivier did when he left out Fortinbras and therefore highlighted a Freudian rather than political dimension to Hamlet. (In adapting Journey to Horsehoe Bend, Andrew Schultz and I thinned out the symbolism and therefore what was left became sharper.) But I bit my tongue. I noticed that the guy - hunched over and with a billiard room tan - had a 'got out of bed on the wrong side' kind of look on his face.

Some weeks ago, I went back into that bookshop and saw the same guy again. I couldn't help thinking about the millions of words under his guard compelled to sit on their arses within their various bindings. I reflected that the best bookshop I've come across in the past year was this one, Bart's in Ojai California. Why? I love that it's outdoors. You can read a book without hiding yourself away from the southern Californian sunshine. It celebrates outdoors and indoors at the same time. It's the beginning of stepping off the shelf and into the flow of life.

Bart's Bookshop in Ojai, CA
But I'll admit southern California has a problem balancing the indoors art of our European tradition and the traditions that arise from an outdoors culture. The Getty Center's buildings and views of LA almost dwarf the artworks inside, even though most of them are masterworks! They seem to depend for their power on their frames and interiors. But I'd sure like to see the power in letting words come off the page.




The San Diego Freeway beside the Getty Center, LA



Tuesday, November 13, 2012

A sobering thought (Philippa, an opera - blog 10)

Continuing my series of blogs on the development of the opera Philippa, based on the life of Harlem-born concert pianist Philippa Duke Schuyler, the daughter of African-American journalist George S. Schuyler and white Texan Josephine Cogdell, who thought that if they combined their superior genes they could produce a genius. Philippa was, indeed, a prodigy who played her own compositions with the New York Philharmonic when barely in her teens. She died in Vietnam in 1967 rescuing 'the orphans', the children of US servicemen and Vietnamese women...

Lest we forget. George and Jody married in 1928. Even in New York it was a daring match for the times, as can be gathered from the following quote from David Levering Lewis's When Harlem Was in Vogue: 'At the close of the year[1927], the Atlanta Constitution congratulated the state of Georgia for getting through the year without a single lynching.'

A Ku Klux Klan meeting in Gainesville, Florida, Dec. 31, 1922.
Other blogs in this series

1. - 16 Sep 2012 - an account of my initial thoughts on Philippa, when I was attempting to convey a more comprehensive trajectory of her life
2. - 18 Sep 2012 - containing Act I of a revised scenario, beginning the action in Vietnam
3. - 25 Sep 2012 - containing my revised scenario
4. - 7 Oct 2012 - containing a one-page synopsis, to make sure such a story can fit into "two hours' traffic on the stage"
5. - Becoming a Harlemite, Vietnamese and Catholic 10 Oct, 2012 - detailing some of the research I'll be doing
6. - A Harlem Tradition? 20 Oct 2012 - detailing Harlem interest in white culture
7. - Sacrifice? 21 Oct 2012 - considering the nature of Philippa's death and whether it was self-sacrifice
8. - Classical aspirations 30 Oct 2012 - looking at Harlem's attitude to classical music in the age of Philippa
9. - Montagnards and Lowlanders 1 Nov 2012 - looking at some of Philippa's writing from Vietnam

Monday, November 5, 2012

Strehlow: Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow’s The Tale of Frieda Keysser)

GKW outside the Strehlow house, Hermannsburg NT winter 1995




I have always perceived a great significance in the Strehlow story. For me, till recently, it was the story of the white boy T.G.H. (Ted) Strehlow born at remote Hermannsburg Mission (now Ntaria) in the central Australian desert in 1908; growing up among young Aranda boys and girls speaking their language as a mother tongue; then going back to Central Australia as a graduate from Adelaide University in 1932 to write the first linguistic description of an Australian aboriginal language and being invested with the sacred myths and chants by the old men who no longer trusted their sons to continue their traditions. And though I know you can read the Ted Strehlow story less controversially or breathlessly it has always spectacularly entranced me. I think of all the travelling that T.G.H.S. did in his 20s by camel across thousands of hot, sweating, dusty miles collecting, transcribing and piecing together chants (sometimes given whole) and myths from old aboriginal men, and I consider it a kind of Wagnerian Nibelung/Eddic project or at least something akin to the work Lönnrot did in Finland creating the Kalevala from kennings collected near and far.

I always hoped to meet T.G.H. Strehlow and in fact I remember exactly where I was when I was told (by John Schlank) one evening in January 1979 that he’d died some months previously. I was staying in Wolseley Street, Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory six hours' drive north of Alice Springs, at the home of my friends, the Speakmans. Later I conceived and wrote the libretto for a symphonic cantata (or concert drama) composed by Andrew Schultz and based on T.G.H. Strehlow’s novel, Journey to Horseshoe Bend, an account of an urgent, life-and-death journey taken down the dry bed of the Finke River from Hermannsburg Mission by the Strehlow family (Pastor Carl Strehlow, his wife, Frieda and their 14 year-old son Theo) in 1922. It was performed at the Sydney Opera House in 2003 by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Philharmonia and Ntaria Ladies Choir, descendants of the Aranda people in the story. You see, I feel I have a personal connection. And that is one of the great poignant plusses of John Strehlow’s book, The Tale of Frieda Keysser: Investigations into a Forgotten Past, his account of the lives of his grandparents, Carl and Frieda, who managed Hermannsburg Mission, 80 miles west of Alice Springs, for nearly 30 years from 1895-1922: this massive epic, titled innocuously The Tale of Frieda Keysser, seems, to a large extent, to be a filling in of stories that John and his siblings, the younger Theo and Shirley, must have heard around their Adelaide dining room table told by their father, Ted Strehlow, the son of Carl and Frieda, who was the young boy, Theo, in that epic trek to Horseshoe Bend.

To my mind, T.G.H.’s story is one of the greatest stories Australians will ever have about the ways in which whitefellas can or cannot live in this land, for in one version of his story, he couldn’t stick to the proscriptions under which he was entrusted with secret-sacred aboriginal material and succumbed to an offer of money to reveal those secrets in the form of photographs of secret-sacred ceremonies sold to a German magazine, Der Stern. The ensuing controversy, the stress caused by the public outrage over sacrilege expressed by national aboriginal leaders, probably killed him.

And I am intrigued by John’s spin on the story, which admittedly only takes up a few pages near the beginning of this book, which is a biography, rather, of his grandparents and particularly his grandmother, Frieda. While acknowledging that his father was collecting tjurunga (myths and songs and ceremonial objects) against the possibility that Aranda tradition would one day revive and the younger generation would want their material returned; and that when that time came and the political situation was ripe for redress T.G.H. failed to do what he had intended, John’s major criticism seems to be that his father made out that his achievements were all his own. (“It was part of my father’s psychological make-up to need to be ‘the only one who knew’.”)  And to be honest, I tended to believe this too; that Ted Strehlow came virtually from nowhere, was the only one trusted, that his was the Herculean heroic effort built on no-one else’s; that in fact he was an only child. I didn’t quite grasp that he had siblings who were taken back to Germany in 1910. I knew this, but had developed a convenient amnesia about it. That is, until I read this book, which proves that T.G.H. was not the only great Strehlow.  

Mt Sonder, "rugged Rutjubma" as it is called in Journey to Horseshoe Bend, lying 25 miles to the northwest of the former mission station of Hermannsburg. Photo: Felix Dance
The Tale of Frieda Keysser reveals that in 1908, the year John’s father Ted Strehlow was born, his 36 year-old grandfather Carl had already completed with Rev. Johann Reuther the first translation of the New Testament into an aboriginal language: Dieri (one of the Lake Eyre languages), and was part way through his five-volume magnum opus Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (The Aranda and Loritja Tribes in Central Australia) - this, on top of arduous mission station duties. John’s grandmother Frieda had reversed the trend of infant mortality at Hermannsburg, the only place in Central Australia where the popular Darwinian theory that the aboriginal people were doomed was being challenged. These were considerable achievements that have barely been appreciated till now.

And there is plenty of drama in this story of the grandparents to match the Greek tragedy of Ted Strehlow’s life. For a start it really is a great love story. Carl proposed marriage to Frieda after only one meeting at Obersulzbach in southern Germany in 1892 when the young pastor was making farewell visits to relatives, and she didn’t see him again until three years later when he rowed out to meet her boat the Gera, anchored in St. Vincent Gulf off Adelaide. On the basis of their one meeting, she was prepared to follow him around the world and marry him. They married at Point Pass, South Australia on 25 September 1895 and she then followed this man she’d fallen in love with at first sight 1,000 miles into the remote desert of Central Australia where they worked for the Aranda people, in Gottes Namen, for the next few decades.

John calls their mission “a victory over death and despair in a bygone age”. At a time in the 19th century when most Europeans assumed aborigines were on a path to extinction and even sympathetic whites aimed only so high as to ‘soften the pillow of a dying race’, Carl and Frieda worked to make life better and statistically more likely. It’s common these days to say that missionaries destroyed traditional culture, but John asks if it was not sensible to try to stop, for example, post-ceremonial wife-swapping when it only helped spread syphilis. Carl avoided witnessing Aranda ceremonies, but their songs must have been sung to him in his home on the mission compound so that he could transcribe them and translate them in Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme. And John tells of how Carl and Frieda eventually realised there were aspects of tradition that didn’t need to be changed and of their practical accommodations as when Carl decided that he would add to his considerable duties the doling out of food in the esshaus because he, as a white man, would not be bound by kinship obligations to share food with relatives who did not live in the mission community.


But John is unfashionable in taking a positive view of missionaries. In an interview in the Alice Springs News (14 Dec 2011), he has gone so far as to say that “the role of Christianity in Central Australia has been...an enormous positive thing...” and I wouldn’t be surprised if some members of Australia’s reading public will simply not read this book once they get a sniff of the fact that it doesn’t fit the prevailing political correctness. Yet, in his 1,084 pages John mounts a fairly powerful argument. And to be fair, he does not fail to relate the really beautiful aspects of Aranda belief and culture. “Such an enchanted landscape these Aranda lived in,” he says towards the end of the book and he’s not being ironic, “spirit-beings everywhere; invisible, but throbbing with latent potential.” I know exactly what he means. I’ve spoken in a previous blog about the way Aranda people (indeed other Central Australian people like the Pitjantjatjara and Warlpiri), even to this day, live as if with the characters of their mythical age all around them. As I wrote in Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira (20 May 2012): “...commissioners in Aboriginal Land Claims have commented on their difficulty in working out sometimes whether a witness is citing a forebear or a mythological figure.” And I suspect that John might concede that that world still exists (or co-exists) because we’ve both discussed how Aranda people will try to convert you to their worldview the minute you enter their country. The older generation today in fact practise ‘Both Ways’ – God’s way and Aranda way. They don’t tear themselves apart trying to reconcile the conflicts.

This book, however, is titled The Tale of Frieda Keysser and a big part of John’s mission is to restore his grandmother to the centre of the story. He is annoyed that she has been airbrushed from history and has even taken Andrew Schultz and me to task for omitting her from our interpretation of Journey to Horseshoe Bend. To be fair, we did ask the Sydney Symphony if they could see their way to paying for a soprano soloist, but I admit we (I) didn’t fight very hard when they said they were already well over budget (and, admittedly, on a piece of music that no professional organisation has performed since*). But I was concentrating on portraying a relationship between Theo and his father, Carl, who would soon be replaced in Theo’s affections (at least in my interpretation) by the old aboriginal men, in this case represented by Njitiaka. Another major reason for John’s focus was the discovery of Frieda’s diary (at least a discovery for him; his uncle Karl knew it existed). Here was an invaluable alternative source of information on life in Central Australia in those early years. John had to teach himself the old German script to read it.

And that is only one example of his salvaging forgotten accounts from history. Because the book is full of German background. Not only richly-informative hitherto-unpublished accounts of journeys by people like Johannes Flierl or Reuther (“...the only living things were the flies. We heard no bird calls, even the crows which live almost everywhere were no longer to be seen”), but taking Frieda’s family’s story back to where it all began, in Franconia, southern Germany in 1554 (or perhaps 50 years earlier) when her family, the Keyssers, established a hammer mill on the river Oelsnitz.

Some people will wonder why John needed to go this far back, and why the book has to be so long. These 1,000-odd pages are actually only volume 1, taking the grandparents’ story up to 1910, the first holiday back home in Germany (neatly, the book begins with John’s own visit to snowbound Germany in 1976). Volume 2 will take us to Carl’s death at Horseshoe Bend, south of Hermannsburg, on the family’s way home to Germany for only the second time in nearly 30 years. Surely, the scale of the story demands this commitment and John says early on that “Some people have said the book should be heavily cut ‘because we don’t need all these details’....But we do not know [these details] or we would not be where we are....We do not need more heavily edited, formula-written books...” 


I know that one of John’s goals with this book is to “bring about a fundamental shift in Australian culture, to introduce a sea-change in the way Australians – especially Australian men – think about themselves, the way they live their lives, their relationship to the land and its aboriginal people” [email to me, 27 June 2012]. What does he mean? He rails in places at “pattern thinkers”, people who try to draw a picture before all the facts are in, people like the famous anthropologist Baldwin Spencer who, John thinks, shelved facts that didn’t fit with the conclusions he’d already drawn. The consequences of such thinking, he believes, have been dreadful, people living in squalor with no hope of economic advancement because the latest theory (since the 1970s) has been that tradition is a panacaea for all ills. There have been a few other voices lately (I can think of Peter Sutton’s) sounding a warning about the dangers of such thinking.
 
From a personal point of view, however, I find the starting way back in Germany overwhelming and exhilarating; a huge weight has been hurtled forward by the time we get to Carl and Frieda in the desert. We get a good sense of the reasons for how they responded to this challenging environment and the reasons why they stuck it out, enduring the Heimweh! And I have an even more strongly reinforced sense of one of those aspects of Journey to Horseshoe Bend that initially attracted me to the subject as a Conservatorium-trained European born in Australia – about the “culture [brought] from Europe and... grounded in Central Australia”.

The other great impression this amount of detailed canvas creates is of a huge Whitmanesque or Wagnerian epic sweep that has originated in this mere fleshing out of stories told at home in the Adelaide suburbs. Because this exploration of family lore ends up covering nearly everything I ever heard about in Central Australian history when I was living in Alice Springs – the Burke and Wills expedition (because they came close to Bethesda, the Dieri mission Carl was originally posted to), the Horn Expedition, the meeting of Spencer and Gillen, the Swan and Taplin enquiry, the great Engwura festival of 1896, the massacre at Irbmangkara, the arrest for murder of Mounted Constable Willshire, the conversion of Moses Tjalkabota...Why John even goes into almost-expert detail on Sidney Kidman’s horse sales, management of cattle stations and the operations of medieval hammer mills. Thank God this book was not edited!

And thank God, also, it is leavened by John’s characteristic humour. Anyone who has read Ted Strehlow’s books or Barry Hill’s Broken Song, his biography of Ted Strehlow, will know that T.G.H.S., had a heavy burden of melancholy. Perhaps John’s humour is a compensation for the hardness of Strehlow hands (father and grandfather). John mentions his uncle Hermann who did not come home after 1945 and of how his mother, Bertha would always say, “How lucky you are to have a father”. Finally, in Gunzenhausen in 1976, says John, he would get to meet his cousin Rainer, “and see for myself if I was so much luckier by having a father.”

The humour is one reason, but one reason only, why I think John is a finer writer than T.G.H.S. Ted Strehlow had great flights of imagination, particularly in nature description (or in wonderful footnote asides!!), but John’s writing is more consistent and stylish. He is greatly eloquent. Few have better conveyed the isolation Carl and Frieda must have felt; Carl spending his first months at Hermannsburg before Frieda arrived, the only German speaker in a 28 days’ horse-riding radius. Or this passage which expresses Frieda’s anguished longing for the climate of her birth:

“Despite the three inches of rain, the Finke did not flood. She longed to see it flood again, because until that happened, the water in the well would stay salty and they would be unable to grow vegetables in their garden. Thanks to Wettengel’s dam holding back earlier floods, it was years since the garden had flourished, years since they had had water that was sweet in the mouth once the rainwater tanks ran dry. She longed for something other than the never-ending dryness, the sparse, burnt-off, ascetic harshness of her desert life. She wanted luxuriance, growth, a sense of plenty. Life in the desert was one endless struggle. A struggle, to which there was no end – unless, of course, one simply got out and left. That was the only hope. To leave, and never return.”

Or if I may just quote one favourite slab about Ted/Theo (particularly the second paragraph here):

“He was a romantic of the Hermann Hesse variety, and could not accept his father [Carl]’s attempts to civilise the Aranda, for what Theo loved about them was their ‘wildness’. In a telling passage in Songs [of Central Australia] he refers to Carl’s Loritja informant Talku giving him his rich lore. ‘And then he disappeared again one day into the free wild life of his own country’.

“Ah those yearnings, those pangs of unsated Wuestenliebe, those memories of campfires quickly covered over with a shovelful of sand as his camel teams rose groaning from their knees to move off across the desert – these were the hankerings in Theo’s soul which no amount of patient study ever could requite, for he never arrived at the end of all his searching and always there was still one more Old Man living beyond the furthermost line of sandhills with secret couplets indentured on his soul...”

Secrets couplets indentured on his soul – boy, that gives you a sense of the eternal appeal and allure of the Strehlow project.

Of course there are villains in this piece. Wettengel, the fellow-pastor at Hermannsburg for the years 1901-06, who seems to have become quite unhinged, even poisoned and made poisonous, by the isolation. And Professor Walter Baldwin Spencer (the other half of that pioneering anthropological duo, Spencer and Gillen), who seems to have done effective work in burying Carl’s achievements, disparaging Carl as untutored, not much above the rank of a peasant.

I didn’t realise until I read this book just how much discussion there was about the Aranda in British academia in the 19th century. Much of it centred around the meaning of ‘Altjira’. I defined ‘altjira’ in the program booklet for Ingkata (the workshop opera on Ted Strehlow at the 2008 Adelaide Festival)** as ‘a substratum of creativity that has underpinned life from the beginning and continues even today’; it’s the realm from which things come into being, and Ted Strehlow himself described it as ‘eternal, uncreated’, elsewhere as ‘always from always’ or ‘eternity’. But observers such as Carl claimed that Altjira was a conception of God. Spencer pooh-poohed. Carl’s informants are missionary aborigines, he said, whose information has been corrupted by association with Christian ideas. Even Spencer’s collaborator Gillen somehow ignored (pressured by Spencer?) evidence he’d found of an altjira-like God elsewhere in Central Australia. This all became a massive debate with thinkers like Oxford's E.B. Tylor and Andrew Lang weighing in on opposing sides, evidence drawn in from eastern Australia, etc... John’s extensive reconstruction of this ‘punch-up’ forced me to realise that Central Australia was one of the great theatres of intellectual debate in the 19th century. (In the end, Spencer and Gillen even influenced Freud.)

But Spencer does not come across as the most honourable of men in all of this discussion. And you could think John was ‘down’ on him (Spencer does shape up as a kind of bête noir in Strehlow family writing). Except that John is fantastic about giving credit where it’s due. He once said to me, privately, “Spencer – there was a beautiful writer”. And if you look at one of the double page spreads that opens this book, you’ll see something which gives a clue to the generosity of John’s writing. That double page spread contains a list of names. They’re shown against the background of a photograph of Hermannsburg folk. It is clear that this list is a detail from a much larger and, I would bet, comprehensive list. I see names of people who figure in the story such as Mounted Constable Ernest Cowle, MC South, Tatakarintja (Katharina) (for John’s book is also exceptional in giving name and as much biographical shape as possible to the aboriginal players), Salomo Ratara, Hermann Kempe... I’m sure if our eye could run off the page we’d see Wettengel and Spencer too. John dedicates his book ‘to the good ship Hermannsburg and all who sailed in her’. Like a good dramatist (like a good Shakespearean, whose plays he has directed for many years) he loves all his characters.

I can’t recommend this book too much. Energy leaps off every page (the dramatist again). It is a magnificent, sprawling epic  - but disciplined and consistent: you could dip into any sequence of pages and find, not only shape, but things you’d never thought of before. The Tale of Frieda Keysser is a book that will sit on (and help take up) a shelf in my library next to Songs of Central Australia, Aranda Traditions, Journey to Horseshoe Bend (I might slip in Spencer and Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia as loyal opposition), and Barry Hill’s Broken Song as visual tribute to the people I consider Australia's greatest family of writers.

Gordon K. Williams


* The Ntaria Ladies Choir organised the presentation of a 10-minute edited version at the Alice Springs Festival in 2006. Doug Abbott read the part of his great-grandfather, Njitiaka.

** music: Gordon Kerry, David Bridie, Warren H. Williams, Nokturnl and Gordon Williams; libretto: Ros Horin and Gordon Kalton Williams; produced by Racing Pulse Productions and State Opera of South Australia

John Strehlow’s website is http://www.strehlow.co.uk. The Tale of Frieda Keysser is available from him or the:

Strehlow Research Centre,
Cnr Larapinta Drive and Memorial Avenue
Alice Springs NT 8070
PO Box 831
Alice Springs NT 0871
Tel: (08) 8951 1111
Fax: (08) 8951 1110
Email: strehlow@nt.gov.au
Website: www.strehlow.nt.gov.au


If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:

Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 August 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012