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| GKW outside the Strehlow house, Hermannsburg NT winter 1995 |
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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.
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| 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
Strehlow
Research Centre,
Cnr
Larapinta Drive and Memorial Avenue
Alice Springs NT 8070
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
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