Feature
The missionary times: look again, says Strehlow
It’s not hard to see why John Strehlow chose to put the grandmother he never met at the centre of his epic volume The Tale of Frieda Keyser.
If the missionaries of Central Australia have been neglected and undervalued by posterity, their wives have been more so, despite the huge sacrifices they often made for the people of the Centre.
As I discovered when I caught up with Strehlow recently, he and his book are imbued with a 21st century mission of their own: to address widely-held assumptions about the goals and achievements of the Lutherans at Hermannsburg.
Did the immigrants force Christianity on to a vulnerable people and pollute their pristine culture? Or were they offering them the choice of new values and safe passage into an irrevocably altered world, in which they found their lives constantly at risk?
It’s a question Strehlow believes is as relevant today as it was as a hundred years ago.
Not long after we met we were discussing a central theme of the book: the tension between the missionaries and anthropologists such as Baldwin Spencer, and to a lesser extent, his colleague Frank Gillen – what this represented, and how it has coloured contemporary policy and opinions in Indigenous affairs.
As Strehlow sees it, Spencer, in particular, was engaged in a private “campaign of disinformation and character assassination” aimed at Carl Strehlow and the missionaries, based on their desire to have a clear and “uncontaminated” view of Aboriginal culture.
“Frieda was not even on their radar screen,” according to John.
“It was always “the men” – the missionaries, and their understanding of Aboriginal people. The fact that the women were there and might have been having an influence doesn’t actually make it at any point into any discussion ever that I’ve personally seen.”
To Strehlow, this oversight illustrates not only the boys’ club mentality of anthropologists and the priority they gave to ‘men’s business’, but the veil of abstraction and theory through which anthropologists viewed both Aboriginal people and missionaries.
The former were objects to be studied; the latter were spoilers of the pure culture they were trying to study. “What the missionaries were doing (according to the anthropologists) is they were trying to ram Christianity down these people’s throats and the idea was this was wicked and wrong – ironically all very much a religious interpretation!
“It was decided and had been ‘scientifically proven’ that Aboriginal people were actually destined to die out.
“It was all based on the idea of the doomed race. The idea was that Darwinism proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the Aboriginal race was doomed to disappear off the face of the earth, by which they meant 20 or 30 years. They didn’t mean in 500 or 1000 years time. People now might like to pretend that, but they didn’t. They meant it was going to disappear probably within their lifetime. (more…)
Jan 27, 2012 | Categories: At the Centre, Features, History | Leave A Comment »
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The missionary times: look again, says Strehlow
It’s not hard to see why John Strehlow chose to put the grandmother he never met at the centre of his epic volume The Tale of Frieda Keyser. If the missionaries of Central Australia have been neglected and undervalued by posterity, their wives have been more so, despite the huge sacrifices they of...
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The missionary times: look again, says Strehlow
It’s not hard to see why John Strehlow chose to put the grandmother he never met at the centre of his epic volume The Tale of Frieda Keyser. If the missionaries of Central Australia have been neglected and undervalued by posterity, their wives have been more so, despite the huge sacrifices they often made for the people of the Centre. As I discovered when I caught up with Strehlow recently, he and his book are imbued with a 21st century mission of their own: to address widely-held assumptions about the goals and achievements of the Lutherans at Hermannsburg. Did the immigrants force Christianity on to a vulnerable people and pollute their pristine culture? Or were they offering them the choice of new values and safe passage into an irrevocably altered world, in which they found their liv Read more...
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An Aboriginal-owned enterprise near Alice Springs is pioneering the cultivation of one of the world’s most ancient wild foods with help from an unlikely source : a Chinese university. Desert Garden Produce’s Max Emery is anticipating a record harvest of as much as one a half tonnes of kutjera, which will be exported to Melbourne and end as part of the recipe of a mass-produced gourmet sausage. After interviewing Max in 2010 about the Rainbow Valley farm, which is owned and operated by local Aboriginal people, I was interested to see him turn up on the ABC Rural site today, reporting further rapid progress. Max told Caddie Brain the farm’s 40 centimetre high plants were yielding an average of five kilograms per plant, with plants fruiting weekly and maintaining the same size fruit. In Read more...
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Like many journalists, Helen has another kind of writer dwelling within. In her case, this writer has her own name. Nelen wrote and illustrated Udjerlah's Song, which she describes as an adult fairy tale. We'll present Udjerlah's song in weekly parts.
Udjerlah’s Song (concluded)
Written and illustrated by Nelen Li-Lo was so happy that she was tempted to ask him to marry her. He was her man, her muthabadah, and she was his udjerlah. There was no longer any doubt about that. But if she had learnt how to go with the flow herself, she remained doubtful that two shackled people, a couple, could hope to do it together. Udjerlah had married herself. She had found her soul mate within and thereby become whole. And her Muthabadah was a whole man himself. Marriage was for people Read more...
Udjerlah’s Song (continued)
Written and illustrated by Nelen Reconciliation with Slava took a little longer. He and Li-Lo continued to meet and go for walks with each other at weekends. How could they not? For who could they really talk to, who were their true companions if not each other? In the summer, she invited him to spend another holiday at her seaside home on the Rainy Island. They walked for miles on cliff and beach; under a white cliff, they found their own private beach, where salmon and young seals rode in on t Read more...
Udjerlah’s Song (continued)
Written and illustrated by Nelen Li-Lo moved out of the flat in Pinebox and went to live in her half-renovated office in the centre of town. She was not really very angry with Slava but she desperately needed her own space. She feared that she always would. Even if she married him, she would not want to see him all the time. The first night, she sat on a broken chair in the main room, looking at the shadows that the streetlamps cast on the bare walls, and revelled in the silence. After a few day Read more...
Udjerlah’s Song (continued)
Udjerlah’s Song is an adult fairytale, set in Moscow and Central Australia , written and illustrated by Nelen. They washed their clothes in the bath and both understood that a washing machine, if ever it appeared in their lives, was down to him to purchase. He owed it to her. It was a symbol of their equality. Li-Lo did not expect a washing machine to materialise in the near future. But that was where she was wrong. To her surprise, a few weeks later, Slava announced that he had bought a w Read more...
Udjerlah’s Song (continued)
Written and illustrated by Nelen Li-Lo donned her bright red raincoat to stand out in the crowd when she arrived at Moscowville airport. She had a sharp new haircut and new silver spectacles like cubes of ice. Slava would not recognise her, looking so flash, she thought. “Unrecognisable,” he said dryly when he picked her instantly out of the throng. “Hi,” she said. They embraced in a businesslike manner. But it was Slava who was unrecognisable, she realised later, when she started to liv Read more...
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