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.

“Spencer et al wanted there to be no tampering with the belief system at all, so that it could be recorded and written down and studied and fitted into general theories about human beings, and when there were no Aborigines left, this record would be there.”

Of course, concedes John, there was plenty evidence that Aboriginal people were dying in disproportionate numbers, but you didn’t need a degree to see it wasn’t Darwinian processes driving the process, but disease, high levels of infant mortality and the guns of the settlers.

“So when you get someone like Frieda, who of course hadn’t been to a university and hadn’t actually read all this nonsense and been indoctrinated with it, she did what any intelligent woman who knew a lot about raising children would do: she went and studied exactly what was going on, resulting in all these babies dying,” he says.

As Strehlow eloquently puts it in his book: ” … almost alone of her contemporaries she made a study of the reasons for the high infant mortality when she arrived and set about rectifying the situation. Literally scores of children survived to adulthood thanks to her ministrations, and their descendants today number several thousands, yet to her own children Frieda was nothing more than a quaint old-fashioned lady with a childish faith in religion and an overly romantic view of her husband.”

Strehlow’s journey into the world of the early nineteenth century has been all-consuming. Not only has he plunged into his grandmother’s family background in Germany (where her family had lived in the same house since 1554) and the vastly different life she entered with her marriage to Carl, sorting through hundreds of journal entries and letters to and from his grandparents, as well as those of other missionaries they worked with. His determination to do Carl and Frieda justice led him a detailed study of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th century and the specific differences between his grandfather and Spencer.

Given his immediate ancestry – anthropologist father and missionary grandparents – perhaps it’s understandable that his journey has hallmarks of an obsession, albeit a magnificent one. And it seems to have started long ago.

John Strehlow knew neither of his grandparents; Carl died at Horseshoe Bend, and Frieda went back to Germany, where as a boy he spoke to her a few times on the phone. It was only after his father’s famous book Journey to Horseshoe Bend was published, that the young John started to see the “good side” to Carl.

“He got a bad press from Dad before that book” he recalls.

“Dad was anti-missions, very much so , while at the same time the Lutherans were very keen for him to translate all these things into the best possible Arrernte . Everyone was a bit torn about these things. He was a bit torn.”

John attributes a brush with death his father had when he suffered an infected appendix to his own softening towards his father.

“The way it was all recorded, TGS Strehlow was the great man, and his father’s just this sort of really distant and probably irrelevant individual,” he says.

“But from his point of view, I’m sure he felt he was under his father’s shadow all his life, because his father was, I am sure, a much better scholar than he was.”

Journey to Horseshoe Bend – while as John sees it, predominantly about its author rather than Carl – did serve to keep the memory of Carl alive, and Carl’s work as a scholar has indeed not been completely forgotten.

This is despite the fact that, remarkably, Carl’s book The Aranda and Loritja tribes in Central Australia has never been published in Australia.

But John Strehlow is not only concerned with correcting the historical view of Central Australia missionaries. The implication is that once we take their work seriously, we as a society can begin to make genuine improvements to the living conditions of Aboriginal people.

“I suppose I always had the awareness that Australia’s spending enormous, almost obscenely large sums of money to try to improve the situation of Aboriginal people, with almost nothing to show for it actually when you get down to it,” he says.

“For some people, it’s hugely better, but overall it hasn’t improved. And to me that indicates that people have been barking up the wrong tree.

“What was interesting was that while I was reading the mission correspondence of course you get comments that indicate why things are going wrong today. Obviously the relevance of the biography is that it sheds light on what’s happening today and why so little is being achieved.”

Strehlow believes the missionaries continue to be widely ignored because of the undue influence of anthropology.

“I would say within three minutes of talking to someone I could almost identify someone with an anthropology degree because after three minutes they’ll start talking about how the missionaries wrecked everything.

“As long as that attitude continues it will absolutely preclude anybody learning anything at all from the missionary experience, which was very dearly bought. These people devoted multiple years of their lives and the whole lot just gets shredded on the basis of .. what?  Some academic theory as far as I can see.”

(Much of Spencer’s criticism of  Carl Strehlow, included in correspondence with other senior anthropologists of the time, was that Strehlow said Arrernte people had told him they had a concept of God before the white man came, a notion Spencer rejected. Carl Strehlow used Arrernte concepts while translating the bible into Arrernte.)

John believes the contrast in outcomes between those of refugees and Aboriginal people is most telling.

“We do have a situation in this country where we have a lot of refugees and a lot of them have come from horrific situations.

“They can arrive in Australia and within five years – If not less – they are on their way And then you say why is it not getting better for the Aboriginal population, and you have to therefore go back to basics. That’s where the missionary information is absolutely priceless, because the missionaries describe in their letters to the mission board what’s happening, what’s going right or wrong and why.”

He gives the example of teaching children how to read and write.

“If you read the missionary letters, they indicate that one of the problems was that when they put things up on the board, the kids just visually memorised it because they though that was what they were supposed to do,” he says.

“They’d memorise it like they were remembering someone’s footprint or some pattern that they saw.

“They would memorise the whole blackboard just like that. It would take the missionary teachers some time to figure it out, and then they’d start getting them to try and read the board backwards starting at the bottom and going up, to try and get them to actually learn to read.

“Those sorts of things could and should have been extracted from the letters of missionaries, but instead anthropologists just came and sneered and jeered and regarded these people as idiots and acted as if they knew everything, and naturally learnt nothing.

“And that’s been the problem. The real problem is in anthropology. Anthropology as far as I see it in terms of Australia is an utterly failed study.”

So what makes a Hermannsburg missionary successful, and an anthropologist part of the problem? Commitment, principally, says Strehlow.

“It’s absolutely crucial in terms of anything working to get rid of this idea that people spend four or five years and become world experts and then go away and lecture to the United Nations or whatever.

“You wouldn’t ever learn anything in that amount of time.

“Secondly, up here, you have to learn the language. If you’re not prepared to learn the language you’re not serious and most Aboriginal people on those sort of communities would judge your seriousness by whether you’re actually really learning a language, not just five words.

“Because Carl Strehlow was absolutely devoted to the Arrernte language, there’s no question why he had such a big impact. I understand the number of words he collected was the most for any language in Australia …

“And the other thing is there for 28 years, which is a huge length time and what you have to do.”

Strehlow sees anthropologists as “off the radar” with Aboriginal people anthropologists because their field works involves “sticking around on settlements” and they fail to spend “proper time” with people. It’s a criticism he applies to his own father, who he concedes spent more than most with his informants.

“I don’t think Dad would have been rated the same as a missionary who stayed there for decades. That’s what they’re wanting.They want person X, not just anyone, and they want that person to stay, if they like them and they do usually, because they’re very good at getting people on side.”

Of course Strehlow isn’t only talking about anthropologists in this context, but all those outsiders who work with Aboriginal people on their communities.

He realises his analysis is out of tune with the concept of self-determination. But he believes that if “traditional” Aboriginal people are to improve their lot, partnership with mainstream Australia is essential.

“Self-determination is a hangover from anthropology which is always talking about ‘us and them’.

“The great strength of Christianity is that it says we’re all the same underneath. If I had one thing to identify as an almost unassailable strength, it’s the idea that we actually all the same. And anthropology is all about how we are different. I don’t see how you can get around that.

“I don’t believe that Aboriginal people are all marvellous and I don’t believe they’re all terrible. All people are equally capable of barbarous behaviour. Essentially, despite what are very considerable cultural differences, we are actually all the same.”

Strehlow’s view of Central Australian History is already gaining influential supporters.

The Tale of Frieda Keysser was launched on 1 December at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs by Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton.

In an adjournment speech to the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly on 30 November, Alison Anderson, said of the book:  “I hope it corrects some of the misunderstanding and misinformation that has been spread over the years about the relationship between the missionaries and the Arrernte people …

“The missionaries left us with our culture, songs and history intact. They gave us the opportunity to understand and learn about the new world, with which we had come into contact. The missionaries gave us jobs and assisted us to travel for work, picking fruit, or shearing sheep. They also set up industries like the tannery at Hermannsburg. They gave us hope through faith, and many of us remain strong Lutherans today …

‘For those of us who grew up with missionary history in Central Australia, there is never a bad word said about the missionaries. We are still grateful for the opportunities they gave us.”

The Tale of Frieda Keysser can be ordered direct from www.strehlow.co.uk.  If you live in Alice Springs, you can buy it at Central SecondHand Shop in Gap Road