by Arthur Groom
Pastor Philip A. Sherer, of the United Evangelical Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg, knocked on my door, introduced himself, and tactfully asked the purpose of my visit and offered all the assistance in his power. I explained my interest in the protection of primitive wilderness areas, particularly in its relation to the future of nomadic natives. He begged me not to walk straight off alone through the Macdonnell Ranges, as I had planned, but to go with him to Hermannsburg Mission and get helpful advice from the Superintendent, the Reverend F. W. Albrecht. I liked Sherer. He was young and keen. The modern term is that we ‘clicked’, and jabbered away like a pair of parrots. He introduced me to the Reverend A. C. Wright, Superintendent of the Ernabella Presbyterian Mission at the eastern end of the isolated Musgrave Ranges. Mr Wright looked like an old prospector; we found him a mile out, dismantling an army hut for removal to Ernabella, three hundred miles by rough sandy road south-west of Alice Springs. He was cautious, and could not see readily any essential connecting link between protection of scenery and aboriginal welfare. I left him, feeling that he would chew the subject over and appreciate it.
During the war many defence buildings were erected in Alice Springs in a hurry. I entered one, now cleared of its wartime furniture. Tables and chairs had disappeared from the polished brown floor, and apparently the telephone mechanic was not far behind, for disused telephones stood up oddly all over the floor. I found Mr V. R. Carrington, Acting Administrator, and Mr Arthur R. Driver, the new Administrator, in a far corner. I asked for a permit to enter the Aboriginal Reserves.
Permits are hard to get, and probably one of many important reasons is that there are a few well-meaning people, mostly motherly women, who think that their presence in an Aboriginal Reserve with a large bag of lollies would solve all the problems of the native races.
I was granted a permit on condition that I entered the Aboriginal Reserves under the supervision of the missionaries at Hermannsburg. It at least gave me a wide range of possible movement.
My room-mate at the hotel slept on. Entry and exit to and from the room did not waken him. I groped about, wrapped and rewrapped parcels, and eventually concluded he was an easygoing chap who would work and sleep a lot up in Darwin, and keep well within the town’s boundary.
Several Adelaide people were spending winter in Central Australia. They swapped yarns, opinions, and experiences round a small fireplace in the hotel’s small music-room. They had many ideas for Alice Spring’s future. One retired business-man was deeply interested in the town’s permanent alcoholics, and worked on a theory that men drank only when there was nothing better to do. He had organized evening talent concerts, which were to a certain extent successful in bringing together singers, poets, clowns, a couple of magicians, and an excellent pianist whom I first noticed lying dead to the world on the concrete pavement outside the sandwich bar opposite the hotel.
The concerts were held in the music-room, which was about fourteen feet square and had only one narrow door and no window. For my last night in town the pianist put on a good turn on the badly tuned old piano; then two tenors excelled themselves, and there was a temporary lull that was shattered by a violent blare of ear-splitting noise when a man greeted as ‘Mac’ planted himself in the doorway and blew a cornet with all the force he could muster. He reddened and dribbled and swayed and tottered, but we could not stop him. His face bulged; he tossed the cornet up and down, round and round, doubled and twisted with all the artistic contortions of a man who knows no equal. The noise was deafening, and after some agonizing minutes of shattering torture some of his mates led him off to the hotel bar, from where the cornet sounded only in spasmodic outbursts. A bearded dwarf eventually returned and reported that Mac’s legs had given way, and they had him ‘down’ in the bar, and drinks were being passed to him in quick succession as the only way of shutting him up. In the end there was a violent gurgle and outburst of language, and the latest news-flash wag returned to inform us that someone had poured a pot of beer into the cornet, and that Mac was ‘out’ to it.
Silence settled over the hotel, and we trooped off over to the sandwich bar for supper of tea and toast. The place was crowded with tourists, townspeople, and hungry travellers whose trucks, cars, wagons, horses, camels, and stock were parked anywhere within a mile or two.
At about 3 a.m. the sound of Mac’s cornet wakened half the town. He had tottered to the hotel woodheap, and beneath a large pepperina-tree, and by the light of a late moon, he played his agonizing notes to a fleet of heavy transport trucks loaded with surplus war material from Darwin.
With Pastor Sherer driving, and Rex Battarbee, the watercolour artist, and several of his native art pupils clinging to the top of a loaded three-ton truck, I left Alice Springs at noon. The truck was loaded with stores, and the usual 44-gallon water- and petrol-drums. Battarbee is tall and gaunt, with sharp features, somewhat shy and reserved, but always ready to give reliable information. He pointed out watercourses and wide valleys through the mountains; and named the summits, the trees and bushes, and each branching track or route of the past and present: turn-off to Simpson’s Gap goes that way – Temple Bar Gap’s down there to the south – the biggest ghost gum in the country is a mile or so up to the right, and was once painted in watercolour by Albert Namatjira, aboriginal full-blood – the sharp blue peaks ahead are north of Standly Chasm, and the domed height is Mount Conway, named by the explorer Ernest Giles in 1872, after Mr Conway of the early Peake Cattle Station – Jay Creek runs down this side of Conway.
It was all very helpful. We stopped for a while at the Government Aboriginal Depot at Jay Creek, in the charge of Mr and Mrs Ringwood. The house is built of concrete, and stands in a garden of fruit-trees, vegetables, and flowers; and a mile beyond it, beside the dry, sandy creek, is the native settlement of ration store, huts, and little iron church, surrounded by untidy wurlies. We continued on, out through a low gap in the Macdonnell Ranges, and on to the broad Missionary Plain. Battarbee identified more peaks and ranges. There was now a sharp deep blue and mauve about Conway, with Paisley’s and Brinkley’s Bluffs beyond, to continue on, peak after peak and curve after curve – the amazing Macdonnells in full marching order from East to West. The Waterhouse Range lay down to the south, low and crouching on the plain, but shimmering brown and light red. It is a place of great interest to geologists, who know it as a great dome about six miles across, kidney-shaped when seen from the air, about forty miles long, and hollowed in the centre down to the level of the surrounding plain by the relentless erosion of millions of years. It contains an excellent example of a ‘pound’ – the term given to these larger hollowed centres surrounded by the remaining outer walls of a mountain that was once high and massive.
We crossed the sandy Hugh River, one-time route of the Overland Telegraph Line, which was completed in 1872. The river heads north of the Macdonnells, and cuts its way southward through range after range to meander across the Missionary Plain, then winding sharp and deep through the centre of the Waterhouse. John McDouall Stuart found it, and trudged slowly and patiently along its sandy banks in April 1860, while on his first exploration over the heart of Australia; and his footsteps followed up and down beside it again and again, until he must have known every bend by heart. Thirty miles dead south of the Waterhouse the Hugh slashes through the brilliant-red ridges of the James Range, and then continues south-east in a twisting course for about another eighty miles before joining the grand old Finke.
At sunset, Rex Battarbee pointed out the gleaming rich red of Mount Hermannsburg, the deep purple shadows of the Finke River Canyon, and the red rock masses of the James and Krichauff Ranges behind. He advised me to memorize Mount Hermannsburg well, for it was an important landmark, and lay a couple of miles south-west of the Mission. Early arrival before darkness was delayed by a bad blow-out, and Pastor Sherer and I wrestled with nuts and jacks beneath the heavily laden truck; and it was by the light of a strong moon gleaming over the plains and the winding Finke River and
slumbrous hills beyond, that we rolled down the sandy Aerodrome Hill, and slid between Mission buildings to the Superintendent’s long stone bungalow, where a babbling crowd of native children and adults milled excitedly about the truck and clambered over everything. My hand was gripped again and again, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes cautiously, timidly; and there seemed no end to it, and to the muttered and laughing ‘Good days’, until I was ushered into the house.
The Reverend F. W. Albrecht, Superintendent since 1929 of the Hermannsburg Mission of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Australia, reminded me of Charles Laughton the actor, thick-set and of medium height, he walked with a limp. Albrecht was born in Poland and trained as a missionary at the little church town of Hermannsburg in Germany. He was sent out to Australia with his wife for the sole purpose of making things a little easier for a race of primitive people condemned to segregation and slow extinction by the march of civilization. He landed as a man inexperienced in bush and desert ways, without mastery of the English language. Nearly a century before, many of his countrymen had migrated to South Australia, and had made good, and Mission work among the dispossessed natives had presented itself to them as a very practical form of thanksgiving for their new freedom.
Albrecht is respected throughout Central Australia, and by all anthropologists. He battled from the first as a complete stranger in a tough land, handicapped by drought and heat and bitter winter frost, and by rare floods that could destroy with water all that drought had spared. The Reverend Carl Strehlow before him, and earlier pioneer missionaries, had set a high standard of work against all the handicaps of a distant outpost; but Albrecht stuck tight to the job, learnt the languages of the Arunta* and Pitjentjara tribes, and the lore of the bush and wilderness and desert spaces, and grew to understand their moods. He has beaten through much red tape, and defied the cry from some quarters that it would be more humane to let a doomed race die out in any case; until now he stands as one of the main reasons why the primitive people west of the centre line of Australia may even yet survive and increase. He has tremendous capacity for hardship and work, and is gifted with sound breadth of vision and understanding of people and their problems.
In daylight, the Mission, its older buildings, and the natives are at first disappointing. The glamour and camouflage of a moonlight arrival the night before had vanished completely. The buildings showed the ravages of sand and drought and time. There was no planned entrance to the Mission: its front and back faced in all and every direction from a central street or compound; and the original clay-pans of the chosen site had been churned into loose sand by busy feet, as though thousands of cattle had stampeded. In all directions except an arc in the north, untidy native wurlies were scattered near at hand and as far as half a mile distant. They were roughly built of bits of material from scraps of iron to scraps of canvas, bagging, and bushes, the focal points of dogs and odd donkeys and camels.
But the worst of the picture passes as yelling, chattering life and laughter take over; the drabness and the trampled, untidy surroundings hide an amazing story of devotion and sacrifice, laughter amid tears, and infinite patience in Christian effort, which has seldom been equalled.
The native children are generally healthy with a harum-scarum scurry and freedom of their own design in play, and with a bare-faced curiosity towards visitors. They were up in trees, on the old roofs, lining up in long queues to be fed, sliding down slippery slides, swinging like monkeys from parallel bars; they were on merry-go-rounds, riding and falling off donkeys amid continuous laughter, rounding up camels and cattle and goats just to let them loose again. They were in and out of every workshop and outhouse, running helter-skelter after old tyres or an old ball, throwing small spears and boomerangs, and stalking imaginary game and going through all the movements and sounds of a ‘kill’; all with a vitality possible only to youth in its element, until school-time, when there was a certain lessening of the babble and scramble; and old Community Leader Abel**, black as the ace of spades behind his sheer white moustache, made his round of law and order and checked the first relay of kids off towards the sandy parade-ground at the base of a tall pole flying the Union Jack. Here and there a bleary-eyed, dirty child stood quietly with matted hair and tattered clothes – a myall, just in perhaps for the first time from many miles out, puzzled and still a little frightened, in his first contact with an outpost of civilization. Tomorrow he might be gone again with his parents into the wilderness; or he might stay. The freedom of the nomad was his, and the call of his primitive forefathers still strong and definite; but the white man’s foods were sweet and tempting.
I kept thinking back to the summer of 1923, and to the pitiful remnant band of unwanted natives who had crossed desert country to Lake Nash. The contrast presenting itself at Hermannsburg was unexpected. This was no dying race – there were too many children. I asked the Reverend F. W. Albrecht to tell me the whole story, for I had believed the work of Missions to be nothing more than a merciful delaying of the final death of the aboriginal race.
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* Aranda.
** Pronounced ‘Ah-bel’. A in Arunta, Aranda, or Arandta is usually spoken a ‘Ah’.
CHAPTER IV
THE AUSTRALIAN
FREEDOM OF WORSHIP
In February 1835 the British Government set up a Board of South Australian Commissioners, including George Fife Angas, a London merchant and shipowner, and founder of the National Provincial Bank of England and the Union Bank of Australia.
Angas bought up large areas of South Australian land, and from 1838 onwards migrated chosen groups of Europeans. In 1838 he sent out five hundred Lutherans, victims of German persecution, who landed in South Australia and settled on new land north of Adelaide. Another group of Lutherans landed and settled at Nundah, in the Moreton Bay district of New South Wales, now within the State of Queensland.
The Lutherans were industrious, deeply religious; and the hardships of a strange new land made success a common goal, if only to repay the faith of their sponsor, George Fife Angas, who had a deep sympathy with them in their search for freedom of worship. Angas did not come out to live in South Australia until 1851. By then he had assisted in migrating over eight thousand Lutherans. Eventually the Lutherans founded a Mission Board to foster work amongst dispossessed natives, as a thanksgiving for religious freedom in a new land. In 1866 a start was made at Kaporamanna on Cooper’s Creek, between Birdsville and Marree. The Lutherans divided into two Synods. One controlled the Kaporamanna Mission; the other Synod began to look much farther afield. It was then that their spiritual leader, Pastor Heidenreich, called on Surveyor-General Goyder of Adelaide. Goyder pointed to a blank area in the heart of Australia, saying that he recommended it as a site for a far-out Mission among aborigines for these reasons: (a) the adjacent Macdonnell Ranges to northward, and the James and Krichauff Ranges twenty miles to southward, would form natural boundaries for limited numbers of Mission stock; (b) the few known waters of the Finke River facilitated the movements of large numbers of natives.
The information had been gathered from the notes of Ernest Giles, who had turned west from John McDouall Stuart’s cross-continent exploration route of 1862. During the early summer months of 1872 Giles had traversed much of the inhospitable wilderness west and south-west of the Macdonnell Ranges. His diary recorded a land of parallel hills, mysterious creeks, and sandy rivers in which water might sometimes be found by digging.
In 1875 Pastor F. A. H. Kempe and Pastor W. F. Schwarz, newly ordained and young, arrived in South Australia and reported to Pastor Heidenreich; and after only six weeks there, set out with Shepherd Mirus, 33 horses, 17 cattle, and 3100 sheep from the little village of Bethany near Tanunda, at 4 p.m., after a prayer-meeting and blessing, in the crackling summer heat of 22 October. Only blind ignorance and tremendous faith could have overlooked the incredible mistake of sending such an inexperienced and cumbersome expedition northward into the continent’s little-known dry inte
rior. Men and animals were to battle for nearly two years through drought, heat, starvation, bitter winter cold and exposure, and the resultant sicknesses of blight and scurvy; but ever northward, and ever so slowly, right up into the heart of the continent, over which the new and costly Overland Telegraph Line stretched like a shimmering black thread along its thousands of poles. They were not long behind the explorers Gosse (1873) and Giles (1872–5). Giles had been able to travel with some speed. His experienced party had been limited to Messrs Carmichael and Alexander Robinson, fifteen chosen horses, and a humorous pup. They had no cattle or sheep to impede them.
Schwarz and Kempe moved slowly through Siegersdorf, Kapunda, Allendale, and on to Waterloo, where they gladly purchased a harness horse for £40 to replace a cantankerous animal that had been kicking its wagon harness to bits. They continued on via Mount Bryan, Canowie Station, Jamestown, Mount Remarkable (Melrose), Stirling, and on to Willochra. There they met a wandering Central Australian native who spoke English quite fluently and behaved like a white man. He told them of the far-out land still hundreds of miles across desert waste. His intelligence encouraged the missionaries greatly, and they pushed steadily on past Hookina, Mundawanna, and Strangways Springs.
During November the heat became almost unbearable. Their lips cracked and bled. Swirling hot winds parched and shrivelled stock feed and blew it away in clouds of choking dust. A wagon split in two, and when repaired it tipped over and smashed precious supplies into the rock and sand. Known surface waters had dried up, and dry travel between more reliable waters was growing longer and longer. Stinking mud-holes, once filled with good water, were now death traps for weakened animals. The missionaries split into two lots, later into three travelling parties; and learnt the wisdom of slow travel sometimes at night. They had to return again and again over many miles for weak horses, cattle, and sheep left behind to rest. On 7 February 1876 they reported: ‘We are stuck in sand, and are unable to continue, as our horses for the lack of water are too weak to pull.’ One of the missionaries stripped and went to wash his tattered clothes in a precious mud puddle; on his return he discovered that all his clothes, which he had left to soak, had been trampled deep down into the mud by thirsty cattle.