by Arthur Groom
Daily temperatures rose to 130 degrees in the sun. Treeless gibber plains and desert lay before them. The promised land seemed ridiculous, unbelievable. Many of the sheep had to be left behind. Eleven hundred had died of thirst in one area where it had not rained for twelve months. Dingoes raided the sheep-fold at night, and followed openly by day to pull down any weakened sheep they could surround. The expedition straggled out in three different parts with two hundred miles between its lead and tail. It was undermanned, with food supplies running out, when Kempe and Schwarz had to call a halt, and wrote back by letter to Bethany: ‘It is fearful, cruel, to travel in summertime.’ Passing travellers, more experienced, less heavily equipped, unencumbered by stock, helped them again and again. Some of the letters and messages got through to Bethany. Pastor Heidenreich travelled up with horses to join the expedition, and on 14 May 1876 reported:
I bought another 9 horses, we had two foals, making a total of 44. We lost through death 5 draught horses, 4 foals, 1 ran away, sold 3, with 31 on hand. Of cattle, 17 left. Bought 2 cows and 1 calf, also 6 oxen to pull waggons, making a total of 25. Twenty-three left on 14th May. Together, with lambs, 400 sheep. Five dogs, 4 hens, 1 rooster. Supplies: ¾ bag of flour, ¼ sugar.
A retreat to civilization could not be considered. Even though they had only four hundred sheep left of an original flock of three thousand one hundred, the missionaries were still convinced that they could battle on against odds that had turned back more experienced men.
On 29 May 1876 the expedition reached Dalhousie Springs, only to find the area overcrowded with three other parties travelling with stock. It was a desert outpost with the last reliable water for many miles; and northward travel had ceased. Further progress depended on good rainfall. It might fall within a week, possibly not for years. Pastor Kempe set up an open-air blacksmith’s shop to carry out urgent repairs, and also set up a crude wool-press. They shore the weakened sheep by hand and cleaned the wool and squeezed the fleece into rough bundles. Some day, perhaps, some of the wool might find its value in a city market and provide some small credit. Little did the missionaries know they were to stay eleven months before the drought was to break sufficiently to enable the full expedition to move on.
There were many days without a cloud in the sky; day after day when clouds formed in battalions and marched and rumbled away into hazy distance without a drop of rain falling. It was devastating mockery in a thirsty land, where rare floods sometimes bogged every yard of the earth’s coloured surface. Nevertheless, on 28 June 1876, Pastor Kempe and Pastor Heidenreich, and one of the paid workers, left with an old dray and one riding horse between them, and travelled northwest to intercept the Finke River via Charlotte Waters. Cool winter days and nights helped them over a sixty-mile dry stretch. They continued up beside the great sandy bed of the Finke and turned north up the Hugh River to Owen Springs, in the known tracks of John McDouall Stuart. From Owen Springs they skirted below the red walls of the Waterhouse Range, crossed sandhill country westwards towards the Finke again, and camped about one mile north of the deep and colourful Finke Canyon, forty miles long, winding in its wild grandeur through the James and Krichauff Ranges.
This was the land of the broad valley, bounded by high ranges, where Surveyor-General Goyder had told them a Mission might be established. Beneath spreading river gums they said a simple prayer for guidance, and sank a shallow well in the dazzling white sand. The water was brackish, but they felt a growing confidence in the country they saw about them during twelve days spent in strenuous riding on the one saddle-horse, and walking turn about. The land was at its best. Rain had evidently fallen along the broad plain running east and west, now known as the Missionary Plain. The great Finke, a quarter of a mile wide, sandy and dry, wound down from the north-west across the plain. High driftwood indicated past flooding. Ernest Giles had ridden over the spot on Thursday, 5 September 1872. The deep-blue and red peaks of the Macdonnells stood out twenty miles northward, and all the unknown mystery of Giles’s Krichauff plateau to southward. Central Australia turned on its best winter days, with sunlight gleaming through grass and spinifex, and the shadows of morning and evening deepening the incredible colour of the hills.
The sheep and cattle and valuable equipment were still more than three hundred miles back at Dalhousie. The drought would have to break over the intervening desert and reduce the distances between waters before the slow-travelling stock could be brought through. Kempe and Heidenreich quickly retraced their outward dray tracks back to Dalhousie, reaching there on 30 August 1876 with encouraging accounts of the country Goyder had recommended to them.
Supplies were now reduced to raisins and dried fruit, until someone in the Dalhousie community of waiting expeditions lent them fifty pounds of flour; but the position was desperate, and Pastor Kempe was forced to take horses and dray and travel nearly two hundred miles south to Peake for supplies.
The drought at Dalhousie broke during late summer, early in 1877; and on 9 April 1877 the full expedition moved forward at last, and made good and steady progress over country that had been barren and waterless, but that was now covered with green feed and good water. They arrived at the chosen spot on the eastern bank of the Finke River on 4 June 1877. There they immediately held a simple service of thanksgiving; and it is on record that they felt greatly strengthened in heart.
Their foundation flocks were sadly depleted, but the missionaries evidently had tremendous faith and belief that they soon would be a self-supporting community. They had brought many varieties of seeds to put in the ground. Several days’ journey to eastward the new Overland Telegraph Line hummed its costly single strand north and south across the continent. It could convey an urgent message, but could not provide food or equipment. That had to come up over the long, slow desert and death route of a thousand miles.
Foundation during cool winter months was one thing; survival through the hot hell of summer was another. A new drought brought dysentery, scurvy, and fever; and semi-starvation on a heavy meat diet nearly crippled the merciful work time and time again. Early contact with wanderers of the primitive races they had come so far to help proved disappointing. These early missionaries were to discover by costly experience that Australia’s inland desert nomad was the most improvident man on earth, belonging to a people who had never seen water boil, and had never tilled gardens, raised stock, or thought of the morrow; who went through terrible initiation tortures in youth as a hardening for manhood. Some tragic mistakes were made by the missionaries, mistakes that at the time might have seemed foolhardy, unwarranted perhaps, but that slowly set up a valuable store of experience and knowledge.
Their dreams of being a self-supporting community soon received a rude shock. Crops failed one after the other. Wheat, maize, barley, melons, pumpkins, vegetables, fruit, all were tried, and shot almost eagerly above the earth to sprout rapidly, only to wilt away in blazing heat and wind-driven sand. They made crude sledges and buckets of wood, and hauled and carted water from wells and soaks, and poured it into the ground.
Water! It mocked them. Each yard of rich sandy soil had strange fertility, ready to give forth tremendous plant-growth, but it thirsted for water. The damp patch on a summer evening of hard water-hauling was a steaming oven by morning, a dried-out bed of windblown sand and earthy powder by midday. Their small plants burnt off at ground level and rolled away with the hot winds. So they built bough shelters, and gardened beneath the shade. The results were a little better, but as summer heat killed much of their labour, so did the black frosts of bitter winter.
They named the settlement the Finke River Mission, and the area Hermannsburg, because of a strange, tiered red mountain in the Krichauff Range several miles southward, which reminded them of a place in their homeland. Paster Kempe took charge of the work, with Pastor Schwarz as assistant. The first white woman at Hermannsburg was Karoline Rosine Dorothea, the wife of Pastor Schwarz. She made the long thousand-mile journey across the desert; and their daughter
, Wilhelmine Charlotte Dorothea, born on 19 March 1879, was the first white child born at that far-out, isolated place. Pastor Kempe travelled back to Dalhousie to meet his bride. They were married there in an old tattered tent on 1 March 1878, by the Reverend L. Schulze, and set out on a long and slow honeymoon journey on the open desert road.
The women brought a great deal of comfort, but for them the battle was tough and desperate, and household facilities primitive and rare in the extreme. They had the faith and devotion of saints, and rare courage, strengthened greatly, perhaps, by the almost unbelievable colours of the distant hills. Some of the short recorded comments and reports are graphic and filled with meaning:
Dec. 1880:…Two years and six months without rain. Hard on our wives. Mostly meat diet….
20th January, 1881: Various plants and even trees growing nicely…the hot wind we have had for two months has dried off everything….
Two home-made windmills and a wooden pump helped a little; and a crude dam, dug by hand, 150 feet long, 20 feet wide, and 6 feet deep in the sand, caught and held a little water; but it was mostly a failure. Late in 1882:
Plenty of vegetables now in winter. However, summer sun scorches everything….
2nd April, 1883: Gardening successful only if ground kept wet all the time. Watering with bucket not sufficient….
1886:…We have a garden of three acres full of vegetables, especially beans. First time harvested spuds….
April, 1887: Remunerative agriculture under present conditions impossible….
2nd January, 1890: Thermometer never under 112 for weeks. This heat has shrivelled everything….
Stock were drowned in rare floods; some wandered afield in the wake of misleading desert storms, and were speared and eaten by the men the missionaries had laboured so far to help. Outward mail and pleas for help and more seeds to sow, again and again, took many months to get to Bethany and back again; inward bullock-wagon and camel freight took up to two years to arrive, and cost up to £75 a ton. Years passed before the animal transport route was reduced from one thousand to eight hundred miles.
The missionaries burnt and made lime, hauled rocks from the Finke River bed, and built walls that are still standing firm and strong. They thatched the roofs first with grass in a clay compound. Summer flies carried sickness and spread eye-blight. White ants worked silently at all the first wooden structures, until the missionaries found that it was wiser not to build with timber in contact with the ground.
In 1880 a man named Warburton founded the Glen Helen Cattle Station at the head of the Finke; and the Mission had a close neighbour, vaguely thirty miles away in the Macdonnell Ranges a little west of north through a long, red, and beautiful gorge of vertical and tilted rock walls, down through which the broad, tree-lined Finke emerged from its unknown source. Two small stone Mission buildings had been completed, and the natives were moving in, curious, begging, some sick and confused, a few in anger, defiant and troublesome. It seemed impossible to teach them anything useful, or to encourage them to adapt themselves to the slow but certain spread of civilization that would gradually disperse them and lure or drive them from their proven hunting grounds where existed the only balanced diet they knew how to get. The missionaries tried to understand and teach a primitive people who believed in witchcraft; who believed their ancestors were rocks, birds, animals; and who spent tremendous energy in vivid body-decorated chants and wild dancing to a weird legendry and mythology of the past.
Almost in desperation, and knowing not quite what to do, Kempe and Schwarz gradually taught the natives to sing Christian hymns; and found a strange and willing response and a glimmer of understanding in the melody of the white man.
In 1891 the Finke River Mission was nearly abandoned. Drought had ruined the land. Sickness, including dysentery and dread pneumonia, had followed drought; and the wells and waters of the Finke were salt and stinking. Pastor Schwarz had left with his family on 19 September 1889 on a long-overdue furlough, and had not returned. Pastor Kempe was an ageing, wasting man. On 13 November 1891 his wife died after having given birth to their sixth child. She was buried beside their son Paul, who had died on 22 December 1889, aged six years. On 26 November 1891, broken and dispirited, Kempe turned his back on the Mission and set out with four of the remaining children on the long journey southward. The infant child was left in the charge of another Mission worker. Months later, Kempe reached the south safely. He had once been a strong man; but sickness and worry had reduced him to seven stone in weight.
CHAPTER V
A PROBLEM IN HUMANITY
For several years after the tragic departure of the Reverend F. A. H. Kemp from Hermannsburg, Mission work stood practically at a standstill. A lay missionary, C. E. Eggers, took over until the Reverend Mr Warber arrived in 1892 and left again in 1893. He was followed for another short period by the Reverend L. Heidenreich and a Mr Kliche, of Bethany, South Australia. A reform took place in the control of the Mission. It came under the Immanuel Synod of Lutherans, who sent a call of duty to the Reverend Carl Strehlow in Germany. Once again an inexperienced Missionary entered the land, to journey into a wilderness that had conquered many good bushmen. Strehlow arrived at the Finke River Mission, Hermannsburg, in October 1894, and felt the burning blast of a particularly hot summer. He battled on for twenty-eight long years, and placed on record the dialects and myths and legends of the Arunta (Arundta, Aranda) natives; learnt their customs, manners, and fervent inherited beliefs, until he became an understanding power among them. He alone could control and guide many of them. They had tremendous faith in him; but about him he saw the unmistakable signs of a dying race, now fugitive from civilization. The native needed vast space in his own domain, freedom, unlimited movement, and time to gather his own bush food and water so necessary to provide a diet that was instinctive to him, and as definite as the centuries. The country was far too poor to support large community groups, and thus most of the time they must hunt and collect bush foods in small groups or families. Every advance of the white settler interfered with known supplies of food and water. Gradually the bewildered remnants of once strong tribal units either moved into the nearest white settlements and lost their tribal beliefs in beggary, or turned to the Mission for help; but unhygienic congregation about the Mission soon eliminated natural greens and roots; and there was no immediate compensation.
It set up an appalling problem in humanity that has been understood by very few people.
Strehlow found the remnants of the once virile and proud Central Australian natives a filthy and sick people. They had recoiled from the shock of civilization. Some had gone in to white settlements. A few of them had been well treated. Many had been exploited. All had lost their tribal life, and most of them had become cunning paupers and beggars. Vice, prostitution, and disease followed. Yet some of the young native men proved good workers with stock, and thus became an important economic potential in the development of Central Australia. These young men had once been the hunters for the old and infirm; and the aged were now without support in their nomadic wanderings. Government ration depots supplied some of the wants of the aged, who in many instances shared or bartered all given to them and became surrounded by more detribalized paupers and beggars.
It was not a pretty story. It was not a new story.
Time and distance mocked Strehlow; but he slowly laid a permanent foundation for Christianity. His study and his extraordinary understanding of the native mind enabled him to choose and train native evangelists. These men wandered far afield, and explained to their tribesmen the Christian doctrine of the white man. In 1895 a South Australian man called Haemerling, assisted by native labourers, built the Mission church. It became a place of meeting. Natives travelled in over long distances to hear the white man who had learnt to speak to them in their own language. Today the church is far too small for the mixed congregation of black and white. Those who cannot crowd in sit outside in the loose sand beneath shady trees. Some still do not u
nderstand; but they like the singing.
Constant toil and repeated illness weakened Carl Strehlow through the years; still he battled on, deaf to all entreaties to rest awhile and seek medical attention; until pleurisy and dropsy forced him to leave Hermannsburg on a long journey by wagon down the rough and lonely mail track beside the Finke River. Mrs Strehlow and their son Ted nursed him on a painful and difficult journey. It was October, the same month of blasting summer heat in which Strehlow had arrived at the Mission twenty-eight years before. They then had no one to help them, no magical radio, no merciful Flying Doctor Service; but about them the deep shadowy red of the great sandstone canyons beating back the terrible heat. A hundred miles from Hermannsburg Strehlow was in agony and unable to bear the terrible jolting. A native boy raced on to the Elliott family of the Horseshoe Bend of the Finke River for assistance.
The Reverend Carl Strehlow was buried at the Horseshoe on 21 October 1922 by Pastor Stolz, in a coffin made of flimsy old packing-cases. His passing was mourned by many, and his name in the centre of Australia was and always will be respected. His influence on the native problem and his research works and translations will continue to bear fruit for generations to come. His son, T. G. H. Strehlow, Lecturer in English Literature at Adelaide University, followed to some extent in his father’s footsteps, and compiled valuable records of the traditions and habits of the Central Australian native, partly from the valuable records left by his father, and partly from his own lifelong experience, which included a span from 1936 until May 1942 as Patrol Officer and Deputy Director of Native Affairs at Alice Springs. His book, Aranda Traditions, is a very important addition to Australian knowledge.