T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  One of the men who had been among the boys saved on that occasion had repaid a part of his old debt to Strehlow a few weeks earlier, when he had carried an urgent telegram on foot to Alice Springs, the nearest telegraph station, eighty miles away, in the space of a day and a half. He had waited one night in Alice Springs for the reply, and then carried it back to Hermannsburg at the same rate of speed. This amazing walking feat of one hundred and fifty miles in three days had been undertaken in order to save vital time. To have mustered some saddle horses would have delayed the departure of the message by at least a day, and these grass-fed horses would not have covered the distance any faster than the lone message-bearer. The same man – he had been christened Hesekiel by one of Strehlow’s predecessors – was waiting that very morning to begin his new assignment: to act as the driver of the buggy on which his sick master was to be taken south.

  On this final morning the dark folk, after coming from the camp to eat their breakfast in the community messroom, went outside again and sat under the gums of the mission compound, talking in subdued voices and watching the double doors of Strehlow’s house, in order to await the exit of some message-bearer who would announce that the time had arrived for harnessing the horses to the buggy. These double doors opened on to a wide front verandah, furnished with a table, a garden settee, and some birdcages. In addition, there were two large boxes, one on either side of the settee. Each box held a huge bracken fern which had been brought down a few years earlier from Udepata, and which had always required valuable rainwater from the house tanks to keep it alive. This front verandah was now piled high with the twenty-odd boxes which contained all the books, the household linen, and the remaining personal possessions of the Strehlow family. These boxes had been packed within the previous fortnight by Strehlow’s son Theo, a boy of fourteen; for Mrs Strehlow had been fully occupied during the past three weeks with the task of nursing her sick husband. The boxes had been stacked for easy covering in case of rain. For the verandahs of all the mission residences had been roofed only with slim desert oak saplings which supported a top layer, some three inches thick, of lime concrete. While these verandah roofs ensured extra coolness on hot days, they were by no means waterproof. Heavy rains soaked the lime concrete till it became water-logged and dripped profusely. Hence even the large birdcages standing on the verandah had required to be protected by their own roofs of galvanised iron. Efficient stacking of the newly packed boxes on the verandah ensured that they could be adequately protected in a heavy downpour by one of the large-sized tarpaulins stocked on the station for long-distance travelling parties.

  While the dark population was quietly and patiently waiting outside, the final preparations for the journey were going on within the house. The sick man inside was obviously both distressed and anxious about the journey. Moreover, he was battling desperately to preserve his trust in that God whom he had believed all his life with a rock-like faith. Strehlow had always been supported during his twenty-eight years at Hermannsburg by the unshakeable conviction that it was God Himself Who had chosen him to build up Hermannsburg and to establish it as a Christian home for all those Aranda men and women who had been dispossessed of their tribal lands. Ironically, he had been the only missionary out of the three who had been stationed at Killalpaninna on Cooper’s Creek in 1894 who had voted again his Synod’s plan to take over Hermannsburg, on the grounds that the Immanuel Synod did not possess sufficient staff or money to run even Killalpaninna satisfactorily. But when his Synod had taken the decision to purchase Hermannsburg from the trustees of the rival Lutheran body, and he had been asked to go to Hermannsburg as its first new superintendent, Strehlow had chosen to regard this call as an appointment ordained by God; and after that he had never wavered in his determination to see the struggling settlement on the Finke River through all the difficulties that threatened to crush it from time to time. The majority of the large, solid stone buildings at Hermannsburg – the church, the school, his own residence, the community kitchen, the wagon shed, and some additions to the station store – had all been put up during his regime: the derelict settlement of 1894, which had come in for unfavourable comments in the Horn Party’s Report written in that year, had by 1922 grown into the largest ‘village’ of Central Australia outside the telegraph station and governmental administrative centre of Alice Springs. He had accepted a totally inadequate salary all his life – it was only in the closing period of his regime that he had been paid as high a figure as £120 a year, and this sum had to support him, his wife, and his son Theo. It had compared rather poorly with the £l00 a year that Heinrich, the unmarried school teacher, had been receiving. He had done miracles with the meagre mission funds received from a few devoted congregations down south. Many others had largely remained aloof, or had been niggardly in their financial support. He had been bitterly hurt when the rival Lutheran Synod, from which Hermannsburg had been acquired in 1894, had expelled the two Pastors Heidenreich, father and son, whose congregations had continued sending occasional funds to help aboriginal welfare at Hermannsburg; for this expulsion had been forced through on the ground that any material support of this nature enabled the new Hermannsburg missionary to spread ‘spiritual poison’ among his flock. Since these congregations had followed their pastors into Synodical exile, no further financial assistance for Hermannsburg could be expected from them after that.

  Even from his own Mission Board and the members of his mission staff Strehlow had not always received wholehearted support. In 1904 his Aranda re-translation of the Lutheran catechism – a work undertaken in order to improve its grammar and eliminate the many unnecessary European loan-words introduced by his predecessors – had been hotly challenged by his associate missionary, the Reverend N. Wettengel; and the latter had dropped his charges of doctrinal falsification against the new book only after a decision on this dispute had been given against him by a South Australian conference of ministers. When Strehlow had gone on long leave in 1910 to visit the land of his birth, the chairman of the Mission Board, Pastor L. Kaibel, had brought a new missionary, the Reverend O. Liebler, to Hermannsburg. Kaibel had later informed Strehlow in an exuberant letter of all the improvements effected at the station by the new management: within a matter of weeks the long-standing defects of the old order had been miraculously remedied by the new man and himself. However, Kaibel’s triumph was short-lived. Neither he nor Liebler was able to control the forces of dissent which they had released among the aboriginal population. Liebler, a born comedian who lacked all sense of humour, had quickly become a laughing-stock to his dark congregation, and had won for himself the derisive appellation of ‘the poor, mad missionary’ among the hard-headed cattlemen of the neighbouring stations. Upon his return to Tanunda after a four months’ stay, Kaibel had unwisely published a series of articles about his trip to the Centre. Kaibel, a quiet minister accustomed to the stolid and submissive attitudes of the German-Australian settlers of the Barossa Valley, had shown no understanding of the special social problems of the interior in his writings; and some of his remarks had deeply offended the Central Australian population. Thus he had described Horseshoe Bend Station in the Barossa News as ‘one of the minor hells on God’s earth’, where ‘all the sins against the decalogue are committed…as no guardian of the law is near’; and he had painted an almost libellous pen picture of its hotel proprietor, Ted Sargeant: ‘I asked the hotelkeeper, if he did not think it was time that he should reform seeing that he is 67 years of age, but he said, he did not think he ever would reform. Blasphemy, mocking, and scoffing is the daily diet, until the fumes of the whisky have fuzzled the brain and the tongue becomes heavy.’ As was to be expected, a strong counter-attack had quickly been mounted against Hermannsburg by its many antagonists. With the cession of the Northern Territory by South Australia to the Commonwealth Government on 1st January, 1911, the station had passed under the control of a new civil administration. Adverse reports on Hermannsburg sent in during Strehlow’s absence by Cap
tain Barclay, Police-Corporal (later Sergeant) Stott, and Professor Baldwin Spencer, had forced an urgent visit by Kaibel to the Minister for Home and Territories in Melbourne; and these talks had ended with Kaibel’s assurance that the urgently recalled Strehlow would take full charge of Hermannsburg once more. However, an ugly climate of distrust had been created between the Lutheran Church and the new departmental officials of the Commonwealth Government.

  But the biggest test had come during the 1914–18 war. Strehlow had been compelled by the German Government to sign a declaration giving up his German citizenship when he left Germany in 1892; and he had thereafter acquired South Australian citizenship as soon as he legally could. Long before this date he had been appointed, in 1893, a Justice of the Peace in the State of South Australia. Believing that, as an Australian citizen, he should give his undivided loyalty to his new country, he had always striven to live up to the Christian injunction, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’. The sudden flood of hatred released in Australia after August, 1914, had amazed and shocked him beyond words. He had suddenly found himself looked upon as an enemy alien, and by some even as a potential spy and traitor. In defiance of his naturalisation certificate, he had been compelled to fill out an alien’s registration certificate in 1917, and Hermannsburg itself had almost become submerged by a flood of vituperation, particularly in certain super-patriotic South Australian circles. A proposal had been made that Hermannsburg should be taken away from the Lutheran Church, turned into a Government Station, and used as a training school for aboriginals generally, and for the raising of stock. Fortunately for the mission settlement, the Northern Territory had been handed over by South Australia to the Commonwealth Government three years before the outbreak of the war, and even the most virulent South Australian hate campaigns had not been able to overwhelm Hermannsburg during the war. Strehlow’s personal honesty of purpose had become so generally accepted in Central Australia by this time that the leading governmental officials of the Northern Territory had refused to yield to the irresponsible campaigns waged in Adelaide to close Hermannsburg and to intern its superintendent. The dour, Scottish-born Administrator of the Northern Territory, Dr J.A. Gilruth, had formed a high opinion of Strehlow during his only visit to Hermannsburg in 1913. Above all, Sergeant Robert Stott, of Alice Springs, the most powerful man in the Centre, who was known everywhere as ‘the uncrowned king of Central Australia’, both respected and liked Strehlow, whose honest and forceful personality was so closely akin to his own. Stott, a rugged, tough, plain-spoken Scot from the Aberdeen area, was a British patriot who refused to allow war hysteria to divert him from what he believed to be his main duty – to uphold at all costs the principles of British justice and fair play as he understood them. Anti-German feelings had reached their height in 1917. This had been the year when hysterical patriotism in South Australia – a State in which parliamentary passions were being fanned at that time by various fanatics, chief of whom was a former Premier who had originally been a semi-literate Moonta copper miner and Methodist lay preacher – had led to the scrapping of all German place names, and the placing of a veto on all public uses of the German language. Strehlow, however, had continued to resist Kaibel’s panic-stricken urgings to sell as much stock, including breeders, as possible before the station could be taken away from the Lutheran Church. If the worst had happened, Strehlow’s plan would have been that Hermannsburg should be offered as a going concern to the Anglican Church; for he had always felt great admiration for Bishop Gilbert White, the former first Bishop of Carpentaria who had recently become the first Bishop of Willochra. Strehlow’s faith had been justified by the events. The Mission lease had been renewed from year to year, and so had its annual Government subsidy of £300. For during the most critical years Hermannsburg had enjoyed the protection of a liberal Commonwealth Minister for Home and Territories – Patrick McMahon Glynn, who was an Irishman and a devout Roman Catholic. And so Hermannsburg had survived its desperate struggle for existence, and kept the name given to it by its original missionary founders.

  The strong esteem in which Strehlow had come to be held in Central Australia even during these hysterical war years had been highlighted sharply when an official enquiry on the running of Hermannsburg had been ordered in December, 1917, because of pressure brought to bear on the Northern Territory Administration officials by southern enemies of the Lutheran Mission. The Administrator of the Northern Territory, Dr J. A. Gilruth, had sent a telegram to Strehlow, asking him to come to Alice Springs for personal discussions on ‘an important matter’ with Mr Justice Bevan, the Judge of the Northern Territory Supreme Court. Strehlow had not only been given a sympathetic hearing by the Judge when he was defending the affairs of the mission: he had also stayed at the home of Sergeant Stott himself, who thereby publicly proclaimed his faith in Strehlow’s integrity and loyalty.

  During all these disturbances and trials Strehlow had carried on his duties with outward unconcern, confident that God would protect him because Hermannsburg depended on his labours. Only a few months before his illness he had silenced the doubts expressed by his wife about their uncertain future by saying to her bluntly, ‘Frieda, we have God’s own promises of help to depend on; and as long as we have complete faith in Him, He will, nay He must, answer our prayers. For He has promised this Himself. And if God should fail to honour His own promises, we should have the right to throw the Bible down at His feet.’ His shocked wife had begged him not to speak with such blunt vehemence. But Strehlow had replied with passionate conviction, ‘No, Frieda, I mean every word of that. If God will not carry out His own freely given promises, then there is no point in believing in the Bible.’

  But the past ten years of uninterrupted toil, stress, and strain, without a single holiday break, had finally convinced Strehlow that it was time for him to go back to Germany, now that the war was over. He had merely been holding on to his position for the past couple of years in order to make it easier for the mission committee to find his successor. And it had been at the beginning of July of the present year, while he was waiting to be relieved and preparing himself for his new parish duties in Germany by re-studying his theological textbooks, that illness had suddenly struck him down – a man who had never before in the fifty years of his life known from personal experience what a serious illness was. He had been afflicted by what he believed to be an unusually heavy attack of influenza, but he had refused to go to bed even when severe fits of fever had begun to set in. There had been too much work to be done on the station, and he had believed that, as long as he refused to give in, his granite constitution would, with the assistance of homoeopathic medicines, overcome his temporary state of illness. But for the first time in his life neither his physical strength nor his iron determination had been able to overcome his condition.

  At the end of July Mr F. C. Urquhart, the former Police Commissioner of Brisbane, who had been appointed Administrator of the Northern Territory in 1921, had visited Hermannsburg. Urquhart, like Gilruth, had been born in Scotland, and had, as a young police officer, acquired a reputation for toughness when leading a punitive expedition against the ‘warlike’ Kalkadoon tribe in 1884. It was largely because of his reputation of fearlessness that he had been chosen to become Gilruth’s successor, when the latter’s rule had come to an end after the Vestey’s meatworks riots of December 1918. Strehlow had shown Urquhart over the mission settlement only with considerable personal distress: he had been getting worried over the persistent stabbing pains in his sides, and had been forced to conserve his strength for attending to his visitor by permitting Heinrich to take over the church services on the Sunday of the Administrator’s visit.

  None of the white men at the station had given any thought to relieving Strehlow of his exacting physical tasks during the months of July and August. Mr W. Mattner, a member of the Finke River Mission Board, had come to Hermannsburg at the beginning of July to help Charlie Paschke, the
recently engaged ‘newchum’ stockman, with the mustering of the cattle and with the building of new yards; and Heinrich had taken this opportunity of going out on the run to help Mattner throughout the month of August, leaving Strehlow behind on his own, and expecting him to look after the dark school children as well. For Hermannsburg had run into considerable debts, and the Board had insisted that quick sales of stock were necessary to provide funds for keeping the mission going.