T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  Buck and Butler now said goodnight to their visitors and departed with Tjalameinta and Ettie. ‘We’ll come down to see you off in the morning,’ they called out as they briskly strode back to the station over the crunching gravel banks. A sudden silence fell on the camp of the travellers, and they went to sleep with the bellowing of the cattle in their ears; for it was eleven o’clock at night before the station cattle ceased coming down to the Tunga waterhole. An hour later several hundred half-wild horses began to arrive for their night’s drink. But Theo was the only person still awake to hear them – everyone else near him was sleeping soundly.

  WHILE EATING HIS BREAKFAST next morning, Strehlow was still full of happiness about Bob Buck’s offer of the previous night and the obvious sincerity of his warm words of personal appreciation. Throughout his twenty-eight years of office Strehlow had often passed through moments of deep depression when indulging in reflections on his completely isolated position at Hermannsburg. To the dark people he had always been the ingkata, or chief, and the ajua, or old man, and to his white mission staff he had been the stiff-necked manager and eagle-eyed superintendent; and while he had in a very real sense enjoyed his position of supreme authority in both the spiritual and secular spheres, he had known also that he had been, except for the love and companionship of his devoted wife, a completely isolated and lonely man. His very power, and the duty which it had imposed upon him to make all the final decisions, had constantly served to alienate men’s affections from him: he had always been respected and often admired, but he had rarely known men’s friendship and just as rarely heard even any guarded expressions of affection. During the whole of his term at Hermannsburg he had towered above his community in lonely aloofness. He had been keenly conscious of the fact that behind his back many of the white mission workers had criticised him in harsh and resentful terms. Sometimes these criticisms had been relayed back to him by the very persons to whom they had originally been addressed in confidential conversations or in private letters. Thus only two months earlier a former Hermannsburg stockman had sent back to him a letter written by Heinrich, in which the latter had bitterly attacked him as the incompetent mission boss who was interested only in seeing the ‘lazy station blacks watering a few cabbages in his garden’, while the hard-working white employees on the run were vainly battling to get their worthless dark stockmen to carry out their all-important station duties. These stockmen had been vilified in the strongest possible terms: ‘They are like the hammers of hell, and nothing but a bullet will stop them.’ Strehlow, of course, had been forced to conceal and to swallow his rage, since the letter had been sent back to him under cover of secrecy. But it had been a bitter pill for him to have to continue entertaining Heinrich in his home. For the bitterly critical man who sat at his table and shared his meals with him continued to address him to his face in terms which would have led outsiders to think that Heinrich was Strehlow’s greatest admirer and most trustworthy associate.

  The Finke River Mission Board also had, so he felt, been far too prone to take the part of the white mission workers against himself. This had happened on several occasions in the case of the white stockmen. The Lutheran Church had never numbered any big graziers or cattlemen among its members; and the men sent up to take charge of the stockwork involving thousands of half-wild cattle and horses on the Hermannsburg run had never possessed any previous cattle-run experience. The most that any of them had ever done before their arrival at Hermannsburg had been to look after a few tame dairy cows and draught horses on some southern wheat farm. Their stock musters had hence tended to be rather inefficient, and their droving of the Hermannsburg stock mobs on the long road to the railhead at Oodnadatta had long since come to be regarded as a standing joke among the vastly more experienced cattlemen of the Centre. When one of these white mission stockmen, on one occasion, had had the audacity to arrange, without Strehlow’s knowledge, a sale of several hundred branded young cows as breeders to a neighbouring station, Strehlow had been forced to foil this disastrous deal by having the yard gates opened by the dark stockmen and the cows turned loose once more. In spite of this lucky escape, the Board had been slow to approve of their superintendent’s honesty and foresight; and he had to put up with his nastytempered subordinate for a further seven months before a successor had been sent up. The church people down south had often failed to appreciate the fact that Strehlow, who had grown up in a farming village before he came out to Australia, had always taken a keen interest in all stockwork done on the mission station. He had thereby acquired a much better insight into the stock problems of Hermannsburg than most of the inexperienced wheat and dairy farmers who lived in the Barossa Valley and adjoining areas. Through listening to the experienced cattlemen of the Centre and through watching keenly the methods of the skilled outside drovers hired from time to time to take the mission cattle down to Oodnadatta, Strehlow had also gained a far better appreciation of efficient stockwork procedures than the so-called southern stock experts among the Mission Board members; but these had, quite naturally, disliked admitting their somewhat pitiful lack of grasp of the unique problems of Central Australia – a country so completely removed from their own spheres of experience. The financial difficulties encountered by the Hermannsburg Mission had been far too often ascribed without any evidence to Strehlow’s alleged lack of business acumen. But any knowledge of the local conditions would have revealed to the Board members the all-important fact that most cattlemen in the Centre who lived on holdings ranging from one thousand to two thousand square miles were rarely well-to-do men, even when all the profits of their runs flowed into their own pockets. Hermannsburg, by contrast, had always had to support from its funds several married white staff members, and a native population of rather more than a hundred people. Because of the Board’s failure to grasp the specifically Central Australian problems, certain reorganisational proposals which, in Strehlow’s opinion, were impossible wildcat schemes that could end only in complete financial disaster for the mission, had been urged with strong persistence on him from time to time; and his honest resistance to these so-called ‘rehabilitation schemes’ had been castigated severely as the wilful obstinacy of a man interested far too much in spiritual matters and in the tenure of his own personal power.

  What had given Strehlow his deepest sense of hurt during his final years at Hermannsburg was the fact that, as his knowledge and experience increased, the Mission Board, and in particular its newest members, seemed to place less and less confidence in him. Not only were his critics listened to with surprising readiness, but even the occasional malicious tale-bearer received an attentive hearing if he came from the ranks of the church – an institution never noted for its firm rejection of irresponsible or malicious gossip. This was something that Strehlow could not understand: in his eyes talebearers, calumniators, and spreaders of malicious gossip had always been the lowest kind of vermin in existence. He considered that they were unworthy creatures who had allowed themselves to become, either foolishly or wittingly, agents of the sinister Prince of Darkness – of that mysterious ‘fallen Morning Star’ of the patristic writers, who had turned, as Satan, into the great and privileged Adversary of all mankind. For it was Satan who had been depicted in the Bible as the malicious calumniator whose constant aim it was to spread lies, and as the hateful accuser who spoke the truth before the throne of the Almighty only when it was his purpose to bring about the punishment of sinners. It was this Satan who had been permitted by God in His unfathomable wisdom to bring down upon Job those intolerable trials of pain and suffering that had been devised to break the sufferer’s spirit and destroy his faith. And the promised era of eternal peace and joy for mankind in heaven was, according to the last book in the Bible, to be ushered in by the expulsion of Satan from heaven: the final victory over the forces of evil could be expected only after the implacable Accuser of mankind, who had been accusing even the elect before God unceasingly both ‘day and night’ since the beginning of time, ha
d been evicted and cast down himself.

  In short, during his final years at Hermannsburg Strehlow had experienced to the full both the envy and the malice of lesser men. He had come to know something of that supreme loneliness which is the normal lot of men of outstanding capacity and the invariable burden of men of genius. All persons of more than average mental stature tend to be envied and disliked by those individuals who, upon entering into their presence, experience feelings of acute inferiority. Strehlow had always been a logical, clearheaded, and well-informed thinker, and a man with a very forceful personality. He had never put up gladly either with muddled thinkers or with honest, well-meaning fools. But many small-minded men had discovered that they possessed the advantage of superior numbers over him. If they could not defeat him in an open battle of wits, they could at least, by sneers and tales uttered behind his back, damage his image in the eyes of those whose personal knowledge of him was only limited. Church boards could be used for attacking his policies, and even for delaying or preventing their practical application. Unsatisfactory subordinates could be supported, at least temporarily, against his complaints and protests. Finally, whispered sneers and masked attacks readily commended themselves to that large number of little men who enjoy the spectacle of seeing outstanding individuals of a greater stature than their own being dragged down to the rather more commonplace levels of average humanity. Heroes and saints have too often won their tributes of appreciation and praise only in the writings of posterity; and some of them have been unable to avoid persecution, and even death, at the hands of their own envious contemporaries.

  Few of the people who knew him had ever realised that there was another side to Strehlow’s nature – that this man with the blazing amber eyes, who was universally regarded as a stern and unbending, if completely honest and upright, authoritarian, was one of the most humane of men during his moments of relaxation when he considered himself to be unobserved. His warm, human sympathies had a habit of showing up at the most unexpected times. Thus he had been known to swallow hard and to brush tears from his eyes when reading aloud moving passages from authors such as Fritz Reuter or Sir Walter Scott to his wife and son in the privacy of his home during the long winter nights. Try as he might on such occasions, he had not been able to control his voice; and sometimes he had been compelled to pause for several seconds before he had been able to read on at all. He had not sought out the supreme loneliness of his position either among his white staff or among his dark congregation: circumstances and his own inflexible principles had combined to force it upon him. He had always felt that he had been appointed by God to his position at Hermannsburg; and God had demanded from him that he should always exercise his powers in accordance with what he believed to be God’s ordinances. There were many times when this belief had cut across some of his own inclinations, even some of his personal desires; but he had then told himself that God demanded absolute obedience from His servants in all things. Brought up in a sternly Lutheran household, he had at times become almost obsessed by a strong sense of sin about many of the things that ordinary men did and thought as a matter of course. One of the results of this inflexible attitude had been his failure to develop strong friendships with any of the members of his dark congregation. He had watched over their behaviour with the eyes of an eagle. Smaller misdemeanours had been rebuked sternly, and major offences punished by dismissal from the station. Church penance before the altar was vigorously enforced for all sex offences. At the same time, Strehlow refused to keep records of any church offences, and he regarded every case as closed once the offenders had accepted their reprimand or their punishment. No past misdemeanours were ever raked up a second time. In addition, Strehlow was too much of a man to stoop to spying tactics in order to keep himself informed on the living habits and morals of his dark congregation. He spoke with scathing contempt about one of his fellow missionaries on a different settlement, who had walked around in the aboriginal camp on dark nights, ineffectually trying to hide his storm lantern behind his overcoat, while snooping around in the hope of catching offenders against the church’s moral code. In Strehlow’s opinion, a minister might well have to be a stern disciplinarian, since he was a responsible servant of the Almighty. But God was no friend of spies and snoopers: these were men on the pay-roll of Satan.

  Strehlow’s fear of God’s displeasure had also led him to refuse all invitations to attend the aboriginal folk-dances (or corroborees) or to be present at performances of the Western Aranda sacred ceremonies, even though his study of the Aranda and Loritja sacred songs and myths had evoked in him a great admiration for certain elements of aboriginal religion and culture. To attend any of these performances would have been, for a missionary as conceived by Strehlow, a deliberate act of condoning paganism; and his God would not permit him to do so. Even old Loatjira, the ceremonial chief of Ntarea who had honoured Strehlow not only by giving him most of his store of the Western Aranda sacred traditions but also by revealing to him at least some of the Western Aranda death charms sung for purposes of black magic, had not been able to induce Strehlow to witness one single Western Aranda ceremonial act. Nor had Loatjira ever been able to win any permission for himself – a man who still believed in and clung to the faith of his forefathers firmly and passionately – to practise any of his own aboriginal ritual openly on the Hermannsburg mission run. Strehlow had, of course, been aware that the Western Aranda, the great majority of whom had not yet been converted to Christianity in his days, were sometimes engaging in their sacred acts secretly outside the immediate station precincts; and he had refused to encourage any spying by informers on these activities. Indeed, he had privately often longed to see performances of the Western Aranda sacred acts. But his personal attendance, he had felt, would have been taken as tacit approval of these things by members of his congregation; and such an act on his part would accordingly have blurred that clear-cut, black-and-white division between activities labelled as sinful and activities permitted by God that he had tried to inculcate into his converts. Unable to win any counter-concessions from Strehlow after revealing to him some of the deepest secrets of the Western Aranda sacred beliefs, the ageing Loatjira had finally left Hermannsburg in despair. He had spent most of his remaining years on the Glen Helen Station run, where the practice of the old religion was not frowned upon as long as the sacred ritual was not being carried out near the main cattle waters. Strehlow had been painfully aware of the breach between Loatjira and himself, and he had personally regretted it deeply. He had also been aware that even his most loyal converts were unhappy at the long absences of the venerated ceremonial chief of Ntarea from his own conception site, and he had known that Loatjira had always been greeted like a loved ruler returning from exile by everyone at Hermannsburg whenever he had come back on his infrequent visits. Strehlow and Loatjira had always met on such occasions. Loatjira had brought him some tjurunga objects, and Strehlow had given him liberal supplies of rations which were debited to his private account. But their later meetings had been characterised by politeness rather than by friendship: there had been no real warmth in the relationship between the two most important men at Hermannsburg. Their long estrangement had continued till the day of Strehlow’s departure; and Loatjira had not been present at the mission when Strehlow left. But Strehlow’s God was a jealous God, who brooked no whittling down of His holy commandments; and Strehlow had felt that any other course of action would have been both wrong and sinful in the eyes of his Master.

  It was the same fear of giving offence to God that had made Strehlow so uncompromising in his stern attitudes towards the unconventional morals and the general way of life of the Central Australian white station folk and stockmen; and he had rarely failed to attack sin vigorously from his pulpit on the occasions when any of these white visitors had been staying at Hermannsburg for any length of time. Strehlow’s sermons were, of course, always given in Aranda; but a fair proportion of the white station folk understood many of the remarks tha
t had some special application for them. Some of them were perfectly well aware of the Aranda words for the particular sins that were being castigated so uncompromisingly from the pulpit. Among the more knowledgeable white listeners on several of these occasions had been men like Alf Butler and Bob Buck; and these men had been sufficiently interested in the sermons to ask their dark women after the services for more detailed explanations of Strehlow’s warnings and castigatory remarks.