T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  Mrs Strehlow had scarcely been able to spare the time for listening to Theo’s story, for she was a very busy and worried woman. As soon as he had walked away, she rushed back into the log cabin to attend to her husband. The latter was clearly approaching the end of his physical strength. On leaving Henbury he had still been hopeful of reaching at least the Overland Telegraph Line at Horseshoe Bend. But the fifty-five-mile journey from Henbury to Idracowra had shattered even his iron will. Travelling through the Britannia Sandhills had been for him one long nightmare. The horses had to be flogged to the top of every dune, and the team in harness had to be changed frequently. The loud bursts of shouting at the horses by Heinrich and Hesekiel sitting in the front seat, and the continual crack of the lashing coach-whip either to the side of the sweating team or on their trembling rumps, had deafened, and at times almost maddened, his ears. Nor had things become easier for him during the final twelve miles’ drive into Idracowra. The heat of the sun had proved almost too much for the strength of a man who was beginning to sense that he might be embarked on his death journey; and he knew that he could not face the road any longer by day in these blazing heat-wave conditions. Travelling by night, in the absence of proper wagon tracks and buggy lamps, seemed completely out of the question; and, finally, his physical condition was worsening much more rapidly than he had anticipated. In spite of the streams of sweat that had been pouring out from his body during these excessively hot travelling days, his limbs had swollen very considerably since his departure from Hermannsburg. He had to sit upright in a chair, day and night, for almost a fortnight already; and he could no longer even lean back in his chair, since he would then feel immediately the pressure of the internal fluids against his lungs – an excruciating pressure which produced agonising jabs of pain and threatened to stop him from breathing at all. In order to rest or to sleep he had to lean forward and cup his chin in his hands, supporting his weary arms on his shapelessly swollen knees. A certain amount of pain was ever present now. It left him completely only when he had been drugged by his nightcap of laudanum.

  Strehlow’s low physical condition was matched by his intense spiritual despondency. Excruciating bouts of physical pain, a depressing sense that he had been disloyally deserted by his southern colleagues, and an agonising awareness of the continuing and complete silence of God to his incessant prayers – these were the heavy afflictions that kept on tormenting his mind during all his waking hours. Till the morning of his departure from Henbury Strehlow had always experienced a new upsurge of hope and faith after praying, either alone or together with his wife, to that God of his fathers, in Whose almighty power he had put all his trust throughout his life. He had always considered himself to he a staunch Lutheran. This fact accounted for his strong sense of sin in himself, in others, and in the whole world around him; and many people who had come only into superficial contact with him might have felt that he had almost an obsession about the danger of sin lurking in every corner, even in things that most people considered as being harmless in themselves. Indeed, probably the majority of non-Lutherans would have regarded most staunch Lutherans as suffering in some degree from an obsession of this nature. But such a view would have given only one part of the picture. It would, in fact, have been a most misleading assumption to make that thoughtful Lutherans were interested in the existence and presence of sin more than in anything else. For this Lutheran sense of sin was, in men like Strehlow at any rate, a perhaps natural corollary of their belief that they and all other people were expected to be God’s human instruments, whose actions, even the most insignificant, were always before the sharp scrutiny of the Almighty. Hence all of God’s servants who earnestly tried to carry out the work for which He had brought them into the world were always standing in His special care and protection till they had performed the whole of their tasks. To Lutherans of Strehlow’s type perhaps the most significant aspect of their religion was the complete sense of confidence in God that their faith had kindled in them. It was not for nothing that the favourite hymns in the Strehlow home had been those composed by Luther and by Paul Gerhardt. A mighty fortress is our God, Commit whatever grieves thee, If God Himself be for me, and others of this kind, were hymns giving perfect expression of Strehlow’s own complete faith and trust in God. The last-named hymn set forth in jubilant poetic language the sentiments so powerfully stated by St Paul in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans: ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose…If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things…Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ In his song Paul Gerhardt – in contrast to Luther who in his hymns had always clung to the plural pronouns that befitted a whole singing congregation – had changed St Paul’s first person plural pronouns to the singular, in order to give the apostle’s message a stronger individualistic force. Similarly, Strehlow had always expressed his faith in God in strongly personal terms.

  But as Strehlow was sitting in his log cabin at Idracowra on the Sunday morning after his arrival from Henbury, his extreme physical weakness and his constant pangs of pain made him wonder whether the Bible did not contain some other, and rather darker, messages that might be more relevant to his present condition. A strong, healthy man who had little personal acquaintance with sickness until three months ago, he had led till now a far too active life ever to have given much thought to the problems of pain, of suffering, and of calamities in a world governed by an omnipotent God of Love. He had, it was true, always been impressed by the grandeur, the depth of thought, and the magnificent poetry of the Book of Job, the finest exposition of human pain and suffering, and of the calamities afflicting even the innocent and the God-fearing, that was to be found in the pages of the Old Testament. But he had always been rather more interested in the verses which expressed the trustful resignation or the strong faith of the afflicted than in those passionate passages in which the ancient writer had grappled with life’s deepest problems and with catastrophes which had defied all attempts at satisfactory explanations. Strehlow had always been moved during the Hermannsburg funeral services by the resigned piety of the verse ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’; and Job’s profession of deathless hope that had been so beautifully expressed in the verse beginning ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’ had been so dear to him in its old formulation that he had regarded the modern translations which substituted ‘without my flesh’ for the older version ‘yet in my flesh shall I see God’ almost as sacrilegious corruptions. But he had never had much leisure to ponder deeply over the arguments raised by Job and his friends with such passionate poetical fervour on page after page of this magnificent book.

  But now that he himself was experiencing the crushing hand of God in his own afflictions, he was beginning to understand fully the deep tragedy in Job’s call of anguish to God, ‘Why hast Thou set me as a mark against Thee, so that I am a burden to myself?’; and he readily comprehended from his own agony the dark depth of meaning in Job’s wild cry of despair beginning with the words, ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived’. Job’s heavy plight and his bottomless despair suddenly began to assume a new and deeply personal significance for him. It was precisely the man who had trusted implicitly in God, who had anxiously striven to please the Almighty, and who had patiently accepted the early calamities blow by blow, who had been crushed and humbled ti
ll he could bear his afflictions no longer, but had left his house and sat among the ashes for seven days and nights without opening his mouth. And when Job had finally given expression to his anguish and to his utter inability to understand the ways of the Lord, the three friends who had come to share his sorrow had suddenly turned on him. Like most priests, ministers, and pious church folk who visit persons who have been crushed by illnesses, accidents, or calamities, Job’s friends had felt obliged to defend the Almighty and the justice of His ways against Job’s cries of bitter anguish; and, in rebuking him sternly, they had increased his misery till his trustful resignation had threatened to turn into a bitter mood of resentment and revolt, in which he could find relief only in hurling accusations against God. The writer of the Book of Job had made no attempt to solve the final mysteries of pain and calamity: only God could fathom the ways of God. The Almighty, when replying to Job in the closing chapters of the book, had merely confronted the exhausted sufferer with a long series of counterquestions which no man could answer, thereby clearly demonstrating that no creature was able to call to account its own Creator. Job had, in reply, hastened to declare his complete and unquestioning submission to the will and the judgments of a God Whose ways human wisdom could not understand. God had thereupon severely reprimanded Job’s three friends for having dared to defend the ways of the Almighty in petty human terms which had brought discredit to God. Only Job’s prayers for his officious and conceited friends had finally appeased the anger of the Almighty against their presumption. The Book of Job had thus concluded with a severe Old Testament lesson on the punishment awaiting all self-righteous men who misused God’s calamities as opportunities for increasing the miseries of the victims by proclaiming that the Lord had resorted to special disciplinary measures against them. After Job had prayed for his friends, God had blessed him, restored to him his health, doubled his possessions, and enabled him to have a second family.

  However, on that Sunday morning hope itself seemed to have died. Strehlow could obtain no message of comfort from the conclusion of the Book of Job. He could appreciate as never before the anguished cries of a tormented soul that had felt itself crushed by a long series of calamities and suffering, rarely sent down singly on a single human being. But his physical condition gave him no ground for hope that God would restore him to health and bless him once more with the joys of this world. He could only strive to endure his agony manfully, and he felt that his physical strength was rapidly reaching its breaking point. Yet whatever the future might hold for him, he would try to cling to his faith steadfastly, even, if necessary, blindly: it was the only thing left for him to grasp, now that the last glimmerings of hope had almost completely vanished from his heart. He would spend the day pondering over the next steps that he and his party should take. At least it was comforting to know that he had safely arrived at a station before reaching this point of almost complete mental and physical collapse.

  Theo spent the morning wandering over the station area with his friend Johnson Breaden, the three-quarter white son of Allan Breaden. He had first met Johnson Breaden at Hermannsburg on one of Bob Buck’s Christmas visits. Johnson Breaden and his mother Jessie had both wanted to take a holiday away from Idracowra, and Bob Buck had included them in his Henbury party. One of Jessie’s three-quarter aboriginal daughters had been staying at Hermannsburg permanently and attending the mission school. Like many other half-caste women in the Centre, Jessie had always been in a difficult marital position. Being a half-white woman, she had always been expected to live with any white station man who might take a fancy to her. Generally the man who had the first right to her would have been the station owner or manager himself, or else the white head stockman. But none of these men, who enjoyed supreme authority over the station and its inhabitants, would ever have dreamed of legally marrying her. Nor would they have given much care to any three-quarter white sons which she might have borne to them. All of her three-quarter white daughters, on the other hand, would normally have been sent down south to a home for children or, very much more rarely, to white relatives of their father – so as to save them from being brought up ‘among the niggers’ and treated by other white men as their mother had been by their father. When the white owner or manager or stockman left the station, his half-caste spouse and her children would in most cases be left behind to fend for themselves as best they could. Often it would be a dark man who now came to their rescue. He would invariably be proud of his ‘white’ wife, and he would become a perfect foster-father to her children, always looking after them as though they were his very own. For in the Aranda-speaking areas of the Centre (and probably in most of the adjoining tribal areas as well) any man who lived with a woman was looked on as her properly married husband; and he was expected to regard and to treat every one of his wife’s children irrespective of their actual parentage, as his own progeny. This was an attitude that the ‘civilised’ white folk who came into the country found impossible to understand. For a man to treat all the children of his wife, irrespective of their parentage, as his own, was held to be a sign of the supreme stupidity of the dark race. Even some of the missionaries had been perturbed to find that no stigma was ever attached to ‘illegitimate children’. The very term ‘illegitimate children’ had no meaning in the Aranda-speaking community, and could not, in fact, have been translated into Aranda. When Strehlow, while translating the New Testament, needed an Aranda equivalent for the expression ‘illegitimate child’, he had to be content with the word ‘wolurkuna’: this term, however, merely meant a ‘deserted child’ – that is, a child whose father had abandoned it and its mother by going to live in a different local group or tribal area. Jessie, too, had her share of the vicissitudes of life. Her mother Rounja had been an elder sister of Njitiaka. Jessie’s white father was generally accepted as having been Walter Parke, the younger of the two Parke brothers who had founded Henbury Station, though there were one or two dissident voices which claimed that the real father had been a man called George Elliot, who had been the station cook during the time of the Parke brothers. Jessie had sometimes been the proud half-caste mistress of the station, and sometimes the spouse of a dark stockman in the native camp on the same property. Her eldest child had been Baden Bloomfield, the three-quarter white son of Louis Bloomfield. Louis Bloomfield had been a prominent man among the Finke River pioneers and cattlemen at Henbury, before acquiring Love’s Creek Station. After this son by a white man came the three-quarter black half-siblings, William, Eileen, and Elvida. The father of these three children had been her full-blood husband Ungwanaka. But she had also had a second three-quarter white son, who came between William and Eileen. This was Johnson Breaden, and his father was Allan Breaden. Jessie had been living at Idracowra Station for some time now; and she was keeping house for Allan Breaden and her son Johnson. Throughout her difficult life Jessie had managed to preserve to the full her great natural charm. Nor had she lost her impressive air of quiet womanly dignity in any of her difficult marital situations. An air of almost aristocratic aloofness often seemed to surround her. Jessie had, however, been fortunate in being able to keep all her children; for the two children which she had borne to white men had both been boys. In this regard she had been more fortunate than the other half-caste woman, Leisha, who had, like herself, experienced the favours of both Allan Breaden and Louis Bloomfield. Leisha’s two daughters Sarah and Susie, whose fathers had been Breaden and Bloomfield respectively, had been sent south as small girls; and she had never again set eyes on them. She had, however, had the consolation of four other, three-quarter dark, children by two full-blood fathers.

  On Johnson’s first visit to Hermannsburg Theo had immediately struck up a friendship with the pleasant and cheerful near-white boy, and he thoroughly enjoyed his walk with Johnson over Idracowra Station that morning. Johnson was, like his father, rather shortsighted, and his thick and somewhat pouchy eyelids, which he had likewise inherited from his father, gave him a slightly sleepy though par
ticularly good-natured facial expression.

  The buildings at Idracowra Station were of the same rough and ready gum log construction as those of Henbury. There was, first of all, the simple one-room blockhouse, roofed with galvanised iron, which served as Allan Breaden’s residence, and which was at present being occupied by Theo’s parents. Two bush beds, with bullock hide ‘mattresses’, stood in this room, their legs let in through a floor paved with stone slabs. The door of this blockhouse had been made of packing-case boards, and the walls were covered inside with illustrations from The Chronicle and cartoons from The Bulletin. The second loghouse was the one in which Theo had already eaten two of his meals. This building also was roofed with galvanised iron. It was a kitchen/dining-room unit with a mud-mortar chimney and a stone floor, and it was protected by a verandah. Its furnishings were of the utmost simplicity – two home-made tables, a somewhat rickety wooden food-safe, and a cockatoo perch on which a white cockatoo screamed and talked during the hottest daylight hours. A three-legged cast-iron camp-oven stood on the ground in one corner. A rain gauge had been placed on a low post between these two main station buildings. It had to be cleaned out whenever rain was expected: normally it was full of sand from the sandstorms that enveloped Idracowra on all days when strong winds blew from the north or the west. There were two further structures – the meat-house and the harness-room. In front of the thatched meat-house stood a meat bench with a top layer of heavy logs on which the carcass of the slaughtered bullock was cut up before the meat was taken inside. During the winter months certain parts of the carcass were hung up on hooks inside the meat-house, where the cool air of the day and the icy draughts of the night kept the meat in prime condition for a week, and even longer, without any need for artificial refrigeration. The tender steaks cut from such a naturally chilled carcass had a rich flavour which far surpassed that of any meat which was to be taken out by subsequent generations of station folk from refrigerators introduced in later years. However, much of the beef in winter, and most of it in summer, was dry-salted, bagged in empty 150-pound flour-bags, and stored in these containers in the meat-house during the day. It was then spread out in a coarse wire-netting trough, suspended from a frame set on posts fixed in the ground inside the meat-house, so that the large chunks of salt meat could air during the night. The fourth building was the rough and simple harness-room or saddle-shed (also constructed of logs), with its rails and pegs for holding the saddles, bridles, packbags, and all items of donkey wagon harness. All greenhide ropes, when not in use, were also hung on pegs in this saddle-shed. A couple of chains of linked new greenhide hobble-straps stretched down from other wall pegs. Close to the harness-room stood a row of posts from whose top rails hung suspended the hides of the bullocks killed at the station. The cattleyard of Idracowra had been erected as close to these station buildings as had the cattle-yard at Henbury; and Idracowra, like Henbury, possessed also a goat-yard crammed full of well-fed goats, which supplied the station with milk, cream, and butter.