T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  God: there was the problem. What was man’s relationship to God? The Book of Job had not answered the problems of human pain, of human calamities, and of those shattering blows that sometimes overwhelmed even the finest and best men and women in human society. On the contrary, Strehlow’s own experience had convinced him that it might well be the finest and best people in the community, and those who had loved God and trusted Him beyond everything, who sometimes were subjected to the most cruel experiences possible and to calamities which ended only in their own final agony and death. The history of the early martyrs of the Church, and the history of the persecution of God-fearing men and women at the behest of the organised churches in previous ages, gave many eloquent proofs of that.

  Not that he was afraid of death. His physical condition actually made him long for release from that shocking feeling of water-logged internal heaviness that reached from his abdomen to his swollen feet, from the pains that racked his chest when he took a slightly deeper breath or his back whenever he attempted to rest for a moment against his chair, and from those occasional paroxysms of asthmatic breathlessness during which he was gasping and choking helplessly to get sufficient air into his lungs. Death would mean a merciful termination of his sufferings. But why should that God, Whom he had endeavoured to serve so faithfully, abandon him and his family out here, in these lonely desert wastes, to die one of the most cruel deaths imaginable? Without medical assistance little could be done even to ease the pain of his last days. God could have helped him greatly by merely permitting the weather to keep cool during his journey to seek aid. It was still only October – a month in which long heat waves were most unusual. But the weather had turned unseasonably hot shortly after he had set out on the road; and there seemed to be no prospect of a break in the series of scorching days that were helping to turn his final brief span of time into a long stretch of almost unbearable misery. In his present condition, and particularly because of the heat that made his body run with sweat hour after hour, he should have been washed and had his body moved into different sitting or lying positions several times a day. But because only sitting in a certain posture still enabled him to breathe with any degree of comfort, he was compelled to stay in this attitude day and night, without any chance of lying down even for short periods of respite. As a result, his skin was breaking out into sores in many places under the unnatural weight of swollen flesh. A cool change could at least have put an end to his day-long sweating bouts, and made the agony of his slow, but relentless death struggle a little more bearable. Instead the sun’s fire was being stoked remorselessly day by day: the God of mercy seemed to have no compassion left for him. Kyrie eleison – Christe eleison – Kyrie eleison: he had intoned these prayers so often before during the Hermannsburg church services. These cries for God’s mercy had formed an integral part of Christian church worship since the earliest centuries of the Christian era; and their position at the beginning of the liturgical part of the service indicated the high importance in which they had been held by all past generations of Christian worshippers. They were so old, and so well known, that the Western Church had never translated them from the original Greek either into Latin or into any of the other vernaculars. He himself, like his predecessors at Hermannsburg, had intoned them every Sunday in Greek during the Aranda service. Now he had come to know why these cries for God’s mercy had been regarded as providing the most appropriate opening for Christian worship in the liturgical service.

  If God demanded from him to give up his life in the desert, could He not at least have shown him more mercy during the agony of his final days? Could not God have been more generous to a man who had always believed himself to be God’s servant, and at the very least permitted him to see his own country once more and to leave his wife and son behind among relatives, before death took him away from them? He had been so very young when he had first come to Australia – a young man aged only twenty. Most of the next thirty years had been spent in hardship, loneliness, and frustration. Throughout this time he had believed himself to be battling resolutely in God’s service: was this cruel death to be his very last experience, when God could so easily help him to slip out of life’s troubles in peace?

  And yet it was both foolish and unworthy of his rock-like faith to argue against God in this way: that was one lesson which had been demonstrated with startling clarity in the Book of Job. An ant was clever only in the ways of an insect; but its understanding was always limited by the very nature of its tiny thinking organ. Any ant that had strayed into the room of a great mathematician, a great musician, a great scientist, or a great thinker, could certainly have perceived this man to be a human being and sensed those of his actions which affected its own existence; but it could not have fathomed the tremendous fullness of the human mind. Similarly man could not hope to comprehend God. Man’s highest and deepest thoughts were limited by the bodily structure of his mortal brain: what was infinite and immortal could not be grasped by an instrument that was finite and mortal. To protest or to murmur against God was hence not only wrong but utterly futile, since the very reasoning that lay behind it was the result of man’s insistence on envisaging God merely as a glorified and apotheosised human being.

  Whatever his tormented brain might think about it all, Strehlow knew that there was only one Christian answer to his problems of doubt and fear: to pray with all sincerity that hardest, gravest, and darkest of all the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer – ‘Thy will be done’. He had prayed the Lord’s Prayer many thousands of times in his life – in German, English, Dieri, and Aranda; and he had often read it also both in Latin and in its original Greek. He had preached sermons on it, and believed himself to be aware of all its awesome implications. It was only now, however, that its full and limitless command to the human spirit to surrender and to subordinate all its wishes and aspirations to the will of God had begun to throw out its iron-fisted challenge at him. Rock-like faith was not enough in the eyes of God. Indeed, men whose faith had the strength of granite were often men of strong personal will as well; and it was precisely these men who were often subjected to the hardest tests by God – to tests designed to break their will and to force them to submit themselves without any reservations to the supreme will of God.

  Perhaps he had been too conscious in the past of the strength of his personal faith, and now his Master was testing him in a furnace heated to its grimmest fire by hot blasts of pain and by paralysing sensations of his state of absolute forsakenness. Each day it was getting harder, not easier, for him to pray in full honesty that grave petition – ‘Thy will be done’; and yet he felt that he must learn to do so, without faltering, without doubts, and without any secret personal reservations.

  NEXT MORNING STREHLOW WOKE up from another drugged night to face another long and enervating day of physical pain and further wearisome and tiring hours of mute self-questioning and spiritual struggle. That struggle was all the harder for him because he could not share more than a small part of it with his unsuspecting wife, whose eyes seemed to have been mercifully blinded so that she could not see that the man sitting in the chair next to her, whose pains from time to time caused him to groan audibly, was slowly approaching the end of his sufferings.

  Strehlow knew now, not only that that simple-sounding petition ‘Thy will be done’ was the hardest prayer ever enjoined on mortal men, but also that there were situations in which few, if any, men or women could repeat these words without at least some measure of hypocrisy. Try as he might, he could not rid his mind of some last-minute reservations.

  Had anyone ever been able, by his own strength of will, to utter those words with complete sincerity during the hardest tests imposed on him from above? And was God unaware that there existed situations which the tortured hearts of His sincerest servants could not face with complete, unquestioning submission to His will?

  Suddenly he recalled Christ’s own passionate prayers during his last night in the garden of Gethsemane. He had so often
reviewed the story of Christ’s passion in the season of Lent, when the Aranda congregation at Hermannsburg, according to a long-standing station tradition, attended a short service every Wednesday morning before starting their work for the day. But never had that one brief span of twenty four hours into which Christ’s sufferings had been compressed before his death on the cross become so meaningful for him as during the weeks of his own cruel illness. Only now had he come to realise fully that even Christ, who had so often proclaimed that he and the Father were one and that he had come into the world to fulfil the will of the Father, had, when the hour of that fulfilment came upon him, faced an all-exhausting battle in his own heart before he had been able to submit his will to that of his Father. As a result of his own illness the sick man had attained to a new and clear vision of that titanic struggle in all its passionate intensity. There had been no purposeful calm courage in Christ’s own mind when he had led his eleven loyal disciples into the secluded garden of Gethsemane. Upon entering it, he had left eight of them behind to wait for his return. He had gone on a little further with his three leading disciples and left them at another place, after telling them, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death; tarry ye here, and watch with me.’ After that he had gone a short distance further for his final struggle, which only his Father might witness. He had fallen on his face to commune with God about the hours of suffering, anguish, public disgrace, and death that lay before him. Not only once but three times had Christ himself, who had taught the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples, prayed earnestly that the cup of bitter suffering and death which was now being put before his lips by his Father should, if possible, pass from him; and three times he had forced himself to add that, if the Father had decided that he must drink from this cup, then he, the Son, would accept the Father’s wish: ‘O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt…If this cup may not pass from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.’ Even Christ had found the struggle so exhausting that in the end his whole body had been covered in sweat, and the sweat that poured from his body had come to resemble great drops of blood. The gospel writers had not recorded how long Christ’s agony had lasted in the garden of Gethsemane; but it was only after he had prayed three times, and after he had received comfort and strength from above, that he had at last been able to rise to his feet and go forward with firm steps to meet the implacable anger of the enraged Church leaders, the insults and the mockery of an Oriental king, the shouts of an incensed, priest-incited multitude clamouring for his death, the violent scourge strokes that quickly turned his back into a quivering expanse of raw flesh, and the hard hammer blows that drove great nails through his hands and his feet. Nailed to his cross, his head lacerated by a crown of thorns, he had then gazed as calmly on the milling, mocking crowd below as he had earlier suffered the brutalities of his jeering tormentors without any screams of pain.

  And so Christ, too, the sick man reflected, had been compelled by God to pass through the full measure of anguish to which ordinary humanity could be subjected; and he had hence experienced for himself the dark depths of that struggle through which thousands of ordinary men and women had to pass before they could utter in perfect sincerity that simple-sounding, yet humanly almost impossible, prayer: ‘Thy will be done.’

  With that realisation, peace came upon him. He would strive to become more like Christ: he would pray for the strength to submit his own will to the will of that God Whose ways were so completely inscrutable, but Whose love for mankind offered the only hope on which men and women could base their faith. And his lips moved as he repeated in a whisper to himself, ‘Kyrie eleison – Christe eleison – Kyrie eleison – Thy will be done.’

  Except for one or two brief snatches of sleep, Strehlow spent most of the day pondering over his personal relationship towards God. The camel-mail team, returning from Hermannsburg, halted for about an hour in the lengthening shadows of the tall river gums at the station while Jack Fountain sipped a leisurely cup of tea with Allan Breaden and Heinrich. Then Fountain resumed his journey, and soon the camels had vanished once more into the southern box gum flat on their road to Horseshoe Bend. Slowly the hot sting of the sun lessened, and the scorched and weary land became covered with an intricate lacework of shadows.

  At six o’clock there was a sudden commotion in the camp. A cloud of dust could be discerned rapidly approaching the station along the Horseshoe Bend road. Within minutes the shapes of horses and of four riders could be seen emerging from this cloud of dust; and by the time this horse party had reached the bank opposite the station, keen-sighted watchers had already identified the riders – they were Mrs Gus Elliot of Horseshoe Bend Station, accompanied by one of her dark stockmen and the two messengers sent out by Allan Breaden on the previous morning. The whole population of Idracowra rushed forward as the riders dismounted, and the air became filled with their shouts and greetings. Mrs Elliot dismounted with the athletic grace of an experienced horsewoman. She shook hands briefly with Allan Breaden and Heinrich, and then asked to be taken without delay to the log cabin where the sick man was anxiously awaiting her news. The shouts of the population had already informed him who she was.

  One look at Strehlow told the young woman that he was close to death; but she concealed her apprehension about his condition perfectly, and smiled pleasantly at him and at his tired wife as she went straight to the point of her errand.

  ‘Mr Strehlow,’ she said in a rich, low-pitched voice, ‘I’ve come with a message for you from the Reverend Stolz. The car he and Mr Wurst were coming up in from Oodnadatta, broke down in the Stevenson crossing north of the Alberga on Sunday morning. The Alberga had pretty well knocked the car out, and the Stevenson finished it off. Mr Stolz was lucky enough to catch the camel-mail from The Oodna soon after the car broke down, and he spoke to Gus, my husband, over the phone as soon as he got to Blood’s Creek this morning at half past nine. When Gus told him he’d got a message from Allan last night about your wanting to wait at Idracowra, Mr Stolz grew quite alarmed. He wants you to come down to The Bend immediately, so’s you’ll be on the Overland Telegraph Line. He said there’s a doctor in Oodnadatta at present, and you could get medical advice from him or from the Hostel by phone once you got to The Bend. But that’s not all,’ she added quickly, when she noted the look of pain and deep disappointment that had come over the tired face of the sick man; ‘Mr Stolz said he was arranging for a local car in Oodnadatta to come up as far as The Charlotte, to take up the doctor himself, and Gus will bring on the doctor from there to The Bend by buggy. There shouldn’t be any trouble as far as The Charlotte – most of the country up to there is, as you know, hard gibber country.’

  Here Mrs Elliot paused for a few moments to allow her more comforting second message to cheer up her listeners. Strehlow replied in a slightly choked voice, ‘Do you think the local driver will do any better at the Alberga crossing than Mr Wurst? And what about all the rest of the creeks after the Alberga? What about the Stevenson? What about Hamilton Bore?’

  The young woman smiled and went on in her comforting voice, ‘Mr Strehlow, the local drivers know how to handle all the creeks north of The Oodna. They’ve had to cross them plenty of times when going over their station runs. They aren’t newchums like the drivers from down south. And they know the right places for crossing the creeks. Even Mr Wurst might’ve got over those two crossings without doing in his clutch if he’d had a better pilot than that chap Jack Fox he picked up in The Oodna. Jack’s all right when he’s sober; but I bet he was drunk when he left The Oodna pub.’

  Strehlow sighed, and sadly nodded his head in agreement. He recalled the trouble he had on one occasion years ago when he was trying to set out in the van from Oodnadatta to Hermannsburg. His white driver had been Dave Hart, the man who had done most of the building jobs for him at Hermannsburg. Dave had been a tireless and honest worker on the mission station. But once he reached an hotel, nobody could tear him away
from the bar. Strehlow had finally, after a delay of twenty-four hours, gone into the bar, dragged Dave out, put him on the van, and then driven the horses himself for the first couple of hours till Dave had sobered up sufficiently to take over the reins. Wurst could easily have had a similarly thirsty bushman to contend with.

  ‘And now, Mr Strehlow,’ concluded Mrs Elliot, ‘here’s our last suggestion. As soon as Gus heard that your horses were all knocked-up, he said to me, ‘Ruby, take our buggy horses and one of our boys to Idracowra and bring Mr Strehlow down. And take Allan’s boys back as well.’ And so we got the boys to round up six buggy horses and some saddle horses early this morning – all the ones close to the station, you know – and after that, the three boys and I got going. We left a bit before eleven o’clock this morning, and it’s taken us seven hours to get here. And now please listen to me. You must come with us, so please don’t say no. Gus and I both know you can’t stand the heat any longer. So I’ll just have a quick cup of tea and a snack while the boys harness our horses to your buggy. We could leave here in half an hour or so, and travel right through the night. It may take us thirteen or fourteen hours to get back to The Bend; for we’ll have to go pretty slowly over those gutters in the table mountains. There’ll be no moonlight tonight – it’s almost new moon, you know. But we’ll be close to The Bend by the time the sun’s up, and you’ll be sitting under a roof next to a phone before the day turns into another scorcher.’