T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  Mrs Strehlow offered no further resistance, and Mrs Elliot took her into the adjoining room, where two beds had already been made up. ‘The second bed is for Theo,’ Mrs Elliot explained. ‘I thought you might like to have somebody to talk to tonight in case you can’t go to sleep in this heat.’

  As Mrs Elliot turned to leave the room, Pastor Stolz entered. ‘Sister Strehlow,’ he said in a low-pitched yet resonant voice, ‘I have come to express to you my deepest sympathy. In this grave hour I can do no more than commit you to the care of the Lord, Who has promised to be the protector of the widows and the orphans. He will comfort you and care for you.’

  ‘Pastor Stolz,’ replied Mrs Strehlow, bravely trying to speak coherently in spite of her tears, ‘I just cannot understand it. I did not know that my Carl was dying. It was just as though my eyes were being held shut so that I could not see anything. And now he has gone – I did not even tell him before he went how much I loved him. The last words I said to him were spoken when I was so very upset, and he did not reply to me.’

  She broke down and buried her face in her hands.

  Stolz’s voice was calm as he comforted her. ‘Sister Strehlow, you have done the impossible for your husband for many weeks. Don’t blame yourself now for anything that you didn’t do. I am sure that God Himself in His mercy shut your eyes so that you could carry on as you did till this very hour.’

  When Mrs Strehlow had calmed down a little, Stolz continued, ‘And now let me tell you what Mrs Elliot and I were whispering about just outside the door as your husband died. She had received only a few moments earlier a telephone call from Charlotte Waters, telling her that Breaden’s car which was to bring the doctor up from Oodnadatta had been held up by an unexpected flood in the Alberga. It could not hope to get through for several days, perhaps even for a week, depending on how quickly the Alberga went down. Gus had rung to ask her about your husband’s condition. He wanted to know, should he wait at Charlotte Waters for that time or not. When Mrs Elliot told me this, I knew that it was God’s wish to call unto Himself the soul of His weary servant and to give him his reward for his faithfulness unto death. That was why all our little human efforts to intervene had to fail. What has happened has been the will of the Lord of life and death. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!’

  ‘I shall try to accept God’s will without arguing against Him,’ whispered Mrs Strehlow, battling in vain to stop her tears. ‘Only I still cannot grasp it – O my Carl, I did not even know that you were dying. Why did you not take me with you? O my God, what is to become of me?’

  ‘The Church will not let you down,’ Stolz promised. ‘It will mean your staying in Australia for the time being. But I will talk to you about that tomorrow, when you have had time to rest. And now, here’s your son – I will leave you together and go.’ And he closed the door on their grief.

  Theo had been told the news of his father’s death while he was sitting with his friends in the aboriginal camp. It had been relayed by the half-caste kitchen women by shouts and sign language, and had been received in the camp with loud cries of grief. The women immediately began their customary wailing for the dead man who had long since become accepted as an Aranda father figure even at places as far removed from Hermannsburg as Horseshoe Bend, Alice Springs, and the stations located on the Hugh River. Theo had run to the hotel as soon as he had heard the news. Though shocked by the final suddenness of his father’s death, he reacted with outward calmness; and when he was left alone in the room with his mother, he tried to reassure her as much as any teenage boy could. Nor was he afraid of the future – it might be harsh and difficult, but he would face up to it, come what might. Other boys had come through similar and even much worse tragedies. He had always believed that life in the white world would be a hard battle for a bush boy who had never known any white playmates. Whether that struggle would have to be fought out in Germany or in Australia did not really matter to him. The cheerful little freckle-faced boy who had ten years earlier walked many miles with his mother on the journey from Oodnadatta to Hermannsburg had long since acquired the sturdy independent attitudes of a ‘bush kid’ to a degree that his mother had not yet comprehended.

  At about seven in the evening Mrs Elliot knocked at the door and told Mrs Strehlow that she could come and take her last look at her late husband. The sickroom had been completely tidied up. The dead man lay on the bed with all perspiration washed off him, covered by a clean white sheet. His body was lying stretched out fully for the first time for over a month. With his arms folded across his chest, he was reclining in an attitude of perfect peace. All signs of strain had vanished from his slightly bluish face: once more it looked powerful, manly, and resolute. Mrs Strehlow looked at him for some minutes and then turned to go, saying, ‘I only wish he had taken me with him to that peace that he has been granted at last.’ Theo, who had not been able to take his eyes off his dead father, was certain that his father’s face was not merely peaceful but that it bore the look of someone who had known the joy of final triumph at the moment of death. He followed his mother out with a new sense of determination to face the challenge of life in the indomitable spirit of his father.

  Mrs Strehlow slept little during the night. It seemed to her that her life had lost its whole meaning and purpose with the death of the husband with whom she had hoped to go home at last to her own country. She reflected that her span of years had been a long series of tragedies and bitter hardships. She had been born at Geroldsgruen in Bavaria as one of the two children of a Franconian mine owner, whose family had been able to trace their descent – and their mine-ownership at Geroldsgruen – back to the first half of the sixteenth century. Her father had been the last of this long line of mine owners. The ore had given out when he was still a young man, and he had soon been plunged into heavy debts. Before she had turned four, her father had died. Soon after her tenth birthday the death of her mother and the loss of the old family estate, which had been left to her stepfather, had forced her to leave her home. She had been fortunate in being taken into the care of relatives. But except for a short period in a technical college at Neuendettelsau she had been forced to earn her keep by serving in a clerical household. She had met her future husband briefly only during the Easter weekend before his departure to Australia. Though she had been only sixteen and a half years old at the time, she had fallen in love with him, and had followed him out to Australia three years later. She had always missed her homeland with its evergreen meadows, pine forests, and running brooks since her arrival in Australia. And now she was being forced to turn back alone and to leave her husband behind among the barren cliffs of Horseshoe Bend. She had looked forward for years to a quiet life in Germany in a manse with her husband upon his departure from Hermannsburg. That dream would never come true now; and she knew also that she would never again be the mistress of a home of her own. Was this to be God’s reward for her many years of heartache and loneliness at Hermannsburg?

  It was long after midnight before she was able to recall without bitterness the words of Loehe’s motto for deaconesses which she had treasured ever since her brief period in the technical college at Neuendettelsau. She had it framed and had often looked at it in the dining-room of her home at Hermannsburg. She had never stood in greater need than now of the plainspoken exhortations which it contained for all those women who purposed to dedicate their lives to God’s service:

  What do I want? I want to serve.

  Whom do I want to serve? The Lord, in His poor and needy.

  And what is my reward?

  I serve neither for reward nor for thanks, but out of gratitude and love: my reward is that I may serve…

  When the darkness eased in the eastern sky, she had at last been able to regain control over herself and her emotions. Her faith had stood the test.

  LIGHT CLOUDS HAD BEGUN spreading over the sky during the hot and stifling night that followed. They had served to shut in and to conse
rve the heat of the preceding day like layers of insulating material thrown over a pre-heated surface. For the second night in succession no one at Horseshoe Bend had slept much. The choking air had allowed no one to relax completely; and through the stillness of the dark hours there had sounded from time to time the subdued wailings of the dark women in the camp, carrying out their age-old traditional lamentations for a loved kinsman whom death had suddenly torn out of their midst. Each burst of wailing began on a high-pitched note and descended by degrees, in a series of musical sobs, to the lowest note of the tonal pattern used for these lamentations. All the lost hopes of mortal mankind and all the desolation of the great wastes of the Centre seemed to find their expression in these infinitely sad protestations of grief for the departed. According to the time-honoured Southern Aranda explanation, the Central Australian folk had wailed for their dead in this manner ever since that fatal dark dawn when the two Ntjikantja brothers had first pronounced their grim curse upon the stricken Tangka host at Uralterinja.

  Long before sunrise the burial preparations began. White-bearded Jack Fountain, with the assistance of one of the three-quarter white Elliot sons, went to the station store and set to work constructing a coffin. Almost immediately afterwards echoing noises made by picks and crowbars which rang back from the low, barren hillside north of the station proclaimed that a mixed group of grave-diggers, too, had decided to get a start on their back-breaking task of making an excavation in the rocky ground alongside the grave of Sargeant senior.

  Jack Fountain’s task was by far the lighter of the two. He and his assistant had soon found four long dry gum saplings which had originally been chopped down for roofing purposes. These were cut into suitable lengths. Then some old whisky cases were ripped up, and their boards nailed to these gum saplings to form a stout bush coffin. No other timber was available at Horseshoe Bend. But when the coffin had been completed, its weight was found to be excessive. Stolz was called and informed that it would be advisable in view of the overweight of the dead man’s body to take both the coffin and the body to the grave separately. Stolz’s permission having been obtained, Fountain and his assistant accompanied Stolz back to the hotel in order to take Strehlow’s body off his bed and lower it on to an iron stretcher for easier carrying. With two additional helpers, who had been summoned from the hotel staff, the party entered the room where Strehlow had died. Mrs Elliot was also asked to come to the bed. The sheet was lifted carefully off the face of the dead man but was pushed back again quickly. When the body, completely swathed in the top and bottom sheets that had formed its final bedclothes, was lifted up by four strong men, the lower linen sheet was ripped by the weight: the sheet was an old one, and it had already become saturated by its contact with the body. More sheeting had to be placed underneath before the body could be lowered on top of the stretcher.

  The sound of the shuffling feet of the struggling men brought in Mrs Strehlow from the adjoining room. ‘Please let me have a last look at my Carl before you put him in his coffin,’ she pleaded and advanced toward Jack Fountain. Quickly Mrs Elliot put her arm around her and restrained her. ‘Please, Mrs Strehlow, you mustn’t look at him again,’ she explained. ‘You see, it’s been a hot night… And your husband’s condition has made things worse. Just try to remember his face as you saw it last night.’ The older woman did not reply at first, but stared almost vacantly at the covered body on the stretcher, feeling completely stunned. Then she turned to leave the room. ‘I understand,’ she whispered to Mrs Elliot, ‘thank you.’ As soon as she had left, the stretcher was moved out and set down on the verandah.

  The grave-diggers meanwhile toiled and sweated in temperatures that soon left the century mark far behind. Though the rocks at the foot of the ridge were of the softer types, they still offered stubborn resistance to the cutting edges of picks and crowbars. Only the use of the heaviest crowbars enabled the toilers to maintain a reasonable rate of progress. Nor could any explosives be used because of the proximity of the new excavation to Sargeant’s grave. In the end most of the able-bodied male population of Horseshoe Bend, both white and dark, came out and took turns at excavating the hole while the sun rose higher and higher in the sky. The light clouds were beginning to thicken; but though their shade was greatly appreciated, the increase in the humidity of the air made the toil of the diggers just as unpleasant as it would have been had the day been hot and cloudless.

  At length, at half past ten in the morning, several of the men returned to the hotel to announce that the grave was ready; and four of them volunteered to take the heavy coffin over first. Since the ground on which the hotel stood was separated by a rough watercourse from the bare hillside where the grave had been dug, the coffin-bearers lurched and stumbled along in almost drunken fashion before they reached the hole. After the coffin had been set down, virtually all of the grave-diggers were summoned to the hotel verandah. It took six sweating men at a time to carry the heavy iron stretcher with the overweight body to the grave. Most of the bearers had to be relieved by others before they had reached their destination. The hard, uneven ground, with its sharp slopes down into the watercourse and again up from it, and the loose pebbles on the far side, made the task of the stretcher-bearers a particularly difficult one. But eventually they reached the graveside without any mishap; and the body was safely taken from the stretcher and lowered into the coffin. And now an unpleasant discovery was made by the funeral party. The oversized coffin, when placed over the grave on two saplings, proved to be an excessively tight fit for the narrow hole dug out for it. It became clear that the rough lid, if nailed down on the coffin, would not go past the edges of the grave. Widening the hole would have entailed at least a further hard hour’s toil for the exhausted grave-diggers, whose torn and blistered hands were beginning to bleed in many places. After a short consultation between Stolz and the weary men it was agreed that the lid should be left off, so that the coffin could be successfully forced and squeezed down as far as possible into the narrow grave. An empty candle-case was finally jammed down to give secure protection to the face of the dead man. After that the useless lid was thrust into the grave as far as it would go. Finally the coffin and the lid were hidden under a thick layer of green gum tips thrown over them.

  The funeral procession now left the hotel. It included all the white folk staying at the hotel, all the dark and coloured men on the station, and many of the dark women and children from the camp. Mrs Strehlow and her son were escorted by Heinrich, Mrs Elliot, Jack Fountain, Harry Tilmouth, Snowy Pearce, and a couple of other white men. In addition there stood at the graveside Jakobus, Titus, and Hesekiel, with about a dozen dark and part-coloured Horseshoe Bend men. Victoria and Lill, the two half-caste kitchen women, stood in the front rank of the female mourners.

  The order of the funeral service had necessarily to be modified to suit the unusual situation and the unconventional congregation. The greater part of the service was conducted in English. The two psalms read as lessons seemed singularly appropriate to the tragic events of the previous day. The first was the twenty-third psalm with its note of deep trust: ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.’ The concluding verses of the other psalm (the hundred-andtwenty-sixth psalm) struck a confident note for the future: ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.’ For the benefit of the widow, however, the benediction of the body was pronounced in German, and the first part of the service was concluded by the singing, in German, of two verses of the hymn O Gott, Du frommer Gott, with its final prayer:

  Let me depart this life

  Confiding in my Saviour;

  Do Thou my soul receive,

  That it may live for ever;

  And let my body have

  A quiet resting-place


  Beside a Christian’s grave;

  And let it sleep in peace!

  And on that solemn day

  When all the dead are waking,

  Stretch o’er my grave Thy hand,

  Thyself my slumbers breaking;

  Then let me hear Thy voice,

  Change Thou this earthly frame,

  And bid me to rejoice

  With those who love Thy name!

  After some biographical details relating to Strehlow had been read out, Stolz gave a short address in which he stressed the single-mindedness and devotion to duty of the deceased – how he had left his homeland, given himself wholly to his task, and remained faithfully at his post till death had relieved him. He had been able to do these things only because of the rock-like strength of his faith. A few words were added for the benefit of the dark people present: the man they had come to bury was someone who had devoted his life to teaching them that God and His heaven existed not only for the white people but also for the dark folk.

  The congregation, during both the English and the German parts of the service, stood around the grave in attitudes of deep reverence for the deceased and warm sympathy for those who had survived him. Mrs Strehlow stood her ordeal with calm courage and dignity, trembling only when the hard lumps of earth and stone fell with a clatter on to the green gum branches shading the coffin, while Stolz pronounced the familiar words: ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’

  Only twice was the full congregation called upon to join personally in the service – during the praying of the Lord’s Prayer and during the singing of the grave-side hymn. The selection of the latter for a congregation that knew and cared little about church worship or hymn-singing had given Stolz a great deal of headache. After discussion with Mrs Elliot he eventually decided on ‘Rock of Ages’: this was felt to be the most likely hymn whose tune might be known to most of those present. In the absence of hymn-books it was given out to the singers line by line: