T G H Strehlow

by Journey to Horseshoe Bend (retail) (epub)

  The latter was fitted out first, since Stolz was due to leave immediately after an early midday meal. Stolz spent over an hour after Elliot’s return with Mrs Strehlow discussing her future and that of her son. He made it abundantly clear that her best plan would be to remain in Australia for the present and to send her son to the new secondary school that the Church was due to open in Adelaide at the beginning of the following year. While Stolz could not give any definite financial undertakings, he promised to do his best to obtain the necessary assistance from the Church both for Mrs Strehlow and her son for at least the whole of the following year. Theo, when called in and told of the new plans for his education, accepted them with pleasure; for they meant that he would not have to leave his homeland after all.

  This conversation was interrupted by a telephone call from Alice Springs for Mrs Strehlow. Mrs Stott, the wife of Sergeant Stott, had rung to express her sympathy. ‘Dear Mrs Strehlow,’ she said, ‘I just felt I had to ring you even though my husband and I had already sent you that wire last Friday evening. We still can’t grasp what’s happened – your dear husband’s death has thrown such a sadness into the police station, and we don’t seem to be able to throw it off. To think that that was the end of the huge sacrifice of life that the dear Reverend Mr Strehlow made! I suppose it’s the will of God – certainly beyond my understanding. My husband and I cannot get over nor understand we will close the curtains on one of the best men in the country – most conscientious in his work and life, and respected by all.’

  Mrs Strehlow was too overwhelmed by the obvious sincerity of this tribute to do more than stammer out a few broken words of thanks. She apologised for her inability to carry on a more coherent conversation.

  ‘Don’t worry, dear Mrs Strehlow,’ replied Mrs Stott, and her voice was full of warm sympathy. ‘There’s just one more thing that my husband wants me to tell you about. It’s about the half-castes here at The Bungalow. You know what a problem Mrs Standley and we are having with them. The Government certainly doesn’t know what to do with them. That is why my husband and Mr Urquhart called on Mr Strehlow last July when he was so ill. Your husband didn’t see how he could take the half-castes off our hands – we feel now that he was too ill to listen to our plans. But we hope to see the Reverend Mr Stolz at The Alice, and we still hope The Mission Station will take them all. They do no good here. At the Mission Station they would at least learn to fear God and learn the higher ideals of life. We trust that The Mission will be pleased to take these poor foundlings – the surroundings here are against them.’

  Mrs Strehlow, who was well acquainted with Urquhart’s and Stott’s plan, remembered how alarmed her husband had been about it. He had felt obliged to oppose it because he could not see how Hermannsburg could house two different sets of people in one small area – a legally underprivileged and segregated aboriginal population and a privileged half-caste school population that was to be trained for absorption into the white community. Ever since that evening in July he had been worrying lest the Government, offended by his refusal, should use the burden of the debt that was lying on Hermannsburg as an excuse for taking over the mission and turning it into a governmental half-caste settlement. It was a relief to Mrs Strehlow to learn that Urquhart’s and Stott’s plan had been based on genuine high regard for her husband as an educator, and on admiration for his standing among the aboriginal and part-aboriginal population of the Centre. She thanked Mrs Stott for the tribute the latter had paid her deceased husband.

  ‘Please don’t thank me,’ replied Mrs Stott. ‘I’m only sorry your husband won’t be at Hermannsburg if Mr Stolz does accept the Government’s plan. It will be a long time before Hermannsburg will see another man like Mr Strehlow.’

  Sergeant Stott added a few personal words of tribute to those of his wife; and then the conversation ended. The ‘uncrowned king of Central Australia’ had paid his last respects to the man for whom he had come to feel the highest admiration towards the end of his long career at Hermannsburg. Other tributes were to come later to Strehlow from men holding higher public positions; but Stott’s remarks set the official Central Australian seal of approval on one of Central Australia’s outstanding men.

  It did not take long to harness the Henbury donkeys to the buggy after a rushed midday meal. Njitiaka and Lornie were to take Stolz back to Henbury, with Jakobus bringing up the loose donkeys behind them. From Henbury Stolz hoped to complete his trip to Hermannsburg with horses borrowed from Bob Buck. In any case, he knew that there would be the mission horses available which had been left behind at Henbury on the way down.

  When the buggy was ready to leave, Njitiaka and Lornie said a sad goodbye to Mrs Strehlow and her son. After that it was Jakobus’s turn to say farewell. He came up slowly, leading his horse by the bridle. Always a taciturn man, Jakobus did not make a long speech about his feelings; but his few short words were vibrant with emotion and unaffected in their sincerity. First he shook Mrs Strehlow warmly by the hand and assured her that neither he nor the rest of the Hermannsburg folk would ever forget their dead ingkata. Then he turned to Theo and appealed to him never to forget his own homeland and his own Aranda folk. ‘Your father now rests with us, here in the land of the Aranda people, and you too must return to us and to your own home of Ntarea after you have finished your schooling. Always remember us as we shall remember you – don’t leave your own folk forever.’ He shook Theo’s hand with honest, deep, heartfelt affection. Then he turned, mounted his horse, and rode slowly to the yard to round up the loose donkeys. Njitiaka and Lornie called out to their team. Loud shouts of farewell rose from the circle of watchers, and the buggy moved forward, with Stolz waving a vigorous goodbye to Horseshoe Bend. The empty easy-chair which was being taken back on the buggy as a gift to Bob Buck was a poignant reminder of Strehlow’s death journey. With plodding but resolute steps the donkeys moved down into the Finke and across the white river bed into the cane grass flats on the other side.

  The white and the dark watchers dispersed and went back to their rooms and wurleys. Only Theo remained behind. Shading his eyes with his right hand, he kept looking after the buggy till it had vanished from his sight in the distant box gum flats. A strong emotional reaction now began to set in in his mind; for the departing vehicle reminded him of the sudden and tragic end of the journey that had been undertaken with such great faith and courage to save his father’s life. The vanished vehicle had suddenly come to seem to him like a token of the vanity of man’s hopes – a symbol of the utter futility of all human endeavours when they matched themselves against a higher force that was outside human control. Many men and women had rallied to the assistance of his father after he had been stricken down by his last illness at Hermannsburg. Hesekiel’s marathon walk to Alice Springs, Mrs Elliot’s courageous ride to Idracowra, Gus Elliot’s determined dash to Charlotte Waters: all of these had been, in a very real sense, heroic feats, taxing to the utmost the determination and the physical stamina of the persons who had in these exploits hurled themselves recklessly into this grim battle to save a human life. Wurst had not hesitated to risk his new car for the same unselfish purpose. Buck, Butler, and Breaden had offered whatever means there had been in their power to supply. The population of the Centre, both dark and white, had been ready to rise to his sick father’s assistance without any holding back of their private resources or stinting of their strength. And yet, all these high hopes had been blighted, and all this rugged energy and boundless enthusiasm had proved to be of no avail. The two cars sent north from Oodnadatta had both been stopped by the Alberga – the first by its sand and the second by its floodwaters; and most of the men and women who had heard of these events had accepted them in a spirit of fatalism as proofs that his father’s hour of death had been fixed irrevocably. Stolz and Mrs Strehlow had seen in these events the intervention of God, Who was summoning His tired servant to His side. The bush folk had been convinced that these happenings revealed the existence of something that could best be
described as a blind Force akin to Fate. ‘When the game was up’, men had to die. Or, as the men who had returned from the recent World War had expressed it, ‘No man can escape a bullet that’s got his number written on it.’ Even Strehlow’s death on a Friday fitted in with the old bush beliefs; for all the ‘old hands’ in the country knew that Friday was a day of ill, a day of bad luck, a day of grim accidents, and certainly a day on which no new task should ever be started since it would be dogged by misfortune from the beginning to the end. Theo was too confused to be able to reason or argue clearly in his mind about these matters. He felt completely overwhelmed by a chaotic turmoil of conflicting thoughts, doubts, and anxieties. The only thing about which he felt certain was that his father had died because he had been meant to die by a higher Power. But why should his death have had to happen now, and at this desolate spot? Why at Horseshoe Bend?

  Now that the buggy had vanished from his sight, he was suddenly experiencing an overpowering sense of loss: his father was lying buried at Horseshoe Bend, the buggy with the familiar donkeys and three of his friends was returning to Hermannsburg without him, and an uncertain future lay menacingly before him. His mind began to be overcome by deep distrust for the new, white, southern world into which he would soon be making his entry: would he find in it such things as friendship, kindness, decency, or loyalty? His reading of books and magazines had given him no definite reassurances on these matters. During the war years many of the Adelaide newspapers and periodicals had conveyed to him a terrifying impression of the unreasoning popular hatred felt towards the Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg. Again, the Lutheran Church itself and even its ministers had, he felt, let his father down badly during his last illness; and even the late efforts made by Stolz and Wurst had not done much to dispel this unfavourable impression. But even stronger than these well-based feelings of anxiety was the natural fear of entry into a new and totally strange human environment. Up to this point in his life Theo had been a bush kid who had to fight his battles in a completely isolated white bush community. The only playmates he had ever known had been dark boys and girls; and in all his relations with them he had been compelled to conform to the aboriginal norms of behaviour, since he had been the only white child among scores of Aranda youngsters. What would life be like in that distant coastal ‘South’, about which his dark friends knew nothing and to which the white population of the Centre referred mainly in depreciatory, resentful, or sneering terms? The white bush folk, who thought of themselves as strong, tough, honest, and virile types, had far too often referred to the ‘Southerners’ as self-seeking, unfriendly, and hypocritical types in Theo’s hearing; and their derogatory remarks had left a strong effect on the mind of the sensitive boy who could not correct these criticisms by any personal observations.

  Theo felt that he could not return to the hotel – not just yet, anyway. He wanted to be alone. And yet not alone – merely out in the open, somewhere by himself in the Finke bed, looking upon its colourful bordering cliffs for the last time, undisturbed and unobserved. The Finke constituted the last link with his lost boyhood home. It was the ancient Lira Beinta, the greatest of all the sleeping Aranda rivers, famed and celebrated in the mythology of the Western and Southern Aranda regions. It came down from the distant MacDonnell Ranges, from the vast rocky slopes of Rutjubma and Ltarkalibaka; it swept past Ntarea to the very base of the red mountain mass of Lalkintinerama; and it rushed from there into its thirty-five-mile gorge south of Hermannsburg, on its winding way to Irbmangkara. Rutjubma, Ltarkalibaka, and Lalkintinerama – or as they were known to the white population, Mt Sonder, Mt Giles, and Mt Hermannsburg: these were the three great mountains that had greeted his eyes at Hermannsburg every day that he could remember; and Ntarea was his own home – the birthplace that bestowed upon him his Aranda citizenship rights which no man could ever take away from him. The high mountain of Lalkintinerama, over whose red, pine-studded dome the baby Twins of Ntarea had wandered after leaving their birthplace in Palm Valley, the two desert oaks in the sandhills north of Hermannsburg which indicated the furthest point of their wanderings, the second pair of desert oaks on the southern bank of the Finke which marked the place where they had paused before diving into the deep pool of Ntarea, the rounded hill of Alkumbadora which had come into being when the frantic mother of the Twins threw away her pitchi upon seeing the foam flakes rising on the disturbed waters of Ntarea after her babies had leapt into it: all these sites were familiar to Theo, and the traditions connected with them were his birthright, though so far he knew the myth only in its barest outline and had not yet heard the sacred verses. The Lira Beinta was his own river: no matter what the future might bring, he would never cease to regard himself as one of the children of the Finke River.

  He quickened his steps as he walked rapidly past the stockyard because the stench of stale blood and decomposing manure outside the killing pen was nauseating him. A flock of ragged, squawking crows abused him from the top beam of the gallows as he passed by. He did not heed them, but plunged down into the soft, clean sand of the Finke and plodded upward in the river bed for several hundred yards till the station was out of sight, shut out by the high cliff bank of Pot’ Arugutja. From this position Theo could look northward to the high red-and-white mass of Inggodna and southward to the bold cliff faces of Tnondakngara, Ndaterkaterka, and Gula. Though the sky was full of heavy clouds, the rich colours of these cliffs were unblurred by any dust haze. Their broad slopes of red, white, and yellow gave an air of rich and ageless beauty to this part of the Finke Valley – a beauty completely at variance with the drab barrenness of the rocky expanse on which the hotel and the station buildings were standing. These were the Painted Cliffs of Horseshoe Bend: Theo knew that he would never forget them. Their haunting beauty would mingle forever in his memory with the rough grave-mound on the slopes of the bare ridge north of the station. To whatever lands life might take him, the vision of these Painted Cliffs would accompany his steps, and their heavy shadows would fall across his path.

  Theo lay in the warm, white sand for well over an hour, watching, reflecting, and dreaming, before he felt calm enough to turn back to the station. He would gladly have stayed longer; but he knew that if he did so he would be missed at the station; and then men would be sent to search for him. He rose and shook the loose sand from his clothes. Then he looked at his watch, realised with a start that it was three o’clock, and began hurrying back towards the hotel.

  He had not gone many yards before a distant roll of thunder came to his ears. Within seconds a violent north-westerly gale came sweeping down the Finke Valley from the direction of Mborawatna, and the box gum and cane grass flats that lay across its course rapidly disappeared under huge clouds of grey-and-brown dust. The thunderclaps became more frequent, and their heavy rolling drew closer with menacing rapidity. It was as though the rain ancestresses of Mborawatna had become roused from their long sleep once more. Accompanied by a vast retinue of stormclouds and rain-clouds, they were bearing down upon Horseshoe Bend, with columns of red-brown dust whirling and billowing under them on the ground below. Attended by the terrifying fury of a rain-gale, the ancestresses were once more visiting the parched and suffering land lying south-east of their mythical home, affording it a welcome relief from the fiery heat that normally slumbered under its arid surface. The whole scene looked like a re-enactment of the original progress of the rain ancestresses at the beginning of time, as described in the ancient Rain Song of Mborawatna:

  Let the stormclouds wander over the land!

  Let the fury of the dust-storm wander over the land!

  Let the stormclouds wander over the land!

  Swelling rapidly, let them wander over the land!

  Swelling rapidly, let them wander over the land!

  Swelling rapidly, let their foreheads gleam white!

  Swelling rapidly, let them wander over the land!

  Swelling rapidly, let rain pour from them like water from pitchis!

  H
ardly had Theo reached the shelter of the hotel verandah, when the unnatural darkness that had fallen over the scorched and heat-baked landscape was rent by a heavy flash of lightning immediately overhead. A deafening roll of thunder shook the building, and all its iron sheets resounded as though some huge, invisible boulder had rolled down upon them from the cliff walls east of the station. The heavy echoes of this clap of thunder reverberated in titanic cascades of sound that made the very ground under the whole station area quiver and quake before the deafening noise finally died down into a long series of low, eddying rumbles, many of which were still loud enough to make the hotel windows rattle. Even as the thunder was fading away into silence, the first heavy drops of rain began to pelt down upon the iron roof of the hotel. The unbearable tension in the air that had been raised by slow degrees to an almost unnatural level over a long series of days of fierce heat and sandstorms and nights of cloud-choked heaviness, seemed to have found its sudden release in that titanic crash. A wild rain-gale suddenly burst upon Horseshoe Bend in unbridled primal fury. As it hit the yard and the station buildings, the last crows flew screaming off their high perch on the central beam of the stockyard gallows. They flapped their way clumsily to the shelter of the Painted Cliffs, wildly tossed about by the mad gusts of the dust-laden hurricane, like black pieces of driftwood carried downstream by the roaring red-brown waves of a storm-flood at its first mad onrush.

  And now the noise of a second thunderstorm could be heard exploding into life over the table mountain country south of Horseshoe Bend, where other huge stormclouds had been building up above the fire mountain of Mbalka. Within minutes the two thunderstorms seemed to have joined their separate forces, and brilliant flashes of lightning began to writhe over Uralirbuka as well. The landscape on all sides vanished behind dense white veils of pouring rain. It was as though the whole country around Horseshoe Bend was passing again through that mythical deluge of rain which had quenched the bushfires of Mbalka at the beginning of time. When the mischievous crow ancestor of Mbalka had awakened in the middle of the night, he had discovered that the two rain ancestors of Erea – a rain grandsire and his grandson – had succeeded in surprising him in his fiery lair at the foot of his mountain: