While Carl Strehlow’s agonising death certainly traumatised his son, it served also as a release from his dominant, pervasive influence. From this moment Theo began his new life, but it is a life predicated upon his father’s achievements and his death. Horseshoe Bend was to serve as the fulcrum, for the fourteen-year old who arrived there in flight with his mother and dying father in the blasting heat of 1922, had already formed the intention to return. Among its other claims as a pioneering work in Australian literature, Journey to Horseshoe Bend explains the peculiar, compelling logic of that decision.
We can assume that in 1922 Western Arrernte boys of Strehlow’s age at Hermannsburg were already becoming candidates for initiation. Carl Strehlow would not have countenanced this ordeal for his own son, and yet that was the social reality of the Arrernte world they inhabited. Theodor was conceived and born at Ntaria, and in later life he assumed rights to the totemic identity of the mythical Ntaria ratapa Twins associated with that site. In the ordinary course, if Carl Strehlow had allowed senior Arrernte men the opportunity, there is little doubt Theodor would have been subjected to some form of initiatory event involving this particular Dreaming. Strehlow placed a reproduction of its sacred design as the frontispiece of his magnum opus, Songs of Central Australia, completed in draft well before the Journey was written. Even during the 1920s it was still common practice for novitiates to be set apart, and to undergo a long journey through the inherited totemic landscape of their forefathers. It is tempting to consider Journey to Horseshoe Bend as Strehlow’s own initiatory journey, to be illuminated in the book by his subsequent research. It is worth noting that despite Strehlow’s unparalleled knowledge of the Arrernte, his book offers little insight into their lives and culture. We glean stray details through the mythological episodes which he relates, but the contemporary situation of Aboriginal people in Central Australia never enters the narrative. Strehlow had much to say about this situation, particularly in his published pamphlets, Dark and White Australians (1957) and Nomads in No Man’s Land (1960). In Journey to Horseshoe Bend though, we learn more about the daily life of the European station people (the ‘white folk’) than the Aboriginal people who were the actual inheritors of the great labrynthine Dreamings which Strehlow enlists as part of his own revelatory account.
Strehlow was fifty-eight years old when he wrote the first draft of the book in longhand, almost at a single concerted sitting, having just emerged from a life-threatening operation in an Adelaide hospital. Describing the sequence of events which led to his hospitalisation and recovery, he wrote: ‘I had often – ever since I returned to the Centre in 1932 – wished to write up my father’s death journey to Horseshoe Bend. Now that I had experienced what it is like to face death, & to suffer excruciating pain, I decided to wait no longer than was necessary till I could sit up unaided in bed…On that day [8 May 1966] I began writing Journey to Horseshoe Bend.’1
On falling ill Strehlow had taken leave from his employment as Reader in Linguistics at the University of Adelaide. Returning to university duties after the August vacation he continued to work on the manuscript, and completed the first draft by the end of 1966. Minor revisions followed, and his university typist produced one version after another until January 1967, when Strehlow considered that the manuscript was ready. ‘I should now be able’, he wrote in his journal, ‘to get the whole historical event out of my mind for the first time since 1932, or perhaps even since 1922.’2 This was rather too optimistic, of course. Following a chance enquiry during early 1967 he unearthed a complete archival file relating to the notorious Central Australian police trooper W.H. Willshire, whose eventual arrest by F.J. Gillen for murdering Arrernte people can be traced directly back to Irbmangkara waterhole, where the Strehlow family rested at noon on the second day of their journey. This discovery led to considerable rewriting. It was only from this point, as Strehlow realised the value of interleaving historical elements within his account, that the book began to take its final, composite form. From February to May 1967 he inserted more material on pastoral station history and ‘a number of foolscap pages on aboriginal history & on mythological matters,’ and noted in his journal that the ‘narrative has been considerably improved by these additions’.3 He continued to tinker with it until finally, on 16 June 1967, he wrote to Beatrice Davis at Angus and Robertson, enclosing a copy of the manuscript and describing it in these terms:
[It] deals with my father’s death journey from Hermannsburg to Horseshoe Bend in October, 1922.
This is, of course, a factual account of that journey, set against a double background.
The first is the history of the three oldest Finke River stations in Central Australia (Henbury, Idracowra, and Horseshoe Bend) which lay along the route of that journey. The names and descriptions of the pioneers mentioned in this history are completely authentic.
A second background is provided by the aboriginal mythology of the areas through which this journey was undertaken.
The whole account endeavours to convey an authentic picture of times and persons in the old Central Australia. That age has now passed on as though it had never been, and all the persons mentioned in this story are dead also, apart from the writer.4
Beatrice Davis was one of Australia’s most successful and influential book editors, specialising in biographical works. Her reply to Strehlow indicates that the Journey’s autobiographical content may have been, in part, a response to her own encouragement: ‘I look forward with the keenest interest to reading this, both as a piece of history and fact, I take it, of the autobiography I so often nagged at you to write’.5 That encouragement stemmed from the fact that Angus and Robertson was already at an advanced stage of publishing Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia, a complex and demanding work of more than seven hundred pages, with innumerable diacritics scattered through its interlinear texts of Arandic verse. The extraordinary depth and breadth of Strehlow’s knowledge of Aboriginal culture and his own particular life-history had greatly impressed the firm’s head of publishing, George Ferguson, and Beatrice Davis in turn. Songs of Central Australia had been accepted for publication as early as 1956 but the book was not to appear until 1971. Strehlow hoped for a speedier result with Journey to Horseshoe Bend, and this appeared likely when Davis informed him in October 1967 that the book had been accepted. But difficulties soon arose. As with Songs, Strehlow had submitted the manuscript with numerous diacritic marks attached to Arrernte words. Davis was able to convince him that a book intended for general readership could not contain these ‘diacritical spellings’, and Strehlow reluctantly dispensed with them.5 This involved some rewriting. In the meantime he had entered the book’s manuscript into the Advertiser newspaper’s annual literary competition, at that time the most valuable in the country. The judges were not impressed, and Strehlow began to combine this disappointment with others, as he was prone to do, and to look for blame. This tendency was evident in the manuscript of Journey itself, in that Strehlow had sought to attach blame for his father’s catastrophic condition to the Lutheran hierarchy’s apparent negligence in delaying his evacuation from Hermannsburg until it was too late. The trenchant accusations in the book would sour Strehlow’s relations with the Lutherans, just as his minor disagreements with his funding sources in the University of Adelaide and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra would widen into deep and irreparable rifts. Simultaneously, in 1968, Strehlow’s thirty-three-year marriage to his wife Bertha ended when he left the family home and began living with his secretary and research assistant, Kathleen Stuart, a thirty-sixyear-old divorcee. She had displaced Strehlow’s previous assistant, Philipp Scherer, whose careful cartographic work now went unacknowledged by Strehlow following an acrimonious dismissal (Scherer was the principal creator of the map which formed the endpapers to Journey to Horseshoe Bend, despite Strehlow adding his own and Kathleen’s initials to it).
Under these adverse circumstances the publication of Journey appeared as a bright
prospect, especially when Beatrice Davis wrote on 16 May 1968, suggesting that Strehlow send a photograph for the cover, ‘something symbolic rather than pictorial – unless you have a really striking picture of your father’. Strehlow’s response was to send a colour photograph of Mt Sonder (Rutjumba) illuminated at sunrise (a scene described on the book’s first page), taken by Kathleen Stuart, but this image was later rejected in favour of a black-and-white photograph of a Central Australian river-bed, which to Strehlow’s eye ‘certainly looks like that of the Finke country in the Britannia Sandhills region’. Strehlow’s recommendation that the jacket be tinted in red, ‘the main colour of the Central Australian landscape’, was adopted.6 In the meantime though, the project came close to foundering, for the manuscript had been passed to one of Angus and Robertson’s skilled and trusted copy editors. His comments and alterations, written in red ink on Strehlow’s typescript, produced a sharp response. ‘In thirty five years of writing articles, pamphlets and books’, Strehlow wrote to Beatrice Davis, ‘I have never seen any manuscript of mine mauled as savagely as Journey to Horseshoe Bend’.
Strehlow took offence at the anonymous editor’s annotations, whether he agreed with the corrections or not. Here he was supported vociferously by Kathleen Stuart, who was to join all of Strehlow’s battles with colleagues and institutions for the next twenty years, until Strehlow’s death. She sent her own letter to Beatrice Davis, defending Strehlow’s text.7 In the event, Strehlow accepted a proportion of minor suggestions, but rejected most. For example, the opening sentence to a new section was crossed through in red ink, but Strehlow apparently saw nothing clichéd in it: ‘When the young dawn approached next day the fresh morning air was quickly filled with the twittering and chirping of birds…’ On another page the editor had recommended excising the first clause from the sentence: ‘Like many other men responsible by their lies for the tragedies of other people, the real culprit who had been responsible for the deaths of well over a hundred men, women, and children, remained unpunished’. The indictment in the opening clause was already becoming a familiar strain in Strehlow’s journals, and in his correspondence with officialdom, as likely to be aimed against police such as Willshire as the Lutheran hierarchy or indeed, academics in Canberra. Strehlow would not budge on this or on other editing suggestions. The editor’s red pen targeted Strehlow’s clumsier dialogues and his religious excursuses, such as his description of Carl Strehlow’s characterisation of tale-bearers as agents of Satan, ‘the malicious calumniator whose constant aim it was to spread lies’. The editor may well have detected that Strehlow was projecting something of his present state of mind into his father’s character. Carl Strehlow ‘had come to know’, he wrote, ‘something of that extreme loneliness which is the normal lot of men of outstanding capacity and the invariable burden of men of genius’. Strehlow stood his ground on all these editorial interventions, conceding only in matters of punctuation, where the Angus and Robertson house style applied. In the meantime, his correspondence with Beatrice Davis confirms Kathleen Stuart’s growing influence in shaping the book’s final form:
All pages on which dialogue occurs were revised most carefully for local idiom, in order to reproduce the speech of the Central Australian pioneers as accurately as possible…Mrs Stuart, who has met many bush characters (in W.A.) some years ago, was able to draw my attention to quite a few matters which were then set right in the final copy. Without Mrs Stuart’s hard work and cooperation the revision of Journey to Horseshoe Bend could not have been carried out in the extremely limited time available.8
Davis had asked Strehlow whether he wanted the breaks in the book’s narrative formalised as chapters. His reply, in the same letter, is valuable as it provides the only direct evidence of Strehlow’s method of dividing the text to correspond to each day of the fateful journey:
Since the book has no chapters but falls into 13 divisions coinciding with the 13 days covered by Journey to Horseshoe Bend, I have begun each of these 13 sections with one or two words typed completely in capitals and beginning at the left-hand margin. The ends of these divisions have been marked by asterisks in my typescript text.
This format was preserved, but would be apparent to only the most assiduous reader, if only because the narrative wove in and out of several modes during the course of each day. In fact, four main modes are apparent in the book – the journey itself, pastoral station history, Aboriginal mythology and biblical references. For the first thirty-two pages the book alternates between the journey and historical vignettes, before widening its scope to include the references to Dreaming and the Bible. Often a single day (or section) takes in all four elements, at least once, creating an effect of motion reflecting the tumult of the journey itself. Invariably though, each section comes to rest each evening and begins on the following morning.
Journey to Horseshoe Bend was finally published in September 1969, essentially in line with Strehlow’s final draft, with its pathos and accusatory tone intact. It was, as a reviewer put it, ‘a winter’s tale set in burning sands of bitter fears & disappointment, with one thread of pure gold running through the horror’.9 The book sold well during 1969 and was a critical success, garnering a cascade of good reviews in the popular press and religious and anthropological journals. Strehlow had purchased a bulk order of thirty-two copies which he sent to key literary figures and anthropologists, including A.D. Hope, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago and Helmut Petri in Cologne. Again, the response was enthusiastic. Lévi-Strauss replied to Strehlow on 8 January 1970, writing: ‘For years I have lived so close to your illustrious father’s and your own work that I was most delighted to receive the copy of your new book. I shall read it with utmost interest’.10 Early in 1970 the book was awarded the C. Weickhardt Award for Australian Literature for ‘the best Australian general book of 1969’ at Melbourne’s Moomba Festival. Inevitably though, the book drew fire from the Lutheran hierarchy in Adelaide. Strehlow’s attribution of blame for his father’s death had been too pointed, too loaded with retributive animus, to pass without comment.
The response came in May 1970 from the President of the Lutheran Church in Australia, Rev. M. Lohe. ‘It is a very illuminating book which will appeal to many people’, he wrote, ‘but, unfortunately, there are quite a number of shadows, not the least being a total misrepresentation of the late J.J. Stolz and the Finke River Mission Board. This reveals clearly that the chips you have had on your shoulders for very many years have not been removed’. Lohe went on to defend Stolz’s reputation, noting his earnest efforts to convince Carl Strehlow to take recuperative leave from Hermannsburg before his final illness, and recording Stolz’s subsequent efforts to rescue Strehlow once the extent of his illness became known. Strehlow responded to this criticism with a sweeping and exhaustive twenty-page letter, closely typed, in which he rejected those arguments and advanced all the evidence which suited his case. As a justification for his stance against the Lutheran hierarchy he also revealed that the book was, at least in part, a debt owed to his mother, Frieda Strehlow: ‘The writing of a book on this journey did not occur to me only in recent years, but had been on my mind ever since the events of 1922. Every year my mother would remind me, in October, of what had happened at Horseshoe Bend; and my memory was refreshed by my recalling of significant circumstances.’11
No doubt his mother also reminded him of the kindness they had received from the ‘bush folk’ encountered en route, at the three Finke River pastoral stations – the ‘one thread of pure gold’ in the story. But Strehlow’s characterisation of the white pastoralists is close to patronising; he elevates their conduct principally to contrast them with the mean-spirited Lutherans who caused his father’s death. In fact, according to one of Strehlow’s sons, the book was later known in Lutheran circles by the title ‘How the Church killed my father’. The controversy over Carl Strehlow’s death lingered for many years after the book was written, with articles published on both sides. These cul
minated in a balanced summary of the evidence published in 2006 by Paul Albrecht, son of Carl Strehlow’s successor at Hermannsburg. Albrecht’s view was that Strehlow’s harsh criticism of Stolz was unfair. Stolz had done his best to save Carl Strehlow, both before and after his illness worsened, just as Carl Strehlow had done his best not to abandon the Arrernte at Hermannsburg, realising too late that his illness had made it almost impossible to reach medical aid.12
Songs of Central Australia was published in 1971, two years after Journey to Horseshoe Bend. It was quickly recognised as an unprecedented classic work of Aboriginal oral literature and anthropology, and propelled Theodor Strehlow to notice within and beyond Australia. He was just sixty-three years old, and given that Songs contained barely a sampling of the material he had gathered during his fieldwork with the Arrernte, it might be expected that a stream of books and publications would follow. In fact, as mentioned, Songs had been submitted to Angus and Robertson in 1956. Extraordinarily, Journey to Horseshoe Bend was to be his last book. Although Strehlow continued to work on his material until his death in 1978, the contemplative time he required for writing was filled instead with controversy and discord, both with colleagues and with the institutions funding his research. He and his new wife Kathleen had an unhappy facility for alienating more friends than they made, and finally, through their extreme possessiveness over the Strehlow collection of artefacts, sound recordings, films, photographs and documents, the Arrernte themselves came to distrust his motives, particularly after Strehlow became complicit in the publication of restricted ceremonial photographs. Controversy over the Strehlow Collection mounted in the years after his death, until it was acquired by the Northern Territory government and placed in a specially designed building in Alice Springs, the Strehlow Research Centre, opened in 1991. The building houses the combined collections of Carl and Theodor Strehlow. It is increasingly visited and used by Arrernte people, on their own terms.
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