![]() This year I hope to publish my novel about the journey of Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow and his 14-year-old son Theo from Hermannsburg Mission to Horseshoe Bend in 1922. Here is a working piece I wrote to try and help me focus my thoughts. This story draws on the life of Carl Strehlow (Martin Gerlach), who lived with the Aranda/Arrernte people, tried (with mixed success) to protect them from the worst of the white world (good), used them as station labour (bad), tried to convert them (bad), taught them (good and bad), but slowly learnt the importance of their customs, studying Aranda traditions, later living with regrets (or at least ambivalence) about his role at Hermannsburg Mission. Strehlow was the first (and most broad-minded) Western Aranda anthropologist. His extensive research and writings about Aranda language are now mostly forgotten. For example, his Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1907) was ignored because of a mix of anti-mission sentiment, the effects of Nazism on Australian anthropology and ‘Australian hostility towards the German Lutherans of Central Australia …’ (Kenny, 2013) But Strehlow was a fierce defender of the Aranda people – so admired they named him ‘Ingkata’, or ‘Father’. The Night Parrots is also about the pastor’s relationship with his son, Theo (Benno) and his three-part (Australian/German/Aranda) life. Father and son found a way to exist (sometimes uncomfortably, sometimes paternalistically) within (or at least between) different cultures. Theo spent his life trying to help and further understand the Aranda. He grew up Aboriginal, his friends and ‘mothers’ were Aboriginal, he spoke Aranda, learnt their stories, became part of their culture. Language My protagonist, fifty-year-old Martin Gerlach, is a German Lutheran missionary. Transplanted to the Northern Territory, he comes to see commonality – humans, their needs, their weaknesses, dreams and ambitions. He senses the importance of language and starts (as did Carl Strehlow) a trilingual dictionary (German/English/Aranda). In the words of Kate Grenville: ‘His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of a map of a relationship.’ An uneasy, unsure progression of thoughts becomes word, and language. Martin begins an Aranda translation of the New Testament – a way of sharing his culture. But realises, in return, the limits of this mindset. He starts studying and translating Aranda songs, stories, charms and ceremonies. This is the starting point for the novel. The degree to which two worlds might (or might not) come together. The friction. The resistance. Landscape Over tens of thousands of years indigenous views of landscape (the Western Desert, the Finke) have manifest in story, song, dance and art. White culture offered new explanations (from Charles Darwin to Beethoven, Rousseau to Goethe), attempting a graft that never really took. The Enlightenment bled into Lutheranism, and a missionary mindset that included cattle empires, station kitchens, pottery workshops, Aboriginal stockman and domestics propping up an ill-fitting cultural paradigm. I was hoping to show how, over time, harsh Australian landscapes resisted this European mindset. The journey along the Finke strips away Martin Gerlach’s beliefs, values, clothes, body. At which point he understands his efforts have been wasted. As Patrick White’s Voss discovered when facing the same challenges: ‘To make yourself, it is also necessary to destroy yourself.’ Complexity I wanted to tell a complex, often uncomfortable, story that might resonate today. Silas, for example, an Aranda man brought up in the mission system, still guided by his ancestors. He understands the ‘old stories’ (as described by Strehlow) but is a Lutheran convert, obsessed with preaching the Bible. He cares about his own people, but also about his mission family. He is torn. But so are the white characters. Martin – only now, at the end of his life, unsure if he’s done more damage than good. Benno, brought up with the stories (and opposing values) of each culture, eventually becoming an ethnographer and continuing his father’s work (but also doubts). Time The book moves between 1922 (Martin’s journey along the Finke), the world of the mission (starting in 1894), Benno’s life as an adult, the story of his lost son and grandson, his siblings in Leipzig, and the world of the Aranda. I’ve tried to make time bleed, non-causal, little circles of life, death and rebirth reflecting black and white views, but also, the limitations of white history. The capacity for misunderstanding (and forgiveness) Theo Strehlow was trusted by the Aranda elders. He was given (for safe keeping) a selection of sacred objects, and when these were sold after his death in 1978, controversy raged. In an attempt to raise money for a research foundation he sold images of sacred ceremonies to German magazine Stern (never thinking they’d be seen in Australia). When they were republished in The Australian Women’s Weekly, Strehlow was devastated. I’m portraying an early twentieth century mindset. I’m not saying it was all good or bad, but I’m asking my readers to think about the issues, without preconceived notions. Also, the book is a white telling. The key players are German/Lutheran (the Strehlow/Gerlach children left in Germany were a perfect chance to cross wires) or cattle farmers and their families. The Aboriginal characters live between worlds. The non-intrusive, contextual portrayal owes a lot to the historical record, of people living on the margins. This story couldn’t be told without reference to them. I don’t claim to know their thoughts and feelings, but I can sense the way in which they were jammed between black and white. As Patrick White said of Voss (Carl/Martin, Theo/Benno): ‘His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.’ Kenny, A (2013) The Aranda’s Pepa We do, don’t we? I mean, talk about Adelaide? There have been lots of whispers, lots of rumours, and maybe some are true. So maybe we should be clear? Most Australians outside of Adelaide don’t know Adelaide. They’ve heard about the wine, the market, the lost kiddies, but they don’t know about stuff like the ‘Adelaide sprint’ (the moment Adelaideans sense a busker is about to ask for money).
Class. That’s a big thing. They’re always going on about being free settlers, like it was yesterday, not 1836. But free? Hardly. A succession of leaders with Messiah complexes controlling cartel-like governments (think fines, taxes, casino royalties), Pravdaesque control of the local media and the two ever-present AFL clubs forming a rusted-on trinity. Class needs to be preserved, the ‘leafy East’, equal parts Downton Abbey and Savannah, Georgia. This isn’t unique to Adelaide, of course, but the old girl has a particularly English-class riven way of letting people know their place. New and old money rub shoulders in one of a dozen, no, half a dozen schools who encourage the best-bred boys to mix with the ladies in a grotesque upmarket captive breeding program. A convoy of Land Rovers head to their owners’ Middleton beach houses for December, more interbreeding as bob-cut mummies share coffees at Port Eliot. Then, off to France for a quick ski before school returns. ATAR-maximising teachers get to work on what is, probably, and under any other circumstances, a fairly ordinary cohort of those-too-long-in-the-shallow-end-of-the-gene-pool. Meanwhile, Saint-like football players slip seamlessly into the media, media into politics, journalists become political advisers, like some confederacy of shiraz-quaffing dunces. But if you’re born on the wrong side of the Gawler or Seaford train lines it’s hard to make good – social mobility (despite any natural talent, or attempt at betterment) is discouraged just as much as cleverness. And the old girl hates clever people, too. She complains about her kids moving east, or to London, but she never does anything to stop them. Or are the kids connected enough to get a job in the public service, preserving generations of nepotism and mediocrity? The ‘pubo’ a gig for life (and after). A hundred-thousand+ lanyardists forming a Labor voting bloc that keeps generations of dimwits in power, organising ever-more sporting events to distract from everything from ramping to failures of the child protection system, the soulless state library to the underfunded museum (no fault of its own, it costs money to fly in so many golfers and soccer players). Maybe Adelaide’s real problem is a lack of vision? People to articulate what the place might be, one day. Partly because the bleeding off of local talent, but also, the union-to-politics conveyor-belt that dominates a Labor state addicted to welfare, Commonwealth-funded infrastructure projects and other people’s (sorry, WA) GST. Thing being, the city-state of Adelaide is ossified, unable to change, improve, innovate, support original thinkers (‘creative types’, especially). The dysfunction of the outer-north and south persists, and every few years a new generation of children begin, again, the lives of their parents and grandparents. Problematic schools (mainly because of a lack of political will), failed town planning and architecture (car-dependent suburbs for those who can’t afford one), politicians who barely mention, or visit (most don’t live in their electorates) the sprawling cracked-clay plains with their empty factories and unspoken message for the locals: ‘You are from Elizabeth.’ There is some sense that things are improving, but locals have heard this over and over. Something always comes along to fuck it up. Submarines to be built, but for most it’s a long way, too far, from Peachey Road to Osborne. If you want to understand why, read Jimmy Barnes’s Working Class Boy. Anyway, and historically, most of what passes for vision in South Australia is actually distraction. But as Juvenal showed, it seems to work. And what about the town itself? Everyone goes to town – the main street’s enormous balls, no commercial life beyond Rundle Mall, the God-shouters (‘cut your whoring now!’), the streets lifeless before the ‘pubos’ arrive and after they leave (home, cardigan on by six, The Voice, sleep, rinse and repeat). Adelaide has a few towers now (though not yet a ‘skyscraper’) and according to its leaders, towers equal progress. A street grid as unchanging as the old girl herself, stop lights favouring north-south traffic running between affluent North Adelaide and Unley, bike lanes more wishful thinking than anything Copenhagen, 760 hectares of under-utilised ‘Parklands’ laid out, for some reason, on the edges of the city instead of within it (think Central Park, Hyde Park), ensuring they’re mainly used as school playing fields, gay beats, and a venue for a car race that needs (in typical Adelaide style) stands built and dismantled every year. Despite all this, the Rose Park locals love their Parklands and won’t see a weed removed. That, too, is characteristic of Adelaide – clinging to pasts of questionable value, just in case the future doesn’t work out. Adelaide. Its four train lines and one tram line, all testament to the car, roads (the old girl can never build enough soon-to-be-potholed roads) an encouragement for kids to get a licence, drive, lest they’re condemned to spending their days on the bus with the guy who sits next to them and asks, ‘Are you a Crows man or a Port man?’ The old buses; ramped hospitals; non- or underfunded culture abandoned in favour of festivals, other people’s culture. Something about rockets and space, all of our kids becoming astronauts (though the old girl’s problems seem closer to home). Thing is, if you live in Adelaide long enough, the love-hate thing becomes mostly hate. It’s a city that eats its young, the scent of self-satisfaction filling the streets of Malvern with a sense of always-has, always-will-be (not Indigenous, that’s another story). Yes, we need to talk about Adelaide, because her self-preservation stops her evolving into something better, fairer, attuned to the twenty-first century. Not just the inherited luck of the Adelaide Club, the SDA handshakes, the not-really-a-ringer Saints’ boys running wild at the test cricket every summer. It could be a place where the most talented are rewarded; where merit’s more important than whoever your uncle happens to be. All of this, so that the old girl might become a place we move towards, not away from. |
Stephen OrrWelcome to Datsunland! This is a second hand car yard of the speeches I've given, the columns I've written, the essays, micro-fiction and micro-thoughts that have passed through my small, shy brain. Also, stuff so strange no newspapers, websites or publishers want them. Archives
February 2025
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