Friends of Lutheran Archives

Sunday 16 February 2020
2:00pm

** PLEASE NOTE: This event was advertised in FoLA News for 3:00pm, but had to be brought forward to 2:00pm **

Australian Lutheran College
104 Jeffcott Street, North Adelaide

After several years of researching and collecting material, John Strehlow started work on the biography in earnest in April 1994. Volume I was launched on 1 December 2011 at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs and at Australian Lutheran College on 12 February 2012. Volume II covers the period from the arrival of the Strehlows in Germany in 1910 down to Carl’s death at Horseshoe Bend on 20 October 1922.

It costs $100 and is published as a hard-back by Wild Cat Press in London. It comprises 1,219 pages including notes, index, and appendices, with 120 pages of colour, sepia and B&W images, many of them unique historical photos of the period in family possession and so never published before. Maps and fold-out photos are included. It contains a detailed history of Hermannsburg Mission directly before, during and after World War One as seen through the eyes of Frieda and Carl Strehlow, and is placed firmly in the historical context of the war. It also delves into the public enthusiasm of the day for state intervention in the relationship between White Australia and Indigenous Australians, and gives detailed coverage of Prof. Baldwin Spencer’s attempts to shut the Mission down and replace it with an orphanage for half-caste children as part of what is now known as the “Stolen Generation” program which he devised. It is being published with generous financial assistance from Mission EineWelt of Neuendettelsau in Germany.

Monday 24 February 2020
7:30pm

Bethlehem House
Sudholz Place, Adelaide

In the time which has elapsed since the events in this biography occurred, many issues have been written about and conclusions drawn which require closer investigation. In his book God, Guns and Government, Peter Vallee accused Hermannsburg missionary Hermann Kempe of encouraging police violence in the belief this would increase the number of Christian converts. Another book, White Man’s Dreaming by Christine Stevens, charged the missionaries at Bethesda with cultural genocide. Both assertions went unchallenged. A shortfall of reliable information was partly to blame, so in Volume I further information was made available so readers could reach their own conclusions.

In this second part of the biography, subtitled Between Three Worlds, topics such as the loyalty of Lutherans and official treatment of the Strehlows during World War One, Carl’s account of Aranda belief around the sky-god Altjira, and Gillen and Spencer’s insistence that Australian Aborigines were a doomed race with its Stolen Generation development, have been similarly investigated to enable people to make a meaningful appraisal for themselves. This talk puts some of these issues under the microscope.