Discusiones y Aplicaciones

In 1877 a microcosm of pietistic, evangelical, Lutheran Germany was deposited in the middle of the MacDonnell Ranges/Tyerrtye in Central Australia. It was the direct result of the

inspiration of Rev Ludwig (Louis) Harms. In 1849 Harms founded his Confessional Lutheran seminary at Hermannsburg in Germany. While being religiously and politically conservative – he was once, according to Regina Ganter, accused of Pietism and on another occasion suspended from the priesthood – Harms adopted a radical approach to the education and training of his future Hermannsburg evangelisers.375 He sought out candidates for clergy training from among the German peasant class. He adopted a revivalist theology which sought to inspire his peasant trainees through strenuous discipline based on the idea that the saving of heathens376 _{in remote places would bring blessings thirty times over on}

Hermannsburg itself.377 _{He retained the traditional Lutheran emphasis on the learning of and}

use of the local language for evangelisation. Once in the field, the initial Harms model of mission operation was austere, with the missionaries being paid a meagre wage, subjected to close scrutiny by distant superiors, and being required to engage in scrupulous accounting of their expenditure. The Harms/Hermannsburg model was based on the appointment of

conservative, patriarchal, hierarchical clergy in far-flung remote mission stations, where they also exercised practical skills, such as blacksmith, carpenter and mason at Hermannsburg.378

The first Lutherans in the South Australian outback arrived at Killalpaninna on Lake Eyre in 1866. While that Mission struggled to survive,379 _{in 1876–77, on hearing of the exploration}

and white settlement of Central Australia and the existence of an untouched Aboriginal

375 _{Hermannsburg Mission (1849), http://missionaries.griffith.edu.au/missionary-training/hermannsburg-}

mission-society-1849 (accessed January 17, 2018).

376 _{“Heathens” was a very common word used by all the missionaries at Ntaria.}

377 _{Hermannsburg Mission.}

378 _{Hermannsburg Mission.}

81

population, Harms sought a lease from the government for a mission. The standard

Harms/Hermannsburg mission model entailed the establishment of a communal village ruled over by the senior pastor and a staff of subordinate fellow pastors and lay missionaries. The object was to establish a self-supporting faith community and economy. Day-to-day life was intense, closely ordered and left little scope for personal initiative. All the

Harms/Hermannsburg missions suffered from internal strife and bickering among the staff.380

Latz says that “Harms believed that Jesus would not return to earth until most heathens had been given the chance to recognise him as their saviour and he was in a hurry to see this happen”.381

The Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg/Ntaria382_{exemplified the translocation of a particular}

form of German culture that would have been incomprehensible to the Arrernte and Luritja. It was not just world-view or religious belief, or even ethics or morality, that were so starkly different. German social structure and material culture were entirely strange to the residents of Ntaria. For example, two significant features of Arrernte male culture are personal autonomy and social equality: all men thought of themselves as equal and none could be ruled by any other. There is no formal leadership structure that allows any one person to be seen as permanent ruler, leader or chief, although certain men were recognised as cult leaders for their totemic site and ceremony. The Arrernte power structure is non-hierarchical. There are distinctions between initiated and uninitiated men, adults and children, and between men and women. It appears that there is an acceptance, by both men and women, that in some aspects of culture men are dominant.383 _{Of course, in other areas women have their own field}

of power, for example in matters of kinship, livelihood, religious ritual, and especially law and custom around conception and childbirth. As well, there are situations where men’s and women’s ceremonial roles interact and each is essential to the other, such as at a boy’s initiation. All are based on an ancient world-view shared by all and not open to question. In

380 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 32}

381 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 16. Latz is an interesting commentator because he was born (1941) and grew up at}

Hermannsburg and because he trained in zoology and botany and is regarded as the paramount expert on the ecology of Central Australia. He has a Masters degree in the Aboriginal use of plants. A Christian by birth, Latz now says he has no religious beliefs, see Latz, Blind Moses, 3.

382 _{Ntaria was the name of the Western Arrernte place that the Lutherans named Hermannsburg.}

383 _{M.K. Turner comments on the differentiation between men and women: “[W]omen can’t talk about Species}

or any details about Land. Some of my nephews, my brother’s sons, can talk about it. Because they are ikwerenge-ntyele, they are male-descended from my father, their arrenge. All I can say is that we are from that place. We are Akertarenyes, and that’s the only name I can use. I can’t do any more explaining, because I’m a woman.” Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye, 9.

82

the missions, however, the Arrernte were to meet a people who operated in a strongly hierarchical social system.

The advance Mission party that arrived in Ntaria in July 1876 was composed of Rev Herman (A.H.) Kempe (leader) and Rev Wilhelm (W.F.) Schwarz. Latz reports: “They were both used to heat, as one was a blacksmith (Kempe) and the other a baker …”384 A year later, as Latz says, “the WesternArrernte people were invaded by the full missionary party. Suddenly in their midst were ten white men, thirty horses, twenty-three cattle, two thousand sheep, five dogs, one rooster and four hens, as well as several wagons, a violin and several rifles …”385 Disruption was on the doorstep.

Latz notes the Lutheran focus on language learning. He writes that the “two missionaries … immediately began to record the local Aranda language”.386 _{Soon the missionaries established}

a school for the Arrernte children in the settlement. By November 1877, as well as these linguistic and educational achievements, they had built wooden shelters for themselves and soon a kiln to produce materials for their next construction, a stone house. By 1878 lessons were conducted in two sittings: for older children in the morning and younger in the

afternoon. Latz reports that the program “initially consisted of Scripture lessons and

hymns”387 _{for the younger children, noting that song and music were especially productive.}

He adds, “It is astonishing that the missionaries were already able to teach the students in their own language and especially have them sing hymns in Aranda.”388 _{The singing was}

often accompanied by Kempe on the flute or violin,389 and music was to remain an integral component of Lutheran missionary style to the present day.390

While the emphasis was on the construction of a settlement and education of children, the Lutherans had one significant blind spot. As Latz noted, “It was highly unfortunate however,

384 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 21.}

385 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 22.}

386 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 24.}

387 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 25.}

388 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 25.}

389 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 25.}

390 _{In 2006 Morris Stuart from British Guyana came to Alice Springs and rejuvenated the song tradition from}

Hermannsburg. He formed The Song Keepers choir comprising Arrernte and Luritja women from former Lutheran Missions at Hermannsburg and Areyonga. The choir travelled back to Germany in 2015 to perform German Lutheran Hymns in Arrernte and Luritja. See Sydney Morning Herald, August 5, 2017 report, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/miff-2017-the-song-keepers-is-a-remarkable-tale-of-culture- surviving-and-thriving-20170804-gxpvol.html (accessed February 8, 2018).

83

that in the first few years the Germans considered that Aranda weren’t very religious, and that even if they were, their religious beliefs were heathen mumbo-jumbo, and had to be replaced by the Lutheran faith.”391 _{This was in accord with Harms’ own teaching at Hermannsburg in}

Germany. Ganter reports, “Satan was easily invoked in his [Harms] speech and against majority opinion and church law of 1864, he insisted that baptism expressly included an avowal of the devil.”392 _{Latz reports an interchange between some senior Arrernte men and}

missionary Schwarz who said, “this tjurunga393 _{is bad. You are lying. You are the children of}

the devil.”394 _{Latz is firmly of the view that in the early days the clear intention of the}

missionaries was to eradicate the magic that the missionaries thought pretended to be Arrernte religion.

Latz reports that in 1881:

Kempe, the former blacksmith, produced an Aranda book of Christian instructions containing Old and New Testament stories, psalms, prayers and fifty-three hymns. This was an exceptional effort, considering that very few Australians elsewhere could have done the same in any of Australia’s many Aboriginal languages.395

Yet the Mission was full of discord and by 1882 the pastors and lay workers were no longer living communally.396 The pastors had all brought their wives to Hermannsburg. Ironically, sexual relations would continue to be a sore point. According to Latz the Arrernte women saw the arrival of whites as an opportunity to have some independence from their men.397 By now it was not uncommon for Arrernte women to engage in episodic sexual relations with pastoralists, miners, policemen, station hands, sometimes with terrible consequences. The Coniston Massacre is an example where misunderstanding – perhaps wilful on the part of the

391 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 27.}

392 _{Hermannsburg Mission (1849), http://missionaries.griffith.edu.au/missionary-training/hermannsburg-}

mission-society-1849 (accessed January 17, 2018).

393 _{Tjurunga means totem or totemic board or object. In this case, early in the contact period, it seems that the}

missionaries were referring to an Arrernte ceremony.

394 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 29.}

395 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 32.}

396 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 32.}

84

non-Indigenous men – was the cause of some of the worst cases of interracial violence on the frontier.398

In 1891 Kempe had a paper published on the Western Aranda Language in the journal of the Royal Society of South Australia.399 _{From the perspective of this study, however, Latz’s}

comment that Kempe’s work was admirable – “especially as once the [Arrernte] adults became aware of the fact that he was obtaining this knowledge to apparently subvert their children’s belief, they become came quite adept at giving him misinformation” – indicates that from its inception the Arrernte were engaged in a subtle standoff with the missionaries. Learning Arrernte by the missionaries was linked totally to their evangelising agenda. Arrernte language was to be the means of conversion and implied the destruction of the old Arrernte beliefs.

A disturbing aspect of settlement that confronted Kempe and his team was the frequent resort by Arrernte to extreme violence in order to resolve disputes. Before contact with the

European culture, wrongdoing and punishment had been a component of Arrernte culture. In the new circumstances the WesternArrernte were now surrounded by white settlers and living in close contact with various Arrernte and Luritja groups. This combined pressure appeared to allow violence to erupt much more frequently than before white settlement and to cascade on into the next “payback” event. Latz concludes: “in my opinion previous authors have tended to only emphasise the violence carried out by whites against the locals. The point I want to make clear is that … as many as twenty five percent of Moses’400 Aboriginal

acquaintances had been violently killed by other Aborigines.”401

398 _{The Coniston Massacre in 1928 was allegedly caused by a dispute between Fred Brooks, a white dingo}

trapper, and Warlpiri people over Brook’s liaison with a local Warlpiri man’s wife. See Alice Springs News Online review of the 2012 film Coniston, directed by Francis Jupurrurla Kelly and David Batty. Jupurrurla Kelly interviewed a descendant of the alleged killer, whose actions sparked the massacre. It is therefore, to an extent, based on Warlpiri oral history. http://www.alicespringsnews.com.au/2012/09/19/coniston-survivors-and- descendants-recall-the-massacre-in-a-new-film/ (accessed February 10, 2018).

399 _{Latz, Blind Moses, 49.}

400 _{Moses is the European name of Tjalkabota, the subject of Latz’s book. Moses was an early convert and later}

a renowned Christian evangelist.

85

Richard Kimber reports that from about 1875 “upwards of 160 Aboriginal people were killed over three years”402 _{by other Aborigines.}403 _{Latz considered that Moses Tjalkabota and his}

newly converted Arrernte Christian associates, along with the German missionaries, decided that this internecine violence indicated there was a corruption at the heart of Arrernte culture and that this needed replacing with the Christian alternative.

The Lutherans as a team were successful evangelisers, largely based upon their commitment to a consistent language policy. Latz reports that “in April 1888 seventeen more locals were baptised, six of whom were children. Kempe, prolific as ever, had his Aranda [sic] primer printed in Adelaide, giving the Mission’s students something to read in their own

language.”404 _{Moses Tjalkabota was one of the success stories of this period. He was baptised}

as a youth in 1890 and went on to become a lifelong Lutheran evangelist. However,

disharmony and the death of Kempe’s child and then of his wife soon after the birth of their child led to the formal abandonment of the Mission by the pastors. After Kempe left in 1891 only three lay missionaries remained at Ntaria to oversee the secular operation of the

Mission. Latz concludes: “What Kempe managed to do in the short thirteen and a half years that he spent in Central Australia is astonishing. Apart from playing a direct role in setting up the infrastructure of the settlement, and are also conducting his priestly duties, he produced a considerable number of scientific and translated documents.”405 _{He was to be followed, after}

a two-year break, by another outstanding Lutheran, but a man with a different character and theology of Mission.