8. Entrevistas
8.2. Entrevista a experta en marketing digital
Carl Strehlow’s time as senior pastor at Hermannsburg (1894–1922) had a powerful and lasting effect on WesternArrernte people. Strehlow was a thoroughly German missionary intent upon bringing the Lutheran faith to the Arrernte and Luritja. Through his great expertise as a linguist he quickly improved the existing translations of the gospel into
402 Richard Kimber, The End of the Bad Old Days: European Settlement in Central Australia, 1871-1894
(Darwin: State Library of the Northern Territory, 1991), 9.
403 Kimber suggests that between 500 and 1,000 Aboriginal people were murdered by police and pastoralists
during the most violent period between 1881 and 1891. In Frances Coughlan, “Aboriginal Town Camps and Tangentyere Council: The Battle for Self-Determination in Alice Springs” (Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 1991), 26.
404 Latz, Blind Moses, 43.
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Arrernte, thus promoting his evangelical agenda. He was also an erudite humanist, and responding to encouragement from Baron Moritz von Leonhardi,406 he began to undertake a
wide-ranging ethnography of the Arrernte and Luritja people. To pursue the collision metaphor, two consequences of Strehlow’s dual program appear. First, it was Strehlow himself who, noticing that he was standing on a knife’s edge, recalibrated his roles as both an evangelist and an ethnographer and modified some of his early more interventionist
evangelising approach.407 Second, his wisdom and intelligence allowed him to pursue a policy
that to a degree cushioned the impact of the colliding worlds. Through his frequent meetings with senior men, where he sought out the finest nuances of Arrernte and Luritja languages, he developed a growing appreciation of the richness and integrity of the Arrernte “religion”, as Strehlow called it, thus leading him to restrict the severity of the impact of the Mission, for example by protecting the Manangananga cave from trespass.408 In this way he fostered among his Arrernte friends an enhanced sense of their self-worth and thus gave them a protective capacity that equipped them to resist the most damaging consequences of contact.
Strehlow began his initial missionary training at Neuendettelsau in Germany. Here he was introduced to German humanism. Kenny notes “that at the turn of the century the discussion in Lutheran theological mission circles on how to accommodate different religions became increasingly explicit”.409 This was a significant change from the earlier Harms/Hermannsburg
theology of mission. Kenny explains the Neuendettelsau style:
The German Lutheran linguistic tradition … heavily influenced the seminary’s approach towards indigenous peoples. It went without saying that the knowledge of indigenous vernaculars was the prerequisite for successful mission work. Thus, potential missionaries were encouraged, through linguistic work, to learn about other people’s cultures. The serious study of indigenous languages lead [sic] some
missionaries towards an interest in the Weltanschauung and mythology of a particular people.410
406 Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 2.
407 Latz, Blind Moses, 105.
408 Hill, Broken Song, 135.
409 Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 80.
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A major influence on Neuendettelsau was Dr Gustav Warneck, Professor at the Halle University.411 According to Kenny, Warneck’s approach was that “all humans in all times, climates and cultures had religion and language … He maintained that since there were no peoples in the world that were speechless, there also could be no people that were without religion.”412 He even held that there was “universality of a spiritual propensity to
Christianity”.413 Strehlow’s ethnography revealed to him convincingly that the Arrernte and
Luritja possessed religion. Therefore, he felt justified in assisting in the pursuit of the propensity to Christianity. However, Kenny goes on to point out that even with this propensity “it was never necessary to destroy a culture in order for its people to become Christian converts”.414
Strehlow found him positioned precariously between his Lutheran missionary responsibilities and his ethnographic investigations. As Kenny notes, he was confronted with “a pietistic parochialism and anti-intellectualism that could have been his undoing”.415 He came and
learned Arrernte in order to evangelise in Arrernte and bring Christ to the “heathens”. But through his emerging familiarity with Arrernte and his theology of mission, along with stimulating correspondence with Baron von Leonhardi,416 he began to understand the innate
religious character of Altyerre. Kenny summarises it well:
Carl Strehlow was a scholar, with a positive and intimate appreciation of the ancient biblical and classical worlds which were older and different to his own; in Australia he came in contact with another different world, which seemed to him in some ways analogous to these remote worlds. This new world opened itself up to him through his intensive study of its languages and his personal interest in myth and song, and allowed him to enter the world of Aboriginal mythology which gave him a glimpse of the worldviews of the Aranda and Loritja.417
411 Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 91.
412 Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 90.
413 Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 91.
414 Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 91.
415 Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 94.
416 Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 2. Carl Strehlow began his monumental ethnography Die Aranda- und Loritja-
Stämme in Zentral-Australien, as a result of prompting and encouragement from Baron Moritz von Leonhardi, a German intellectual with interests in philosophy and anthropology.
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Barry Hill in Broken Song argues that Strehlow travelled an inculturating418 pathway in his approach to mission:
Pastor Carl Strehlow had begun by preaching against native belief, but as his
ethnographic studies continued, he drew back from such militancy. He had, as his son was to write, a “deep respect for aboriginal [sic] culture and for the creative
aboriginal mind,” so much so that “the sacred cave at Manangananga, two miles from Hermannsburg, was never permitted by him to be violated419 by any white intruders.
When he visited it himself, he came as an honoured guest,” invited by Loatjira.420 His father’s [Carl’s] regime, [Ted] Strehlow was suggesting, was “stern” and with “strict discipline”, and yet by a strange process of respectful intimacy it was fostering a kind of quiet coexistence with the pagan culture.421
Carl Strehlow’s work on rendering Christian ritual422 and belief available to the Western
Arrernte and his collaborative work with Aboriginal consultants on translating the Bible attest to his missionary stature. But while he refrained from attending Arrernte ceremonies, lest he give the impression he endorsed them, he made a most detailed study of many Arrernte and Luritja myths and treated them sympathetically, making them available to the Western world. Strehlow was limited by the work of his more pietistic Lutheran predecessors – indeed he felt the need to correct them in regard to their understanding of Altjira (Altyerre). Strehlow came to respect the sincerity and sense of mystery that the Arrernte and Luritja
418Inculturation, sometimes described as contextualisation, is a two-way process whereby Christian missionaries
working with indigenous non-Christian cultures and peoples frame their message in a culturally sensitive manner so that both the Christian message and the culture being addressed are modified. Bevans and Schroeder describe inculturation as “dialogue with the context in which the gospel is to be preached or the Christian life interpreted, and to listen and discern how best to connect the unchanging aspects of Christian faith with the changing and challenging aspects of a particular experience, culture, social location or social changes in a specific place or with a specific people.” Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Maryknoll, New York, 2009), 387. This topic is dealt with in greater detail in Chapter 11 below.
419 Many years later in 1930 his successor, F.W. Albrecht, deliberately led a party of non-Arrernte people to
Manangananga in order to demonstrate that its mythical power over Arrernte people had been broken. Hill, Broken Song, 135. Also described in Henson, A Straight-out man, 53, 54.
420 Loatjira was one of Carl Strehlow’s most significant informants. He remained unbaptised until very shortly
before his death.
421 Hill, Broken Song, 75. 422 The Lutherans relied on music, especially German hymns translated into Arrernte.
The Presbyterian Mission at Ernabella translated English hymns into Pitjantjatjara. At Santa Teresa, according to Therese Ryder, personal communication January 17, 2018, the Arrernte learnt Latin hymns.
422 The Lutherans relied on music, especially German hymns translated into Arrernte. The Presbyterian Mission
at Ernabella translated English hymns into Pitjantjatjara. At Santa Teresa, according to Therese Ryder, personal communication January 17, 2018, the Arrernte learnt Latin hymns.
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men possessed for their Altyerre/Tjukurpa.423 In the end it seemed almost inevitable that, according to his son Ted, Strehlow may have had a final crisis of his Christian faith. As he lay dying in a dark room of a travellers’ hotel on the sandy bank of the Finke River at Horseshoe Bend, his wife Frieda sought to console him by singing one of his favourite Lutheran hymns. According to Ted his father cried in anguish: “Stop Frieda, God doesn’t help.”424 Perhaps Strehlow had come to question the idea of an interventionist God. If so, he
had anticipated a thesis in modern Christian theology based on an ancient dilemma proposed by Job.425 Perhaps also he was questioning the very nature of Lutheran Mission and his role
in it.
Carl Strehlow’s understanding of Arrernte led him to understand that “the Aranda [sic] were part of the universal plurality of one humanity”.426 Contrary to the belief of Spencer and
Gillen, they were not doomed to extinction. Strehlow’s final word on the topic was published on December 7, 1921 in Adelaide’s newspaper, The Register:
If you see in the present type of the aborigines the missing link, you require 11 more links from the present type of the aborigine [sic] to the common ancestor of man and ape, because the greatest difference between an ape and an aborigine is not the bodily structure, but the wonderfully structured language of the aborigines, and their
religious beliefs.427
It is even possible that Carl Strehlow came to identify their religious convictions as his own. Certainly, his son T.H. Strehlow, in the concluding pages of Journey to Horseshoe Bend, suggests sentiments about the links between this world and Eternity, and how his father may have thought about it, that sit much more comfortably within an Altyerre framework of
423 It is important to recognise that all of Carl Strehlow’s informants were men. He was only able to provide an
insight into Altyerre from a male perspective. His ethnography did contain some information relating to the views of women which was researched by his wife Frieda; see Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 44.
424 Hill, Broken Song, 93.
425 Ted Strehlow includes an analysis of Job in relation to his father’s travails in the text of Journey to
Horseshoe Bend, 140–43. In Ted Strehlow’s representation of his father’s anguish he transforms the focus from the suffering of an individual to the self-righteousness of the same individual in his judgments of others and thus throws a light on the reason and justification of mission.
426 Kenny, The Aranda’s Pepa, 100.
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Eternity than within a traditional Christian understanding of Heaven as another place or state.428