Grandsire and grandson: lo, they are covered in darkest darkness!
Grandsire and grandson: lo, they are covered with rain-drop eyes!
As soon as he had caught sight of his enemies, the wily crow ancestor had tried to escape from them by taking to his wings; but the torrents of water that burst in a deluge over Mbalka from their multi-tiered rain-clouds had soon put out his raging conflagrations and drowned him in a lake of hissing water at the foot of his own fire mountain.
Horseshoe Bend station seemed to be experiencing a similar downpour. The thunder above Inggodna was answered by the thunder above Uralirbuka and by the thunder above Mbalka. The clouded sky was ablaze with forked lightning. The ground, scorched and baked by a week of broiling, merciless sunshine, had its smouldering heat cooled down by broad sheets of water that quickly spread out over it everywhere. The whole air was resounding with the deafening noises of wind, rain, and thunder; and in every pool of water the multitudinous rain-drop eyes stirred up eddies which continued to widen out in great concentric ripples.
The first wild fury of the triumphant rainstorm lasted for about half an hour. Then the terrifying madness of the gale began to ease, the day-bright lightning flashes stopped, and the reverberating claps of thunder lessened in violence and finally faded away. Only the sweet music of the quickening rain remained. The heavy drops still fell in steady showers which the thirsty land drank up greedily. The rich scent of the rain-soaked earth floated up from the cooled ground, and a delicious freshness spread through the fragrant air.
The whole hillside north of the station was now glistening with water. This barren rise represented the mythical windbreak of the two ntjira sisters of Pot’ Arugutja, which they had left behind when they went east to Jitutna. As they departed, tufts of ntjira grass in full seed had sprouted from their hair, so that each of them appeared to be wearing a headgear of fire-red black-cockatoo tail-feathers. On the inner side of this deserted mythical windbreak lay the boulders that symbolised the bodies of the unfaithful fire ancestors from Rubuntja, who had here succumbed to their fatal draught; and on its outer side, facing the station, were located the graves of the two white men who had died and been buried at Horseshoe Bend. Gleaming rivulets of water running down this hillside now circled around the grave of Sargeant and the new earth-mound cast up over Strehlow two days before.
As the dusk descended on the rain-drenched Finke Valley and the smell of the sodden brown earth filled the purified air, a sudden wave of joyful hope surged through Theo who stood on the hotel verandah, still gazing on the rapidly darkening cliffs and dune crests around him. No longer did he have to dread a lifelong exile in that far-away, foreign land from which his father had come. He felt certain that some day he would return to his own homeland and to those dark friends whose loyalty had brightened his whole boyhood.
From these pleasant considerations about himself his thoughts went back to the remark addressed to him earlier that afternoon by Jakobus, that his father would sleep forever in Central Australia. The more Theo reflected on those words, the more he became reconciled to the events of the past few days. His father had wanted to go back to the foreign country where he had been born, and had desired to be buried in a Christian cemetery. But was not his grave at Horseshoe Bend sited in much more appropriate surroundings? Instead of being taken out of the land to which he had given all his best years and instead of lying in isolation in a foreign cemetery, separated in death from the people with whom he had spent the whole period of his active life, he was now resting next to a pioneering cattleman, in open country unconfined by cemetery walls yet sheltered by the windbreak ridge of the ntjira sisters of Pot’ Arugutja: through his unexpected and tragic death he had been united forever with the people for whom he had come to be a loved father figure.
In the white men’s countries the dead had always been neatly buried in trim and tidy plots of ground, set apart completely from the cities, towns, villages, and dwellings of the living. In the Aranda country the dead shared the land of the living and the company of their supernatural beings, and their last resting places were to be found scattered throughout the timeless soil of Central Australia. Though Theo possessed only a vague knowledge of Aranda mythology, he was fully aware that every hill and mountain, every river and creek, every spring, rockhole, and waterhole, every plain and clay-pan, and all the highest dune crests in the sandhill areas, bore names of their own, and that they derived these names from the sacred myths and songs of the Aranda people. Theo also knew that every man, woman, and child, including himself, was linked indivisibly with one special site in the country of his birth. He knew that his father had preserved many of the Aranda sacred myths and songs in his scientific writings; and, curiously enough, the most southern of the Aranda traditions he had recorded – that of the two Ntjikantja brothers – had belonged to the Horseshoe Bend area. Theo himself had been allowed to view earlier that year, in deep secrecy, a large number of waninggas and tjurunga objects which had been brought to his father by the older men of Hermannsburg at the end of March and the beginning of April. Now that he no longer had to go overseas, he could at least entertain the hope that some day he might return to his own Aranda country and steep himself in its ancient traditions.
The Aranda folk of Central Australia had always lived and died secure in the belief that their immortal totemic ancestors, too, were living and sleeping in their very midst in this Eternal Land whose geographical features they had created at the beginning of time. To the Aranda, Central Australia had been the Land of Altjira, the Land of Eternity. As the dusk grew deeper, Theo knew that this storied land would provide a far finer last resting place for his father than he could ever have found in some conventional cemetery in that distant country from where he had first come. At Horseshoe Bend he was not sleeping alone: here he had joined forever the great company and congregation of the countless thousands of Aranda men, women, and children, who had lived and died in this Eternal Land for hundreds, and perhaps for thousands, of years past.
Yet this Eternal Land was in no sense a cemetery: the Aranda had never considered their land to be the land of death but rather the land of life. Even such an accursed site as the Land of Death at Uralterinja had always been regarded only as a tiny island in the vast land of life; and there had been men born in the Uralterinja region who had been regarded as the living reincarnations of the two Ntjikantja brothers, since these had left behind a part of their living essence in the two serpents that could not be finally destroyed. Men, animals, and plants might indeed die and turn into dust; but the earth which absorbed their dust yielded new grasses and flowers, new trees and shrubs, fresh food for men and all other living creatures; and, according to Aranda belief, the second souls of all unborn children, too, emanated from the sacred soil of Central Australia. The existence and the continual re-creation of all these forms of life depended on the fertilising and quickening power of rain. The long droughts, the devastating bushfires, and the spells of grim and deadly heat which periodically ravaged this tough and unconquerable land could never wholly destroy its plants, animals, or human beings; for heat, fire, and drought lost their menace and their power once the clouds poured down their life-giving showers on the tortured and apparently dying landscape below. Rain had hence come to be regarded as the visible symbol of life in Central Australia; for it was after its quickening showers that the earth grew green, that the insects multiplied, and that the land suddenly became filled with birds and animals as though by the mysterious processes of magical increase.
And now came the darkness of a dying day. The rain was still falling down from the heavy clouds, but its music had become gentle and soothing, like a song sung by a mother to put to sleep her unquiet child. Theo gazed calmly at the hillside where his father’s earth-mound was beginning to fade out into the featureless blackness of a rain-wet night. Could death ever do more than destroy the temporary embodiments and manifestations of life? Plants, animals, and men all transmitted their life to
their own seeds, their own young, and their own posterity before death came to claim them. Though death kept on stalking over the earth, the world of plants, animals, and men remained vigorously and gloriously alive. And to what limitations was the spirit of man subject? Was not man superior to all other living things only because of his spirit – because of his power of speech and thought that enabled him to probe deeply into the mysteries of the universe and the enigma of his own existence? Did man’s personality survive death? His father had implicitly believed in the truth of the ancient words of the Preacher about the nature of death: ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God Who gave it.’ Since the age of thirteen Theo had often been troubled by secret doubts about the absolute truth of many of the beliefs that had been inculcated into him by his parents from the earliest days of his childhood. The events of the past six weeks had shaken and shattered his faith to its very foundations. And yet he felt strangely reassured as he peered out into the deepening, wet gloom outside. In a few days from now green shoots of grass and herbage would be peeping out from the clay soil between the broken stones of the mound under which his father was sleeping his last sleep. To the boy the rain that was falling on his father’s grave had come to represent the symbol of life, the promise of life, the assurance of life, and the certainty of life. Life could not be finally conquered by death; for the power of life was greater than the destructiveness of death. Life was from eternity to eternity.
Philip Jones. Afterword
Journey to Horseshoe Bend was first published in 1969 by the Sydney firm, Angus and Robertson. It is part memoir, part history, and reflects the author’s deep knowledge of Aboriginal mythology and landscape. It also contains bitter observations on the last days of his father, Carl Strehlow, and on those he held responsible, for the final, desperate journey that ended in tragedy beside the ancient valley of the Finke River in Central Australia. These events left a permanent scar on the author, who was just fourteen years old when the journey was undertaken during the fierce early summer of 1922. As a linguist and anthropologist, Theodor (Ted) Strehlow returned to Horseshoe Bend several times during the course of his career, adding vital elements to the story he eventually came to write during the late 1960s. It seems that he formed the intention to write a memoir of his father’s final journey as early as 1936, when he and his first wife Bertha visited a sequence of the important Aboriginal sites associated with the Horseshoe Bend station, known as Par’ Itirka to the Southern Arrernte people.
The story begins at the Lutheran mission of Hermannsburg, in the western MacDonnell Ranges. After serving as missionary at Hermannsburg among the Western Arrernte people for twenty-eight years, Theodor’s father Carl and his mother Frieda had planned to return to Germany in 1923. They would rejoin Theodor’s sister and four brothers who had been at school there since 1911, lodging with relatives. In their long sojourn Carl and Frieda Strehlow had achieved a great deal at Hermannsburg, rescuing it from a disorganised shambles and instilling durable Christian faith among the Western Arrernte. Carl had also completed an extraordinary work of scholarship about the Arrernte and Luritja peoples, publishing eight linked volumes in German from 1907 to 1921 (Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien). This scholarship was to set a standard for his son and would provide the basis (largely unacknowledged) of Theodor’s academic success.
With these achievements behind him, Carl needed only to endure a few more months at Hermannsburg, but during mid-1922 his health began to fail. He had been advised to take leave by the Lutheran hierarchy in Adelaide, but to do so at this critical stage, without a competent replacement, was unacceptable. Journey to Horsehsoe Bend opens in early October 1922, as Carl begins to succumb to the excruciating pain of dropsy and pleurisy, with no ready means of travelling from the remote mission to reach medical assistance. Thirteen days later, Theo stands at his father’s grave at Horseshoe Bend, on the bank of the Finke River.
Horseshoe Bend station lies on one of the great meanders of the Finke River. That destination challenges the very notion of a journey’s end. The intended destination of the small travelling party was the railhead at Oodnadatta, three hundred miles from Hermannsburg, past the isolated stations of Henbury and Idracowra. Had the party reached Oodnadatta, a train or a motor vehicle might have brought Carl to the safety of Adelaide within another two days. Instead, the travellers made agonisingly slow progress, covering barely fifty miles a day over uneven ground, alternately rocky and sandy, with straining horses pulling wooden wagons with iron rims. Carl and Frieda Strehlow travelled ahead in the mission buggy, with the Arrernte man Hesekiel as driver, accompanied by H.A. Heinrich. The wagon carrying young Theo, with the Arrernte man Titus as driver, followed at a distance. The party was accompanied by a mob of spare horses driven on horseback by the Arrernte man Jacobus.
Journey to Horseshoe Bend contains elements of all the arcane knowledge Theodor Strehlow had accumulated in the years following this searing event: it weaves frontier history and Aboriginal mythology into the grim narrative of Carl Strehlow’s demise, and unfurls the tale against a forbidding desert landscape. Strehlow was not the first to reach for metaphor and imagery to conjure up the Australian desert and its effect on outsiders. As early as 1937 Ernestine Hill had laced her vivid account of the inland frontier with existential themes in the Great Australian Loneliness. Patrick White’s Voss and John Heyer’s remarkable film, Back of Beyond, both appeared in 1957; each in distinctive ways treated the desert’s effect on those passing through it. The reception of such works by the Australian public may have given Strehlow confidence to leaven his intensely personal account with detours into history, mythology and the landscape. But it was his extracts from the vast corpus of Arrernte mythology that set his book apart, for unlike the work of other writers or filmmakers who came to the desert as outsiders, this rich and ancient oral literature had become his own patrimony. This material was added late in the writing process, but its authentic charge drives his narrative, particularly as the doom awaiting his father at Horseshoe Bend seems to match the grimmest fates of the totemic ancestors who had blighted the landscape there with heat, fire and drought.
Carl Strehlow had married soon after his arrival at Hermannsburg in October 1894, having met his wife briefly in Germany before his departure for Australia. The couple raised six children at the Lutheran mission in the shadow of Mt Hermannsburg. Theodor Georg Strehlow, born in 1908, was their youngest. Knowing this, the reader may wonder at his statement in the Journey that he ‘had never known any white playmates’. This is true enough, at least as far as Hermannsburg was concerned, for Theo was barely two years old when the family set off for two years’ furlough in Germany. Faced with the dilemma of how to educate their older children, Carl and Frieda made the decision to leave all but Theo with their German relatives. From that point, the consolations and rigours of solitude, and a peculiar sense of abandonment, were graven into his psyche. They surface often in this book.
Despite being steeped in classical literature during his university years, it is worth remembering that English was not Strehlow’s first language; until he came south to Adelaide after his father’s death his first languages were German and Arrernte. This helps to explain the somewhat stilted and formal edge to his prose. While that manner suits his delivery of certain passages, such as the portentous events of Arrernte mythology or his reflections on his father’s crisis of faith, it is less suited to dialogue or to the portrayal of the landscape. Strehlow was no W.G. Sebald, but these faults are redeemed by his fine manipulations of the book’s shifts in time and perspective. Strehlow positioned his fourteen-year-old self as its narrator, but the book is overlain with the knowledge and caustic insights of an older, wiser man. This interplay between the two narrator-selves, and between the historical past, the welling drama of imminent tragedy, and the epic, timeless mythic extracts, give the book its distinct character. The diversions into reverie and history, myth and lan
dscape always return us to the stricken figure of the father, strapped to his chair on the horse-drawn wagon, jolting over rough ground from sunrise to sunset. Even as the journey proceeds to its climax though, the missionary remains remote; a fractured and emasculated colossus. Revealingly, throughout the entire book, not a word is exchanged between father and son. Can this really have been the case? In contrast to the broader vistas of landscape, history and mythology glimpsed by the son, the father’s world is bounded only by pain and religious doubt. This was not an accidental effect.
In all his publications, ranging from linguistic papers published in the journal Oceania, his first major book Aranda Traditions (1947), his pamphlets dealing with issues arising from government policies, to his major study of mythology and linguistics, Songs of Central Australia (1971), Strehlow was at pains to stress that his knowledge of Arrernte linguistics, song-verse and traditions was hard-won through his own efforts, stemming from his return to Central Australia from Adelaide in 1932. He acknowledged his father’s scholarship, but always indirectly, as a corpus gathered in another time, strangely separated from his own. We know that this was not entirely true, and that much of his foundational knowledge derived from constant and ready access to his father’s voluminous manuscripts, now held with his own collection in the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. What might it have cost Theo to indicate that his father also comprehended and shared at least some aspect of the sacred landscape he was passing through on his last journey, even as he struggled in pain with his crisis of Christian faith? For while he had never travelled on this precise route, Carl Strehlow had recorded several of the myths and associated trajectories that the party crossed on their fateful journey southwards along the course of the Finke River. Here it is important to understand the stage of life the young Theo had reached in the book, and the stage that the adult Theo had reached when he wrote it – for Journey to Horseshoe Bend is perhaps less the tale of Carl Strehlow’s death than of its author’s rites of passage.
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