11 - ‘I am a white-skinned Aranda man’: Theodor Strehlow’s divided self
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2023
Summary
Australian aboriginal culture, with its mystical dream-links between humans and their ancestors in both the sky and the earth, has been largely hidden from history. This is particularly true of the songs, dances, and sacred objects which form the ceremonial core of that culture, because many of them are ‘closed’, and secret. Aboriginal children must come of age before they can be allowed to hear certain songs: the words may not be written down, and absolutely mustn’t be published in a book; to market recordings of them in performance would be anathema.
While the European settlers of the nineteenth century carved up the continent, a handful of whites with an ethnographic bent took an interest in the culture of its indigenous inhabitants, and they found their music arresting. One observer saw a resemblance between Aboriginal chant and Judaeo-Christian plainsong, both being ‘conducive to the expression of solemnity and grandeur, as well as mystery’. Another described its sound as ‘euphony … due to the gentle and even way in which the voices, naturally melodious, fade away to absolute stillness’. Most of these observers shared the fashionable Darwinist assumption that the Stone Age Aborigines were destined for extinction, but in 1899 two energetic enthusiasts – a biology professor named Baldwin Spencer and his drinking companion Frank Gillen, who ran the telegraph station in Alice Springs – published a major study of Aranda ceremonies entitled Native Tribes of Central Australia.
One of the white community’s self-appointed tasks was to convert the Aborigines to Christianity, and Lutheran missionaries from Germany, who learned the native languages to translate the Gospel into them, were in the vanguard of this earnest offensive. A scholarly pastor named Johann Reuther was part of it, but the 130 Aboriginal songs he translated into English are now lost. It is with Pastor Carl Strehlow, who arrived to assist Reuther in 1892, and went on to run the Hermannsburg Mission on the Finke River, that the story which is the subject of this chapter begins. And that this story, which focuses on Strehlow’s son Theodor (1908–1978), can be told at all is thanks to a revelatory biography by the Australian poet Barry Hill.
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- Information
- Musics Lost and FoundSong Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition, pp. 133 - 142Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021