Rereading Barry Hill's "Broken Song"

Rereading Barry Hill’s Broken Song. T. G. H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession. Knopf: Milson’s Point, 2002

Silke Beinssen-Hesse, Monash University

From the start, I found Barry Hill’s 800-page, prize-winning biographical study of T.G.H. Strehlow, published ten years ago, a disturbing book. It seemed to have set itself the task of destroying the credibility of a man who had spent his life proclaiming and furthering the recognition of the social, intellectual and cultural worth of the Aboriginal people of Central Australia and fighting for their rights, though, unfortunately, his last years were dogged by scandal. Ted Strehlow  had grown up on Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia as a native speaker of the Aranda language and up to the age of fourteen he was a participant in this people’s social life and culture. He later became an academic linguist with competence in at least five languages and was the first to publish a sophisticated Aranda grammar and phonetics. He was also a prolific translator into and out of that language, his greatest achievement being his vast and epoch-making collection of the Songs of Central Australia. A graduate in literary studies, he wrote one of the classics of Australian literature: Journey to Horseshoe Bend. He was the first pioneering patrol officer in Central Australia where he worked for six years helping the remaining uprooted, often sick, disorientated, exploited and hunted native population survive, and over many years he was an anthropological researcher who conducted lengthy expeditions into the lands of the Aranda tribes to record their myths and dances. Eventually and most controversially, he was a collector of their sacred objects, their tjurunga, which the traditional owners at the time felt were no longer safe in their ancient cave store-houses, now on land appropriated by white settlers, and which were also no longer of great interest to the younger generation who were adapting to the victorious white culture. By the Aranda people he is still regarded as the ingkata, a high ceremonial chief.

That Hill was able to successfully complete his project and receive public accolades for it was, in my view, due to a number of factors. One of these is Hill’s style; he is a gifted poet and word-smith who has no problems using the language for his own purposes and dazzling his readers with it. Then, much of his argument is based on Strehlow’s voluminous diaries and journals not available for easy public scrutiny so that their use must be taken on trust by the reader. Hill has, moreover, done wide and interesting research and considering the length of his book, his omissions are unlikely to be noticed by the average Australian reader. Then there are the essayistic chapters on such topics as translation which are fascinating in their own right, even though he may be hardly competent to assess and judge the translations he is criticizing, not being either a speaker of the languages in question or a translator in his own right. A further factor is that the book contains plenty of well formulated paragraphs that acknowledge Strehlow and his  work, though these are almost invariably immediately devalued if not ridiculed, mostly from the superior perspective of a psychologist who hints at character problems; in this way an impression of seeing both sides of a matter is created. Lastly, Hill writes in a well established tradition of British scholarship that values the contest in elegant and effective sparring over and above a thorough analysis of the material at hand. It is a tradition closely related to what Hill himself refers to critically once or twice as ‘English condescension’.

Strehlow’s life and work also easily lend themselves to criticism. For one thing, he grew up as a ‘mission boy’, a phrase Hill uses with derogatory intent almost like a leitmotiv. Among Australian readers there is a widespread and largely either ignorant or self-interested condemnation of mission work in frontier times and its supposed destructiveness of authentic Aboriginal culture. This fails to acknowledge that the desperately and ruthlessly struggling settlers had initiated such destruction and created a situation where the surviving Aborigines urgently needed help: sanctuaries from starvation and from punitive expeditions, medical care in view of the rampaging epidemics of the time, but also an introduction to the white world without which Aboriginal survival and assimilation would have been still more difficult. What mission work at Hermannsburg actually involved has recently been documented in great detail by John Strehlow, Ted Strehlow’s son, who in addition to his own vast research had the benefit of his grandmother Frieda (Strehlow-)Keysser’s diaries. Many Australians will presumably also share Hill’s conviction that aside from the literary merit of its foundation texts, religion is no more than a ridiculous relic from the Middle Ages that has no place in modern twentieth century society. The small originally German religious community that had become aware of native needs, though not necessarily of their precise nature, and had made the extraordinary financial commitment to support, among other missions, that of Hermannsburg, was composed mainly of village based farmers and thus easily matches the stereotype. They were Old Lutherans who had left their native land in protest against a Prussian decree that amalgamated them with doctrinally divergent Protestants, in particular Calvinists. Once arrived in Australia, these Old Lutherans formed old-fashioned, German-speaking rural villages in the Adelaide Hills rather than adapting to Australian culture. T.G.H. Strehlow’s father, Carl, the missionary at remote Hermannsburg for the 28 years from 1894 to 1922, had, however, never been a part of this Adelaide Hills culture nor had he actually been trained for the mission to heathens when he was posted in Central Australia. But he had the intellect, the strength of character and the commitment to realistically assess the dire predicament of the natives who came to his sanctuary and whom the colonizers fully expected to conveniently die out. He was able to adapt fairly well to native needs, within the constraints his mission imposed. The Hermannsburg mission, which catered for Christians and non-Christians, was the first place in Central Australia that succeeded in reversing the negative birth rate and the missionaries, for there had been a succession of them from 1874 onward, were the earliest to seriously study and record the Aranda language and religious culture. Carl was foremost among them. It is his work, written and published in German, that his son, Ted Strehlow, would extend, confirm, correct and consolidate, an activity that was to lay him open to Hill’s imputation of plagiaristic appropriation.

Ted Strehlow grew up between cultures. As mentioned, the young child was cared for by Aranda women and mixed with Aranda children, speaking their language. The language of his home was German, English was learned at school and used socially, Latin and Greek were taught him by his strict and gifted father. The Strehlows had deposited their other five children, who had till then been running wild with the Arandans, in Germany with relatives in 1910 so as to ensure their adequate education; for Carl knew what it was to come from a deprived background and how precarious and hard-won his own educational success had been. Thus from the age of four, Ted, born in 1908 as the youngest, had grown up as their only child and with educational expectations on him high, as he would not have the benefit of German schools like his siblings. Missionaries were paid a pittance and their remoteness and their commitment made them extremely exploitable and thus unable to pursue the interests of  their children as they might have wished. When Carl died prematurely at the age of fifty in 1922 because for up to three months it had been impossible to procure urgently needed medical aid for him, Ted and his mother were left without funds. The German relatives, now suffering from post World War I inflation, were no longer able to offer support either. In this crisis, the Immanuel Synod that had just founded a secondary college in Adelaide provided work for the mother and an education for the son. Here Old Lutheran piousness, high German educational standards, and the British concept of the public school combined to create a unique culture. Ted then studied at Adelaide University, the first truly Australian institution he was involved with, where he majored in Literature and Classics. He eventually graduated with First Class Honors. At this stage he still hoped to marry an ‘English girl’ and become part of Adelaide society; he loved playing the piano and enjoyed the refined culture the city could provide. He would have been happy to forget about his German background, his Old Lutheran affiliation, and his Aranda youth amidst the heat and flies, with its chaotic comings and goings and its crises of drought and flood, to pursue the academic career that seemed to be waiting for someone of his talents and application. But when post-graduate work was discussed, his professor suggested that he should make use of his unique knowledge of the Aranda language and his close personal connections with these people, to write his thesis on Aranda grammar and phonetics. He was then awarded a government grant and completed this work, which involved  travelling for two years with camels and native guides in the harsh outback as he collected his material, with distinction. It appears that he had decided to make the sacrifice and return to the outback to a good part because his black friends expected him to and he in turn felt a responsibility towards them. And once he was back, it soon became clear that there was a role for him to play as a ‘white Arandan’. This then led to him being offered the job of the first patrol officer in Central Australia, a job which he was to hold for six years.

Though by then the Aranda had almost lost the frontier battles for their traditional lands and their retaliatory cattle spearing had virtually ceased, as had the punitive massacres of the settlers, there were still plenty of problems. The worst of them were starvation due to  the loss of native game and food plants as well as of drinking water to cattle; introduced diseases; the breakdown of traditional law; and the illegal exploitation of Aboriginal labor and women by the hard living white men who were attempting to establish themselves in difficult and lonely circumstances. A patrol officer whose duties had at that stage not been carefully circumscribed, who was expected to exert his control in the vast area of Central Australia, who had neither the police powers nor the medical or legal expertise needed to make a real difference, nor the money even to fence off the water supply of his compound where he had to look after criminals as well as the sick and destitute, who was expected, moreover, to constantly investigate white settlers in their relations with Aboriginal workers and native women: such a patrol officer had almost insurmountable problems to contend with. And he was working with a considerable additional handicap if he was not ‘one of us’ but conceived to be a mission-minded German or a white Arandan or an academically trained know-all, who made unwelcome suggestions in favor of the natives and didn’t share the understanding among bureaucrats that a good deal of their job was to be just window dressing. Even if he had been more at home in Australian culture, it would have been impossible for him to be popular with almost anyone he was working with, for the demoralized natives too often resented him for the demands he made on behavior and work. But assisted by his hard-working and unpaid wife Bertha, whose health did not stand up well to outback living and was a constant worry, Ted Strehlow struggled on, often using his diary as an outlet for his frustrations. A man working under such conditions can easily be made to look ridiculous, particularly if the diary is exploited. And Hill does exploit his complaints. All the same, Strehlow was obviously the best available man for the job as his short-lived promotion to Deputy Protector of Aborigines and Deputy Director of Native Affairs in the Northern Territory then showed.     

Short-lived, for once the war with Germany was underway, his enemies found it easier to make themselves heard. Strehlow was supposed to have painted swastikas on rocks in the bush and to be conspiring with family members in Germany to further the Nazi cause; complaints of this nature were at the time brought against many Australians with a German background. The government response was eventually to remove him from his job. He was drafted into the army with the rank of private, an obvious insult to one who had a Master’s Degree and had held a position of leadership for many years. Snubs of this sort, later by universities and academic institutions, which were obviously intended to put an outsider in his place, to tell, for instance, an ethno-linguist and collector of myths that he could not consort with anthropologists, became more and more common, eventually leading up to the scandals that dogged Strehlow’s last years.

On his various research trips into the outback that were financed by universities, Strehlow had been given hundreds of tjurungas, sacred objects along with the secret-sacred myths, the songs and the dances that accompanied them, always the personal property of individual initiated Aboriginal men. He filmed their dances on University supplied film. In all cases, Strehlow had committed himself  to guarantee that this sacred knowledge would be withheld from women, uninitiated youths, and basically, any but an academic audience though there was room for discretion. As Australia’s specialist in Aranda culture, Strehlow had grounds to believe himself to be the only person equipped to record and interpret this material, work that would need many years to complete.

To give a simplified version of the years of struggle that now followed: The universities insisted that they owned the research materials they had financed and that these should be handed over to them to be made available to other researchers. Strehlow, in turn, insisted that he was entitled to continue research he was uniquely qualified to carry out and that he would not hand anything over unless it could be appropriately stored and protected, which the universities could not guarantee or even finance. One party argued in terms of financial agreements, the other in terms of responsibility for promises given to the natives and research priorities primarily in their interests. The massive task of documenting, explaining and interpreting all this material required research assistants and they were supplied for some years. One of them then became Strehlow’s second wife, Kathleen Stuart, a scandal in Adelaide’s conservative society. When a son was born and he had to provide for a new family, Strehlow declared his wife and son to be the heirs of his collection, which may not have been his to bestow. By this time funding had ceased so the work was being privately financed. Strehlow now sold sensitive photographs, his own, to the German magazine Der Stern, arguing, as others had before him, that the secret-sacred dimension did not exist in the context of foreign cultures. But in contravention of the contract he believed he had signed, Stern then sold the material on to the Australian magazine People. Not surprisingly, all hell now broke loose. The man who had insisted on keeping ownership of sacred material that two universities, who had financed its collection, claimed as their property, arguing that only he could protect it appropriately, had blatantly violated his trust, though he had of course done this partly, it appears, in order to finance its proper storage. He had further violated his curatorship by handing on his knowledge of secret-sacred ceremonies to a woman and bequeathing this sensitive and disputed material to her: a woman, as it turned out, who did not always know her place or advise him well. When the People-scandal broke, Strehlow also did not apologize as was urgently expected of him.

To complicate matters further, times had moved on. A new generation of often uninitiated or only partially initiated men were laying claim to sacred objects which the elders who had given them to Strehlow would in those former days have sternly denied them. But vestiges of a culture once deemed dead had, against all odds, survived among the younger generation. More men than expected had undergone initiation and had learned at least some verses of their songs. And once the curator appointed by the original owners had betrayed his trust, the claim of the descendents of the ancient culture rang truer. At some stage, to complicate matters, the tourist industry also raised its head, asking the state to secure the ownership of ‘national capital’, something that disturbed Strehlow greatly and further undermined his trust in national institutions. In 1978 Strehlow, who had been seriously unwell for some time, then died suddenly in the midst of all this conflict and controversy. But his wife, who had worked and was still working on the material and also had his child to support, continued to assert her ownership for many years, voicing all manner of threats. It was a sad ending to Strehlow’s life of dedication.

 I am telling Ted Strehlow’s story as I see it and as I think it deserves to be seen; it is not quite the story Hill gives us though it resembles that of Strehlow’s earlier biographer Ward McNally. Why did things go so wrong? According to Hill’s version (Hill is  a Freudian) there were deep if hidden flaws in Strehlow’s personality which, he believes, passages from Strehlow’s private diaries point to. Moreover, these character flaws can, according to Hill, often be related to Strehlow’s German or mission heritage and they throw their shadow over the early years too. Foremost among them is possessiveness, a word that becomes almost a leitmotiv. But as Hill would have it, Strehlow also showed a complaining and somewhat precious selfishness, paternalism towards the natives, no sense of appropriate loyalty to the white men he encountered in the course of his work, tactlessness, an overestimation of his role as a white Arandan, and a German ‘mission boy’s’ underlying and conflicting loyalty to the archaic Christian cause. 

Few human beings are perfectly suited to their role in life. At the time that Strehlow agreed to work with the Arandas, as his professor suggested he should, he would have been quite happy to be a city-based academic. But as a native speaker of Aranda and a trained linguist, he was the only person at the time who could have rescued the fast-dying culture and language from oblivion. And he felt a responsibility towards the people he had grown up with who had asked him to come back to them and be a leader to them in hard times. Not only was their culture collapsing but, as earlier explained, the take-over of land that had been the Aborigines’ hunting and gathering grounds and the diseases that came with the white man meant that the physical foundation of Aboriginal survival was also severely at risk. It is hard to imagine a more difficult job than that of the first patrol officer in Central Australia, an area of 1000 by 800 miles in which the welfare of the Aborigines was a priority neither for the bureaucrats nor the settlers. During these years, Strehlow was a dedicated activist fighting the Aranda cause in all its complexity with a deep sense of the responsibility placed upon him. If his work ethic and his sense of responsibility could be traced to his German mission background, this should hardly be considered a problem. While Strehlow was conscientious, he was also realistic and not a stickler for rules; but it was inevitable that in doing his duty he would often rub settlers and bureaucrats up the wrong way. And he had not come from their ranks. Once war with Germany was declared, there was a ready excuse for removing him from his field of work, even though he was an Australian by birth, the son of naturalized Australians, and had done significant work in and for his country for many years. In retrospect, Strehlow’s life can be read as the story of someone who is repeatedly, almost systematically thwarted, humiliated and excluded because he is not considered part of the dominant culture. Eventually, he was to become so isolated that he could only move against himself and the cause he represents. At some point it then also becomes difficult for such an outcast to distinguish genuine discrimination from bad luck.

That is not to say that I think Strehlow was always blameless. For one thing, he was perhaps too single-mindedly caught up in his cause. He was also probably never a particularly good negotiator and like many who feel they are not respected in spite of their talents, commitment and efforts, he did not take advice and criticism well. In his role as custodian for the Aranda elders, he saw things too exclusively and inflexibly from their perspective (it was to them he had made his promises) though there were other parties involved, in particular the universities and the younger generation of Alice Springs Aborigines. His wife Bertha had worked loyally and hard with him during his time as a patrol officer, but once the children were born, the family had been city-based and there were long periods when Ted was not at home, either overseas or in the outback; he may well often have felt an outsider at home and his children may have perceived him somewhat as a stranger. Perhaps partly because of its secret nature, he never shared his work with them. His second wife, Kathleen, in contrast, was able and prepared to work with him. The unprovoked desertion and divorce and the rejection and disinheritance of his first family understandably led to bitter feelings on their part. Strehlow’s sons have made it clear to interviewers that they did not consider him a good father or a particularly  admirable human being. Bertha, for her part, seems to have been more restrained. It must be remembered that at the time, divorce still carried a significant social stigma which compounded the suffering.

To me Ted Strehlow’s story is one in which the establishment takes pleasure in excluding an outsider, and then shrugs its shoulders as though it had had no part in the disaster that follows. I must declare an interest here. I too grew up among people of German background considered to be ‘enemy aliens’ and derided and excluded as such and I have observed how such ostracization warps individuals, all the while society blithely washes its hands. For by the laws of racism, and racism is what we are here talking about in spite of the camouflage of patriotism, anyone with German blood in their veins must be considered guilty.  If a morality tale is to be told, and there are still many newcomers to this country in whose interest such tales might be told, this is the one I would tell as a tragedy of human failure. And I would locate the failure primarily with society and not with the excluded individual.

In 1960 Ted Strehlow gave a lecture that was published a year later by the Aborigines Advancement League of South Australia. It was entitled Nomads in No-Man’s-Land. Its point of departure was the sad decline and death of the first great Aboriginal painter, Albert Namatjira, a man only slightly older than Ted who had grown up with him at Hermannsburg. Namatjira’s art had brought him fame, wealth, acceptance in the lounge-rooms of white society and eventually the dispensation to drink, to ‘enjoy life’ in the manner of white men. But the welcome had not been extended to other members of his people. As a result, the only group the artist could be truly at home in was still his tribe and tribal custom demanded that property and food be shared. Providing drink to his relatives was, however, against the law; Namatjira was eventually found guilty of ‘supplying liquor to an aboriginal ward’ and a prison sentence, generously halved to three months to be served in an Aboriginal community rather than a gaol, was imposed. But the humiliation of it broke Namatjira who never painted again and died a short time later. Strehlow sums up, and it is obviously his own experience that gives precision and vehemence to his argument: ‘no man can stand successfully on his own, as an individual divorced from the group to which he belongs by race, culture and inclination. He can play his part in life successfully only through the group’ [...] (15) And  he appeals to white Australians:

It has generally been taken for granted that since Australia as a whole has become a white man’s country, all planning for the future status of the aboriginals of this country should be done by white experts, without assistance in point of ideas or with regard to the proposed methods of change from any native leaders. Again it has almost always been accepted as inevitable that integration into white society would necessarily mean the complete abandonment of the whole of the old aboriginal culture by the new citizens of the future. (14)

He then quotes a certain Peter Coleman writing in the Observer in 1959:

           

Despite official claims our policy against the aborigines has in one fundamental respect never changed. Once the idea was to kill them off; then the more humane programme was to let them die out peacefully and meanwhile to smooth their dying pillow; now the policy is to assimilate them. But as far as the aborigines themselves are concerned the result in each case is the same. Assimilation ultimately means absorption and that means extinction. As a “nation” with its own way of life and even as a race the aborigines are still destined to disappear. (30)

Today, society as a whole is largely agreed that there is absolutely no reason why such a monocultural approach should be considered desirable or necessary, though Strehlow can’t say this in his day. Instead he says: ‘if our aboriginals are to be fully assimilated into the white community they must [at the very least] know that their membership in groups of mixed dark and white Australians is of a permanent character, and that no white members of these groups will ever hold their racial origin against them.’ (24) Similarly, he might have said, if Australians can’t find it in themselves to accept Germans in their midst, they should at least be welcoming to the individual of German background who has done his best to assimilate and work productively in their system. Full acceptance of the outsider into the group without the arrogant stipulation that his former identity must be shed completely is what Strehlow too would have needed throughout his career. It is perhaps significant that Hill does not refer to this address.

Hill is firmly entrenched in the opposite camp. He is out to expose and condemn the hidden strands of German-ness in his victim. For Deutschtum he quotes an obviously satirizing definition: Deutschtum ‘is an almost untranslatable word that takes in the conviction that: everything that is German is good: German depth, German strength, German culture, German thrift, and, above all, the German soul.’ (104) Such attitudes, of course, thrive when people are marooned in a culture that makes similar extreme claims for its own superiority. Hill talks dismissively of Strehlow’s ‘lack of genius for the English language’, his genetic predisposition for noun-based sentences, his style that lacks the lightness and wit of that of a Kipling, as though the English language had room for only one style and temperament. Strehlow’s professor at university had also told the Honors student that he would never master the English language like a native speaker. And Strehlow was, of course, not a native English speaker (an anomaly in those days); yet his writing is lucid, vivid and powerful. His Journey to Horseshoe Bend  has become a classic of Australian literature, as Hill himself admits. Hill’s own language skills may well be greater than Strehlow’s; he can risk a mannerist style while Strehlow is plain-speaking. But should we insist that every man whom we accept into our community must be a literary genius, particularly when he excels in many areas?

Setting aside the fatuous definition of Deutschtum just quoted, what was it that distinguished people like the German missionaries in Strehlow’s time? They came from a country in the heart of Europe where neighboring states spoke different languages; it was a natural necessity of life to speak more than one language: French and German in Alsace, Danish and German in Schleswig, Polish and German in Danzig or Silesia, Czech and German in Bohemia and the Sudetenland, Italian and German in the Tirol, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Romanian, Italian and German in Austria. Because Germany and Austria both had few natural boundaries, there had always been a mixture of races on the edges. There was thus also no fear of miscegenation, no ‘Germanic Germany’ ideal at that time. Till 1871 when Carl Strehlow was seven, Germany had been a loose agglomeration of German-speaking states. German nationalism, which had first been awakened during Napoleon’s wars of conquest, was a relatively new phenomenon in the latter nineteenth century that hardly penetrated into the countryside where people still thought in terms of the older principalities and kingdoms. Even during World War I, soldiers swore allegiance to their duchies and city states rather than the nation.  

Industrialization had also only fully begun with unification; Germany was still a country of rural villages in the areas from which the Strehlows migrated. In The Tale of Frieda Keysser John Strehlow has given a meticulous depiction of the milieu from which his grandparents originated.  Village communities consisted of church goers. Their religion gave shape and order to their lives; the pastor and the school teacher were always the head men of their village. To be a pastor was to be a community leader, not a zealot. Higher education, for its part, revolved around the learning of Latin and Greek as the languages and cultures that represented the common heritage of Europe.

In the latter nineteenth century, Germany was an overcrowded country from which vast numbers of people were migrating, mainly to America. There they would eventually have to converse in English; but most emigrants were not ready to relinquish their German language and culture, meaning primarily religion, immediately. At the Neuendettelsau seminary, Carl Strehlow had originally been trained to minister to emigrant German communities in America where it was hoped pastors would take American wives to help in the integration process. When British people migrated to the Empire they were able to take their language and culture with them; Germans could not.

Germany’s most original contribution to European thought and culture had been Romanticism and it lingered on there for longer than in other countries. Romanticism brought with it an interest in nature and its scientific observation, a reverence for origins and roots, for preserving heritage, for depth of feeling, for personal religious experience, and for a pantheistic sense of nature. In comparison, Britain with its great national capital, its earlier industrialization and its vast empire was a much more modern and open society. It bred pioneers. But German culture, as represented by the early German missionaries, explorers and scientists in Australia, was eminently suited to a life in the wildernesses of nature, an appreciation of ancient aboriginal cultures and their religious myths, the acceptance of other races, the learning of new languages, and to the rural and community work, the common-sense and caring village life, that was required on missions. The German missionaries were practical people who had been trained to help others as best they could; they were also scholars interested in origins. There would have been no need to fear or disparage the Strehlows’ German heritage; from an impartial point of view, it provided a perfect counterbalance to British entrepreneurial conquest in the Australian outback, though its championing of the Aboriginal cause was understandably not popular with many settlers of the day. (The particularly vicious anti-German measures adopted against long-time South Australian settlers with the commencement of World War I may well also have been due to pent up anger against the pro-Aboriginal stance of German missions over the years.)

Ted Strehlow was aware of the essential compatibility of his two cultures and in his Journey to Horseshoe Bend he showed he could appreciate both. There was the benevolent paternalism of the mission, with its grateful and devoted aboriginal members, a culture whose other side was the anguished probing of conscience of Theo’s dying father as he worked through the Book of Job, the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, and the passion of Christ and found the strength to forgive the people who he felt had betrayed him. On the other hand, there was the rough and ready, irreligious culture of the pioneers that admitted few qualms of conscience; it had given Ted quite some trouble when he was a patrol officer. In Journey he depicts it not with German disdain but with Australian fellow-feeling:

Gus’s sympathies were, naturally enough, on the side of the pioneer settlers. [...]

“The pioneers came to open up new country. They brought their stock and they had to have labour – not easy to get in those days, I can tell you! Not one of the old niggers’d work for them, only some of the kids came along – boys of fourteen and fifteen or less. The pioneers would teach them to handle sheep, then one day the old folk would come and tell them to run away. Now what could the pioneers do? They’d got their holdings from the Lands Office in Adelaide, and were paying rent on them, and anyway the niggers had never done anything with the land before the white man came into this country. The police wouldn’t help them in any way – in fact, lots of the settlers were too far out to call the police when trouble started. So when the boys ran away, all the settlers could do was to ride after them, bring them back, and give them a good hiding with a stockwhip to teach them they couldn’t just walk out on their jobs and let the sheep get killed by dingoes or let them die without water. After that the old niggers’d start making trouble. They didn’t often attack the homesteads – they usually started killing sheep or cattle, and there was no way of catching them. If the police came, they were weeks late getting there; and mostly they took no action unless you could tell them what niggers’d done it. As if any of the settlers would’ve known! In any case, there weren’t enough police in the whole of the bloody State to protect the poor battling cows in the outback from the thieving niggers in those days! All the pioneers could do was to get together when things got too tough. Then they’d go out in parties and raid the niggers’ camps and knock the thieving bastards over with bullets. Never got very many, of course: but niggers’re pretty cunning and their camps were hard to find, and they’d all run like rabbits if they saw a party of settlers coming up on horseback. But after some years everything quietened  down. The niggers had enough sense to realize that they just couldn’t walk around the country killing sheep and cattle, and they got to respecting the white man’s property. They settled down pretty well after that, and some of ‘em worked jolly hard for the pioneers. It was only during the first few years that things were really tough down in the Flinders.” (152/3) JHB

But this seemingly uncaring culture revealed an astounding generosity and tactfulness of spirit once it called on its commitment to mateship. Strehlow showed that these two cultures, that of the pioneer and that of the missionary, that of Britain and that of Germany, could deeply respect one another when given the opportunity to demonstrate this.

And then there was a third world, that of the landscape of the journey in which each and every feature had an ancient mythical story attached to it, stories that were about to be lost as the natives of the area died out, often from new diseases like the flu epidemic that swept the country in the wake of WWI. And yet the essence of their stories, its myths of fire and rain and death and travelling ancestors growing tired from their exploits and sinking back into the ground from which they had emanated, still seemed to inhabit the landscape. It would become the young boy Theo’s life’s work to preserve these tales of a magnificent and unthinkably ancient culture in the name of their custodians - and to show Australians what they had thoughtlessly destroyed in only a few years time. The Journey to Horseshoe Bend has elements of a foundation myth for modern Australia and it is thus not surprising that it has now been turned into an oratorio.

When Hill uses the word ‘mission’ it has the disparaging ring to it that we know from Spencer and Gillen and that is still wide-spread. It is always implied that the missions perverted the naked and unadulterated native culture (which actually had to be staged for Spencer’s photographs because it no longer existed as such). As stated earlier, the natives that came to Hermannsburg were refugees from dispossession, displacement, violence, exploitation and starvation who needed a sanctuary that provided rations, medical help to deal with epidemics, and schooling in the white man’s ways: stock work, shepherding, building, gardening, the wearing of clothes and the running of a household, the peaceable resolution of arguments, punctuality and an orderly use of time, reading and writing, and the religion of the conquerors which embodied the new values. Without at least some understanding of such things it would be far harder for the dispossessed to adapt to changed circumstances. At Hermannsburg, both the people at the mission and the ones in the native camp across the river were provided for and protected where required; there was a fluid relation between them. Of those at the mission only very few elected to be baptized and even they usually did not relinquish their core traditional beliefs and customs. Moreover, both at Hermannsburg and at other German missions, the missionaries were always the first to record the native language and native customs and myths. That Ted’s father Carl refused to witness ceremonies which ended in promiscuous sex was, according to John Strehlow who was guided by his grandmother’s diaries, due to the need to curb venereal diseases which had reached epidemic proportions and not to any Puritan disapproval of pleasure or nakedness, as Hill imputes. Lutheran religiousness was not Puritan though it could be Pietist, which implied a personal and enthusiastic approach to worship, close attention to conscience, a deep commitment to the care and welfare of the needy, and a determination to work towards the creation of a better world. Its ethic was honorable though its overt piety and enthusiastic language can sound comic to us today.

In times of high emotion, Ted Strehlow’s private diaries (or the little that Hill quotes of them) could have a pietistic ring to them. It is a question, of course, whether private diaries should be used in a book like Hill’s for anything but essential information, also a question as to how such diaries, obviously written for the writer himself to cope with difficult or emotional situations, should be read. Is the diarist indulging himself, distancing himself, trying to understand himself, simply reacting to emotional provocation, or is he recording what is happening, maybe to be reviewed in a calmer moment? One would have to study a diary carefully to make such an assessment. Hill does not stop to confront these questions squarely. In Part II of his book, he devotes more than ten pages to a painful episode in Strehlow’s life where the young post-graduate student fell deeply in love with a woman who did not return his feelings. Sheila Elliot would have seemed an ideal wife for him, a woman who had grown up in the outback but been educated in Adelaide, someone who might be willing to share both his worlds and someone who came from a family that had provided help and kindness at the time of his father’s death. It was a family he thought he could feel at home as with no other, though they were less generous to Ted, now their daughter’s unwelcome suitor, this time round.

Unrequited love is a painful experience many young men and women go through; often an outside observers will shake their heads at the emotional energy expended. There is really no need for Hill’s reader to be involved at such length in something so private. The episode is recorded moreover in Strehlow’s private diary and then paraphrased rather than quoted by Hill, possibly because he would not have been given the permission to quote. Normally a young man might have a friend to talk to or even to write to about such things but Strehlow is in the outback; he has no family in Australia and seems to have had no other confidants. For Hill, the Sheila episode is a comic interlude. He assumes that Strehlow has pretentiously clothed himself in the mantle of Goethe’s Werther, a sentimental hero who uses language inspired by Pietism when he writes to his friend first about his love of nature but soon also of his devotion to a woman who cannot be his. Werther eventually seeks his escape in suicide; Goethe, who had a similar experience, of course does not nor does Strehlow. From Hill’s paraphrases it is not possible to judge the intention behind Strehlow’s diary writing; in any case, people in a state of high emotion are rarely the best writers. Hill comments:

He was a victim of sentiment and sentimentality (in the modern sense of the term). He was hysterically writing – as a diarist, acting, (‘venting’ he said) – things out. But because he was still a Christian he was all the time winching his anguish towards the heavens, striving to write his ego into an eternal scheme of things. (202)    

This seems to me to be not only an unkind comment but also a gross over-interpretation of what may actually have been written. In whatever way Strehlow used his diary, and we cannot tell that from Hill’s summaries and paraphrases, it obviously helped him to calm himself and carry on steadily with his daytime work, which he did; why not say that his use of his diary was an admirable coping strategy? Perhaps the real reason why Hill does not say this is that the ridicule is not aimed merely at Strehlow but is also intended to compromise Goethe, generally acknowledged to be the greatest of Germany’s writers, about whom Hill then passes the following judgment: ‘In the mind of the quintessential romantic, possessiveness is a project yielding its own lost cause.’ (202) Whatever that may mean in the context of a movement as complex as Romanticism (and a German would always classify Werther as a typical Storm and Stress text, this being an earlier short-lived post-Enlightenment literary movement that explored and expanded the emotional potential, both positive and negative, of man), possessiveness will later reemerge as a theme when Strehlow’s refusal to part with the tjurungas entrusted to him needs to be explained. The sub-title of Hill’s book is notably “T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession”.

In this way, Hill encourages us to deduce that the young man carried in him the seeds of evil, or perhaps only dysfunction, and these were sown by a reprehensible and dishonestly emotional German culture promoted by the greatest of German writers. It is an approach often used to trace the roots of Nazi crimes, occasionally to as far back as Armenius and the very beginnings of German history. The message is loud and clear: This people and its culture were never any good and they should still not be trusted. It plays like a basso continuo throughout Hill’s book. In reality, Strehlow’s love experience has only the most superficial and universal resemblance to that of Werther. Hill also has no proof that Strehlow had even read Goethe’s novel.

There are of course many people in the world whose just anger at what German people did to them and their people knows no bounds. If we agree to the world being governed by tribal revenge of the kind that was practiced by the Aranda, where a crime can be avenged on any member of the opposite tribe, then Hill’s onslaught on Ted Strehlow may well seem acceptable, though he seems a strange sacrificial victim to choose. Hill himself is obviously uncertain as to how his readers might react and his book is thus infused with ambiguity. As often as not his positive statements are immediately capped by some negative comment. In describing Strehlow he says: ‘the manly frankness of the decent bushman was going to inhabit him as much as the lustful license exuded by Willshire [the most notorious of the mounted policemen].’ If we exclude Strehlow’s courting of his second wife and perhaps a brief affair in London, there is absolutely no evidence given for ‘lustful license’. A little later he is then accused of a lack of ‘lustful license’: ‘He was a mission boy. The taboos against consorting with Aboriginal women, even though he knew their beauty and, as a boy, had known their touch, were obviously too great.’ (282) Strehlow was a married patrol officer at the time, charged with preventing the abuse of Aboriginal women by white men; even for a Freudian it would seem foolish to hold his abstinence in the outback against him.

 In a similar fashion, Hill acknowledges Strehlow’s contribution to anthropology: ‘With Spencer and Gillen we had a picture drawn for us of gesticulating ethnographic objects. Thanks to Strehlow, the same people have been fully rendered as highly cognisant celebratory subjects, poets and artists of their life, makers of their culture, rather than doomed aspects of nature.’ (11) But a little later this praise is withdrawn: ‘that the subjects he studied were always his subjects and never quite his objects makes him unique in the history of anthropology, even though he was never, strictly speaking, an anthropologist, any more than he was a particularly original thinker. He was rather his problematic self. He might be regarded as a case study of what Boas called Bildung, “the relativity of all cultivation”’.(23) With ‘Bildung’ we are back again to his German heritage for this is a specifically German concept. Hill’s accusations are too complex to be dealt with here and he himself doesn’t follow them up with analysis. Some of them may have a certain validity; but the put-down is loud and clear.

Another example: Rex Ingamells, the founder of the Jindyworobaks movement that ‘wanted to free Australian art from European litarariness and root it in an indigenous sense of place’ had sent some of his poems to Strehlow for comment. Strehlow is positive about most of them but the one about the Bandicoot-god, which had used his account as a source, strikes him as less successful; he suggests that it has ‘not quite recaptured the spirit of the aboriginal legend on which it is based.’(392) Hill himself is critical of this poem writing: ‘The timeless aspect of the myth is there, and the simple echo of the chant, but so is the jingle of the nursery rhyme. Entirely missing is the savage meat of the story, the primal horde’s killing of the father.’ (392) Nevertheless, he says of Strehlow’s critique which comes to a similar conclusion: ‘The egocentricity of Strehlow’s review is [...] striking ... ‘ (393) suggesting that it was mere proprietorial jealousy that had motivated him. Hill believes that ‘Strehlow’s literary criticism was barely conscious of modernism’s attempt to clear up Edwardian diction, to get rid of what Pound admirably called emotional slither or of the obstacles facing Australian poets trying to shape an Australian voice.’ (393) But Strehlow was 38 years older than Hill; when I studied for English Honors at Sydney University in the fifties, at which time Hill was a little boy,  ‘modernism’s attempt to clear up Edwardian diction’ was not talked about either and Pound, in so far as he was mentioned at all, was a fascist. It is probably correct that Strehlow’s taste in poetry was old-fashioned, but he was in good company. Nevertheless, his pre-modern orientation did cause him to choose a style for his translations of Aranda myths that would perhaps not be chosen today. If Hill had taken on the task he might have produced something more literary and pleasing. But Hill is unfortunately not a speaker of Aranda. We are all captive to our historical eras, our abilities and our tastes. Also, if Strehlow had been more kindly treated by his colleagues he might have been happy to consult more, perhaps even collaborate. Here, in the story as I prefer to tell it, we are back to the sad results for an entire nation of exclusion and discrimination. Hill quotes Strehlow’s call for a poetical dictionary of Aranda: “Until such a dictionary exists in Aranda, there will remain many scores of Aranda poetical words whose exact significance can only be guessed at from the general meaning of the verses in which they occur.’ (453) Hill’s comment is again exaggerating and mean-spirited:  ‘It is an important confession. It implies that much of Strehlow’s translation might be guesswork and that, at bottom, since the roots of the language did not “cover” each other particularly well, translation might be inaccurate or even impossible.’ (453)

Strehlow himself describes what the challenges were in this case:

The difficulties of translation from Aranda to English are considerable. The originals abound in archaic and obsolete words, no longer used in current diction, but traditionally preserved in these instances. The verb stem in Aranda can take about a thousand combinations of suffixes; and many of these change the original face of the verb in such a way that a whole sentence may be necessary in English in order to express the new shade of meaning. Again, in the chant verses, the original word components are always run together and then re-subdivided into metrical feet: this pattern of versification ensures that no uninitiated person can readily understand a verse that he has not had explained to him by his elders.

It follows that an English translation which tries to convey the artistic force of these chants and legends must often use a whole sentence where the Aranda version uses only one verb. It must also use archaic words or turns of expression where the native version employs them. It must frequently paraphrase native words for which there is no English equivalent. Since the translator cannot hope to run together archaic English words into a single verse-unit, and re-subdivide it into a regular verse pattern, he has to use inversion and certain poetical turns in an attempt of capture some of the dramatic effect of the original. (438)

Perhaps we should be grateful to Strehlow for taking on this seemingly impossible task. Nobody has tried anything comparable.

In his retranslation of his father’s version of the New Testament, Strehlow was criticized by one Aranda Christian in particular, Manasse Armstrong. Strehlow had decided to treat the Aranda language as a living tongue that would survive into the future. In view of this, he had both composed new words from Greek roots and introduced sacred words that were currently not part of the normal language but that would most likely be lost if they were not now made public. He did this in consultation with a language committee of elders but at a time when the language skills of many Aranda speakers were declining due to competition with English. Such people wanted a simpler rather than a more complicated language. Strehlow’s choice was made in good faith, driven by hopes for the future that would prove to be unrealistic. He was excessively hurt by the criticism, perhaps because it first drove home to him that the Aranda language really did have no future. For years this translation had been his unpaid nightly labor, something few among the natives would have appreciated. Of course his father Carl’s simpler translation was also still in existence.

Hill devotes some space to the theory of translation and, more specifically, to Luther as a translator. And even though he concedes that Strehlow’s approach to Biblical translation was totally different from that of Luther, closer to that of Buber and Rosenzweig, his portrait of Luther’s ‘ferocious, penitent, arrogant and pious personality’ (519) is so ‘arrogant’ and ‘ferocious’ that it taints Strehlow by association. We must assume that it could have no place in the book if it was not intended to reflect on Strehlow. Hill speaks of Strehlow’s ‘display of imperialism in translation, a wilfulness to rival Luther’s’, and claims that ‘on the strict Lutheran model, translation was an exercise in embattled authority rather than relationship, of delivering the Word when the Word was conceived as an inspired act of zealotry’. (544) All this is at best a gross exaggeration at worst wrong-headed. Once more we have Hill’s angry reaction to all things German. It surfaces again and again: ‘with Teutonic will they work themselves to the bone’. (677)

It is not just T.G.H. Strehlow himself that is the victim of this anger. Thus Hill writes about the Bethesda Mission: ’they [the German missionaries] wanted to know how the native language worked, and something of native belief and feeling. They sought and often brilliantly gained this knowledge the better to erase heathenism from the shores of the lake so that all the waters of the desert would be available for Christian baptism.’ (2) The ridicule contained in this statement ignores the practical help towards survival given at great personal cost at a time when Australia was doing nothing to help the displaced Aborigines and it ignores the dynamic encounter between cultures which resulted in a missionary like the Rev. Otto Siebert becoming quite obsessed with Dieri culture, in a way perceived by some to be to the detriment of his mission work. Later we are told:

It seems not to have occurred to any Lutheran that there were certain affinities between their religious beliefs and those of the strangers they were among. The tribes had in common a sacramental culture. They subscribed absolutely to notions of eternity, they had rituals that enacted commitments to transubstantiation, where matter and spirit interpenetrated. They shared a culture where certain words and songs were sacred, and one that rested on the assumption that the ordering principle of reality was invisible because it was a spiritual one. The material world was there for all to see – and to share, as both tribes were uncommonly communal, at least in principle – but at the same time its meanings were located in spiritual history. As a result, the true believers in both tribes shared powerful characteristics: they did so because of their passion for converting the material into the spiritual. To this extent the religious teachers of both cultures were masters of metaphor, or poets of reality. (49)

Hill admits, quite brilliantly, that there was the potential for real respect and understanding, but that it actually occurred (he may have known too little about the missions to realize this) is masked by his accusation of lack of understanding, of bigoted stupidity on the part of the missionaries. There are any number of further examples of Hill’s irritation with all things German to be found, (pointing out that the notorious Mounted Constable Wurmbrand was Prussian when he was apparently Hungarian is another example) but there is no need to labor the point any further.

Another matter that needs to be discussed is Hill’s handling of Strehlow’s private diaries and journals; he uses them almost exclusively as evidence against the man. It is, moreover, often not clear to what kind of text he is referring. An official journal is something very different from a private diary. Hill accuses Strehlow of referring throughout his diaries to Bertha  ‘as his wife or “my wife”, sometimes “my dear wife” – never as Bertha. She is denoted as an act of possession.’ (239) I have recently read letters from the same period; in them ‘my wife’ was common and Australian husbands even referred to their wives by surname: ‘Mrs. Moore also sends her regards’: that in a correspondence with a solicitor considered a friend. If Strehlow used this form of address in his official journal, it is likely to have been quite appropriate for the times.

Hill makes statements about Strehlow’s use of his diary but he never actually backs them up with analysis. We are told:

The authority here, for Strehlow as well as anyone travelling with him in this way, is not God but the diary, with its cunning ability to seduce the diarist into a strange double life. The doubleness for the diarist consists of the phenomenon of writing for oneself directly, sensately, cathartically (or any of the terms that indicate a minimum of self-consciousness) while at the same time cultivating a second reader at one’s elbow. The latter is the other private reader of one’s diary: it is the means by which one writes so theatrically, so confessionally, thus making an echo chamber of the deceptively solitary inner citadel of the self. (248)

[Strehlow has] the need to make an appeal, the compulsion to remonstrate and justify, to reason and be reasoned with – which is what the diary, with Strehlow, is almost always seeking to do. We are, thank goodness, not intruding as much as we thought. (249)

If he had experienced some kind of insight into his suffering – the connection for example, between the weight of his father complex, his sense of abandonment by his mother, and his yearnings for a desert bride. [...]

If, for example, he was as an intellectual contending with Freud’s challenge to religious faith; if he had been, as Hans Kung puts it, combating “projection theory, opium theory or illusion theory”. [...] But that did not happen: so the diaries are simply what they are in all their sorrowful, wretched, constricted, historically revealing, and ordinary worth.

To say this is not to use the diaries against the man.’ (250)

He was being entirely himself, rather as if the fate of his diary was to discover the same self, over and over again.’ (253)

The reader is expected to take such judgmental statements on trust; Hill produces no evidence. And knowing his aggressive dislike of his subject by now, I for one feel disinclined to take such accusations on trust. Used in this way, the diaries amount to secret evidence. There is also no law that says that private diary jottings have to make good public reading.

Strehlow’s Journey to Horseshoe Bend is a powerful and beautiful piece of literature. To me, it is a book that reaches out to Australian readers in a bid for peace and reconciliation. There are the Aranda who over many thousands of years learned to understand this difficult and often violent continent and revere it and hold it dear, even though their own society had needed to counter primeval unpredictability with strictly enforced law and discipline. There are the missionaries from Germany – and many of the missionaries in this country came from there – who struggled hard to help the Aboriginal people survive and adjust to unavoidable change and whose time is past, who are dying in the person of Theo’s father Carl, now deeply worried whether his life’s work was in fact pleasing to God, and forsaken by his church which has become a narrow and outmoded institution that is no longer able to help those in need. And there are the pioneers who have taken over this country, at first ruthlessly and often violently, but by now in harmony with their native workers and concubines and in the process of developing the rudiments of an ethical religion of their own based on mateship, extraordinary helpfulness to those in need and a gentle and tactful respect for the feelings of others. This is where the future seems to lie and those who embody it most fully are Ruby Elliot and Bob Buck. It is in the direction of such practical helpfulness rather than old-style dogmatic correctness that the missions too had been moving and when Carl Strehlow shouts the drinks for his own wake he recognizes that it is with these people that the future lies. Theo, the boy whose name suggests that his life will be linked to the search for God, experiences and recognizes the supremacy of the pioneering ethos as the way forward. But he also allows himself to be instructed by the Aboriginal donkey driver who can introduce him to the mysteries of the land. The book is Ted Strehlow’s homage to Australia and it is intended as a message to Australians. While it is based on facts, it transcends them to embody a new guiding mythology for the continent.

Considering all this, it is surprising that Hill approaches this text much as he would one of Strehlow’s diaries. (Of course Hill makes it clear that he doesn’t like Strehlow’s mythopoetic proclivities.) He is interested only in the way biography is or is not presented: Theo’s role on the periphery as a ‘third person’; his apparent abandonment by his father who totally possesses his mother (his Oedipus Complex); his alleged embarrassment at having had to witness the religious intimacies of his parent’s life; his, according to Hill, probably untruthful report that his dying father lost his faith (in the text Carl does not actually say this, only that God will not help, presumably to prevent his death); his immature and distant admiration for Ruby which will resurface when he later falls in love with her daughter Sheila and misjudges her feelings for him (Hill opines: ‘he is bound for disappointment precisely because he has always been so immature in his reality testing, the commonplace practice of separating his own illusions from the world, of knowing the difference between pleasure and reality principles’ (605)); his sense of belonging with the natives as second class people; his homelessness; Theo’s feelings of shame and anger when he says grace at Buck’s table unaware of social mores; Strehlow’s supposed dishonesty in portraying station culture, which he had strongly disapproved of when he had to grapple with it as a district officer, as admirable. In other words: he sees only Theo’s sense of abandonment, his sulky reaction to this, and his various dishonesties. Hill has determined that Strehlow was self-obsessed, complaining, dishonest and undialogic and he will read him that way, no matter how much effort the author makes to reach out to his readers. Hill writes: ‘his discourse on the Aranda was permeated with his own tragic sense, and the shapes of his own thought were continuously mythopoetic. He was both agent and captive of the elegaic, allegorical mode.’ (228) For Hill The Journey to Horseshoe Bend  is an emanation from Hill’s unconscious and not a structured piece of work. ‘Its slippages from the realm of factual consistency hardly matter as the writing, the narrative art and semi-conscious compulsions, operatically swirl back into the life.’ (656) While the book may have this sub-stratum, I would see it primarily as an inspired but also carefully, bravely and successfully fashioned piece of literature intended to reach out to a wide audience.

At this point, it might finally be time to step back and ask what it really is that makes Hill so angry. Is it primarily religiousness, or German-ness, or poor taste? He is, for example, derisive about Strehlow’s polite interest in William Ricketts’ ‘kitsch’, the project of a sculpture park aimed at converting ordinary Australians to Ricketts’ deep admiration for Aboriginal people and their intimacy with nature. In discussing Strehlow’s talk to the Australian Association for the Study of Religions, which is a lucid, comprehensible and audience-orientated depiction of Central Australian Religion that was first published in a German anthropological Festschrift in 1964 under the title Personal Monototemism in a Polytotemic Community and then did not find an Australian publisher till 1978, Hill objects to the ‘sermonizing’ conclusion. This was, however, perfectly appropriate for the particular audience he was addressing; it shows that Strehlow was ‘dialogic’ after all. He writes there:

           

However much superior critics may smile at the simple religious concepts of “the primitive peoples”, the fact remains that the many modern attempts made to set up material progress as the highest and most noble goal of human endeavour, and to provide a completely adequate and satisfying substitute for religion in explanations of the universe formulated purely in terms of mathematical equations, have so far given few people any sense of real security in the present time, or any hope of a more humane world in the future. [...]

Perhaps even civilized man could improve his prospects of a more secure future by adopting some of the concepts of toleration and cooperation on which the aboriginal Australians based their social and political systems. (51/2)    

Ultimately, it seems to be Strehlow’s lack of ‘coolness’, if one can use this rather anachronistic term, that riles Hill. It is ‘un-cool’ to be committed or religious or idealistic or emotional or moral or activist or hard-working or self-indulgent or sexually restrained or daggy (meaning not in conformity with accepted tastes) or a nerd or unrelaxed (rather than laid back) or old-fashioned or, more generally, in any way different from the in-group. What annoys Hill are not really qualities that could bring harm to society or give proof of a morally inferior personality, though he tries to couch his critique in these terms, but qualities that are currently out of date or perceived to be foreign. And it is, I believe, his own inability to explain and justify his prejudices that necessitates his extraordinary stylistic fire-works. It is a surprisingly unhistorical and culturally uninformed approach for a biographer who also has pretensions to being an intellectual and academic. But enjoyed as poetry, Broken Song can nevertheless be seriously seductive, it certainly brings us a great deal of information relevant to Strehlow that McNally’s biography does not yet contain, and I must admit I found Hill’s essay on translation that displays a poet’s intimacy with language quite fascinating, in spite of its short-comings.