Ted Strehlow

Theodor George Henry Strehlow (6 June 1908 – 3 October 1978) was an Australian anthropologist and linguist. He studied the Arrernte (Aranda, Arunta) Aboriginal Australians and their language in Central Australia.

Strehlow's father was Carl Strehlow, Lutheran pastor and Superintendent, since 1896, of the Hermannsburg Mission, southwest of Alice Springs on the Finke River. (Carl was also a gifted linguist who studied and documented the local languages, and Ted later built upon his work.) Strehlow was born, a month premature, at Hermannsburg, the native place name being Ntaria. He was raised trilingually, speaking, in addition to English, also Arrernte with the Aboriginal maids and native children, and German with his immediate family. After a family visit to Germany when he was three years old (1911), he returned with his parents, and grew up parted from his four elder brothers and a sister, Frederick, Karl, Rudolf, Hermann and Martha, who were raised in Germany. He studied both Latin and Greek as part of his home school curriculum.

When Strehlow was 14 years of age his domineering and charismatic father contracted dropsy and the story of the transport of his dying father to a station where medical help was available was recalled in Strehlow's book Journey to Horseshoe Bend. The tragic death of his father marked Strehlow for life. He left Hermannsburg for secondary schooling at Immanuel College, a boarding school for country boys of German stock, in Adelaide. He was top of the State in Latin, Greek and German in his final year Leaving Certificate examinations in 1926, and thus won a government bursary to study at the University of Adelaide.

At university Strehlow eventually enrolled in a joint honours course in Classics and English, graduating in 1931 with Honours in both.

With support from his tutor, and from both A. P. Elkin and Norman Tindale, Strehlow received a research grant from the Australian National Research Council to study Arrernte culture, and to that purpose returned to his home in Central Australia which was stricken by four years of drought and disease that had carried off many people, and emptied the land of wildlife. The tribes of Central Australia had already become the object of worldwide interest through the joint work of exploration and ethnographic enquiry undertaken by Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, whose researches exercised a notable impact on both sociological and anthropological theory, in the works of Émile Durkheim and James G. Frazer, and on psychoanalysis, in the thesis proposed by Sigmund Freud in his Totem and Taboo. One of Freud's disciples, Géza Róheim, had actually conducted fieldwork while based in Hermannsburg among the Arrernte in 1929.

His first major informants, old and fully initiated men, were Gurra, from the northern Arrernte, and Njitia and Makarinja from Horseshoe Bend, later to be joined by Rauwiraka, Makarinja, Kolbarinja, Utnadata and Namatjira, the father of the famous painter of that name. Mickey Gurra (Tjentermana), his earliest informant and last of the ingkata or ceremonial chiefs of the bandicoot totem centre known as Ilbalintja, confided in Strehlow in May 1933 that neither he nor any of the other old men had sons or grandsons responsible enough to be trusted with the secrets of their sacred objects (tjurunga) (many of which were being sold for food and tobacco as the native culture broke down), together with the accompanying chants and ceremonies. They were worried that all their secrets would die with them. Several, such as Rauwiraka, confided to Strehlow their secret knowledge, and even their names, trusting him to conserve the details of all their sacred lore and rites. He was considered a member of the Arrernte people, by dint of his ritual adoption by the tribe.

In the following two years, covering more than 7,000 grueling miles of desert to witness and record Aboriginal ways, Strehlow witnessed and recorded some 166 sacred ceremonies dealing with totemic acts, most of which are no longer practised. His academic stature firmed with the publication of Aranda Traditions (1947). This work had been assembled in 1934 but Strehlow delayed publication until all his informants were dead.

Soon after, in 1949, he received an ANU fellowship, which, though, as he soon found out, carried with it no prospect for an academic career in Canberra, enabled him to complete further studies in the field, and travel to England for research. His sojourn left him disappointed, both with England, and with many of its leading anthropologists, such as Raymond Firth and J. R. Firth, who in his view failed to extend to him the support and interest his research required, since they were critical of his lack of formal anthropological credentials. He toured the continent and lectured, with considerable success, in France and Germany, and met up with his siblings and mother in Bavaria.