Four duplicate letter books ('Komitee-Berichte' or Committee Reports) compiled between January 1914 and August 1922 by Pastor Carl Strehlow, missionary in charge at Hermannsburg, Central Australia, and addressed to the Finke River Mission Board in Adelaide
Four uniform quarto duplicate order books ('The "Graphic" Series of Pen-Duplicate Order Books'), with a total of 359 pages of text (345 pages in carbon duplicate, and 14 tipped-in pages of manuscript in German shorthand). All four volumes have 'Komitee-Berichte' (Committee Reports) in Strehlow's hand on the front cover.
The books and their contents are in excellent condition.
The first volume contains 22 reports (one per month from January 1914 to September 1915, with two in January 1915). The second volume contains 23 reports (one per month from April 1917 to December 1918, with three in October 1917, none in November 1917, two in December 1917, none in August 1918, and two in October 1918). The third volume contains 23 reports (one per month from January 1919 to October 1920, with two in October 1919). The fourth volume contains 24 reports (one per month from October 1920 to 18 August 1922, with two in March 1921, two in March 1922, and none in July 1922). The volume containing reports from October 1915 to March 1917 is not present. Carl Friedrich Theodor Strehlow (1871-1922) was ordained a Lutheran minister 'in 1892 and worked for the missionary J.G. Reuther of the Bethesda Mission at Killalpaninna among the Dieri Aborigines near Cooper's Creek, South Australia; he helped Reuther to translate the New Testament into the Dieri language. In September 1894 the Immanuel Synod bought the dilapidated Finke River Mission at Hermannsburg (later Ntaria) and appointed Strehlow to head the mission to the Western Aranda and Loritja (Kukatja) of Central Australia. He took charge on 12 October. Except for his travels among the Aborigines as far as Alice Springs, Strehlow left Hermannsburg only four times during his twenty-eight years of service' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). Over those many years, Strehlow 'strained his health by a relentless schedule which included pastoral, teaching, accounting and administrative duties, tending the sick and management of the mission farm. He devoted his leisure to linguistic and ethnological field-work and to preparing the results for publication in Germany'. These reports, addressed to the chairman of the mission board (initially Pastor L.C. Kaibel, then Pastor J.J. Stolz from October 1918), contain comprehensive details of the day to day running of the mission station in all its ramifications. The last one is dated barely two months before his death. 'In 1922 [10 October] the desperately ill Strehlow left Hermannsburg for a fourth and final time. He set out for Adelaide to receive medical treatment; the trip was arduous and protracted, and his faith in God was sorely tried; completing less than 150 miles (241 km) of the journey, he died of dropsy on 20 October at Horseshoe Bend and was buried there' (ADB). Pastor Strehlow was accompanied on that fateful trip by his wife and their youngest child, Theodor. Their son was only fourteen years old at the time; he was over 60 when he published 'Journey to Horseshoe Bend', an unforgettable account of his father's final days. This material comes from the residual archive of Pastor Carl Strehlow's son, Theodor George Henry (Ted) Strehlow (1908-1978), the eminent Australian linguist, with a strong connection to the languages and people of Central Australia. We have the appropriate government approval to dispose of this material, but we have given up trying to place it, as a whole, in any Australian institution. The archive contains thousands of documents, especially in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and music (with an emphasis on Indigenous Australia). Many of them are of strong intrinsic value on their own, but we believe the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that, ideally, the archive should remain intact. Enquiries from any interested parties as to how this may be achieved are most welcome.
Item #126929
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Status: Reserved