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ALBRECHT, FRIEDRICH WILHELM (1894–1984) and MINNA MARIA MARGARETHA nee GEVERS
(1899–1983), Lutheran missionaries to Aborigines in Central Australia. Friedrich Wilhelm was born to German
parents in the small village of Plawanice in Russian Poland on 15 October 1894. He was the eldest of ten children
born to Ferdinand and Helene, nee Reichwald.
Most who knew him thought the boy’s future unpromising. He was lame from a fall into a cellar that occurred
in infancy and, subsequently, his schoolwork was indifferent. His father assumed he would work on the family
farm. Debarred from active sports by his disability, the boy turned to reading and, in the mission tracts of his
Lutheran church, discovered a world beyond the village. At the age of ten, he knew he wanted to be a missionary.
His mother and a Christian neighbour encouraged him but the difficulties were formidable. The village school was
no preparation for higher studies and most qualifying examinations were in Russian. Finally, with the help of his
church pastor, the farm boy was admitted in 1913 to a missionary training institute in Hermannsburg, Germany.
War broke out within a year and he was drafted into the medical corps of the German army and sent to the Russian
front where he almost died of cholera. Meanwhile, the Russians deported his family to Siberia, where five brothers
and sisters died in a month in hopelessly overcrowded conditions.
During his army service, Albrecht was awarded the highest order of the Iron Cross for bravery in rescuing
wounded under fire. In 1919 he was reunited with his parents and remaining family on the farm in Poland.
Six months later he managed to escape across the still hostile Polish border to Germany and return to study
at Hermannsburg. Here he met Minna Gevers, born on 11 December 1899, the only daughter of Wilhelm and
Katharine Gevers, nee Barrels, farmers in the village of Wesseloh. Her history of tuberculosis had stood in the way
of her desire to go to a mission field as a nurse. In early 1924 Albrecht received a call to the Aboriginal mission of
Hermannsburg on the Fink River in Central Australia. He spent some months at a seminary in the United States
to improve his English and was then joined by Minna. They were married in Winnipeg, Canada, on 14 September
1925, and sailed for Australia.
Hermannsburg, the oldest mission in the Northern Territory, had been established in 1877, only a few years
after the building of the Overland Telegraph Line between Darwin and Adelaide. In the early 1920s, the mission
was a community of several hundred Aranda Aborigines 130 kilometres west of the telegraph station and tiny
township of Alice Springs. The nearest railhead was Oodnadatta, 650 kilometres to the south, from which goods
and mail came by camel train. The mission’s isolation from medical help had caused the death of the previous
missionary, Carl Strehlow, in 1922, and the mission board had experienced great difficulty in finding someone to
replace him.
The Albrechts arrived in Australia at a time when tribal lands were rapidly being depopulated, numbers of
tribal Aborigines were drastically reduced and it was generally believed that the Aborigines were a dying race.
In April 1926 Central Australia was in the early stages of what Aborigines there still call ‘the seven year drought’.
Thousands of cattle died, bush foods disappeared, and tribal Aborigines living on Crown lands to the west came in
to the mission for food. Government apathy toward Aborigines was at its height. One government official, hearing
of the deaths of 30 Aborigines in the bush, told Albrecht ‘that was thirty less to worry about’. At the mission and
elsewhere in the district, people began to die of a mysterious disease, eventually diagnosed as scurvy. ‘Death stared
us in the face’, wrote Albrecht later, ‘and our prayers seemed hollow’. Despite strenuous nursing efforts, 85 per
cent of the babies born in those years died. For the Albrechts, the ‘great dying’ was a time of trial they never forgot.
Told by many they were wasting their time and risking the lives of their own children, they nevertheless stayed at
Hermannsburg, believing God had called them there.
Rain came in 1930 and the desert bloomed. The experience of the drought had taught Albrecht that Aboriginal
lives and health could not be secure without a better diet—especially more fresh fruit and vegetables. A water
supply became one of his major objectives over the next five years. Neither government nor church felt it their
responsibility, though the only facilities for a community of several hundred people were wells, which grew salty
in dry times, and a few rainwater tanks on staff houses; Aborigines carried their supplies in kerosene tins from
the Finke. With the help of Melbourne artists Una and Violet Teague, and public appeals in Victoria and South
Australia, a pipeline was built in 1935 and ‘Kaporilja water’ from springs in the hills eight kilometres away flowed
to the mission for the first time. A large vegetable garden was started, general health began to improve and, among
the Hermannsburg Aranda at least, the birth rate started to exceed the death rate.
With the rains in 1930, Albrecht pursued another goal. Accompanied by Aboriginal men, he trekked north and
west on camels to make contact with bush Aborigines—Warlpiri Pintupi, Loritja and later Pitjantjatjara. Over the
next 10 years, ingkata inurra (‘Lame Pastor’) became known and trusted by hundreds of tribal Aborigines.
Deeply sensitive to injustice from his childhood, he thought it outrageous that Aboriginal people were pushed off
their living areas with no compensation or adequate alternative support provided by government or pastoralists.
Horrified by the large-scale disappearance of tribal groups in the rapid drift toward white settlement, he worked
strenuously to help tribal people remain in their home districts. He stationed Aboriginal evangelists in outlying
areas, and worked with Charles Duguid, T G H Strehlow and others for the establishing of secure reserves on
tribal lands. In co-operation with a now more concerned government, he established ration depots and trading
stores staffed by Aborigines at Haasts Bluff in 1941 and Areyonga in 1943, and contributed to the establishing of
Yuendumu. Convinced that Aborigines needed not charity but a secure economic base to re-establish themselves,
he put enormous effort into setting up locally based industries—a tannery, handcrafts, a pastoral association—
and played an important part in the early career of Albert Namatjira.
Simultaneously he was running a large institution on a shoestring budget with minimal staff—attending to
correspondence, accounts, medical needs, building and maintenance, and a constant stream of visitors and officials.