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Despite the pressures, people were received in the Albrecht home with a kindness and hospitality that won many
lifelong friends and supporters.
In the early 1950s, Minna’s ill health forced them to move into Alice Springs. Instead of the semi-retirement that
was envisaged, Albrecht characteristically found an opportunity to develop a whole new field of work. He worked
with urbanised Aborigines and part-Aborigines and began to visit Aboriginal workers on pastoral stations to
the north and south. Feeling that cattle stations, rather than institutional settings like government settlements or
missions, offered the best chance for many Territory Aborigines to establish personal and economic independence,
he did all he could to build up these ‘working communities’, arguing for government help with schools and
training, encouraging station owners and managers to provide better housing and a store for their workers, working
with Aboriginal Christians to establish small churches, helping with social and literacy problems. Writing ten years
later on land rights, he argued that the most urgent and practical aspect was to provide areas on stations through
freehold or long-term lease to Aborigines who in many cases had lived and worked there for several generations.
Always a prolific writer, he wrote and duplicated pamphlets—some in Aranda—on issues like voting rights,
alcohol and communism. His long experience with Aborigines in Central Australia made him a resource for hundreds
of people across Australia and sometimes elsewhere who wrote for information or assistance. He was a friend to
many part-Aboriginal children in town and on the cattle stations, encouraging them to go further with education,
arranging foster home stays in the south during teenage years for education and wider experience. Throughout his
time in Central Australia, he trained Aboriginal evangelists and gave them responsibility in leading and teaching
their people. Several became the first ordained Aboriginal pastors in the Lutheran Church in Australia.
Medical reasons again required the Albrechts to move to Adelaide in the early 1960s. He continued to write,
visit hospitals and gaols, meet trains, and speak to groups large and small about Aborigines and the issues affecting
them. The Australian government recognised his life’s work in the awarding of a Queen’s Coronation Medal and
Membership of the Order of the British Empire (MBE); the West German government in the rarely bestowed
Bundent Verdienst Cross for services to humanity. He and his wife are also remembered in Albrecht Drive,
Alice Springs.
To his life’s work with Australian Aborigines, Albrecht brought a complexity of cultural and personal experience
rare in the Australia to which he came in 1926. His approach was intensely personal; he identified with Aborigines
as far as possible and enjoyed a rapport with them rare among white Australians. He never separated the physical
and spiritual aspects of life, and worked strenuously to help Aborigines in both. He spoke fluent Aranda, worked for
the translation of religious and educational materials into Aranda, and supported tribal ways and authority where
they did not seem to him to conflict with Christian truth. He had a deep respect for Aboriginal spirituality, feeling
that some Aborigines were the finest Christians he had ever known, though he could find no way to reconcile
traditional Aboriginal religion with Christian faith.
In the almost 40 years he spent in Central Australia, he saw and was part of vast changes—a dying race to a
virtual population explosion. An astute and resourceful man, he worked well with government, always urging
that it exercise appropriate responsibility for a people economically and spiritually dispossessed by the advent
of the white man. But he never saw government provision as replacing the need for people to struggle for their
own survival and growth. This was intrinsic to human life—Aboriginal or white. Though his theology remained
conservative, his thinking was often interesting and wide-ranging. He read extensively and his mind reached out to
ideas and questions unusual among his contemporaries. Though he believed that Aborigines had in some measure
to join Australian society to survive, his awareness of cultural differences made him feel this process would be
gradual and he never saw it as a complete blurring of Aboriginal identity. But he was saddened by the trend toward
separate development in the 1970s and 1980s, and by the collapse of many of the employment opportunities he
had worked so hard for. His enduring consolation late in life was the development of the Aboriginal ministry and
that the gospel was rooted among Aborigines in Central Australia.
His immense dedication to his life’s work did not preclude a basic enjoyment of life and people. He enjoyed
food, was immensely hospitable, and liked talking. He was a man rich in stories—always ‘people’ stories and
usually from his experiences with Aboriginal people. In their turn, Aborigines who knew him remember and
retell a host of stories—jokes, incidents, memories from more than half a lifetime. The words of an old Pintupi
man, recalling Albrecht’s first trek to the west, arc as good a summation of his life as any: ‘Old man Albrecht, he
went everywhere. He came on camels and camped there, and he shared us everything—tea, sugar, flour, the good
word—everything.’
Despite a long history of frail physical health and recurring battle with depression, Minna Albrecht was an
integral part of her husband’s achievements. A person of great inner strength, her support gave him, paradoxically,
the impetus and autonomy necessary to pursue his task with such single-mindedness. After she died on
18 November 1983, aged 83, he lived only a few months. He died on 16 March 1984, in his ninetieth^ year, and
three Aboriginal Lutheran pastors from Central Australia participated in his funeral service. Both of the Albrechts
are buried in Adelaide. Two daughters and three sons survived them.
L Leske (ed), Hermannsburg: A Vision and a Mission, 1977; Lutheran Herald and Lutheran Almanac, 1926–75; Mission correspondence and
reports, Lutheran Archives, Adelaide.
BARBARA HENSON, Vol 1.
ALDON, ALBERT PAUL: see JOHN, ALBERT PAUL
ALLEN, DOROTHY: see HALL, DOROTHY