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his son, and his ‘muscular Christianity’ transferred to muscular home education. German and the classics, Latin
and Greek, and learning to play the organ, were both encouraged and thumped into him, with sermons thrown in for
good measure should young Ted show any resentment. A competitive love-hate relationship was to be the outcome.
Perhaps it would not have been so intense had not the parents, despite being naturalised and having the support of
some of the Northern Territory’s most influential people, been made to suffer effective open internment during the
First World War. They turned inwards as a family, and Ted felt both the strengths of the family in such a situation,
and the resentments and frustrations which in part were released through intense educational instruction.
In 1918 the tensions were somewhat released when the catastrophic conflict ended. However, while Ted was
in his most formative years, family tragedy struck. Carl, the Lutheran father about whom stories are still told
at Hermannsburg, the man of iron will, was struck down with dropsy and, as his body weakened, with asthma
and pleurisy too. In a crisis the family set out late in 1922 in a buggy for help. To Carl it seemed that the Church
hierarchy, and even God, had abandoned him. Frieda, young Ted, Aranda and other Aborigines, and the roughest
and toughest of bushmen—these were his friends. They gave him support. It was a terrible time, wonderfully retold
by Ted nearly 50 years later in Journey to Horseshoe Bend.
Despite the help along the way, and despite attempts (unknown to the family) by Lutheran authorities ‘down
south’ to assist, Ted’s father died and was buried at Horseshoe Bend on 21 October 1922. If it was a blessed release
for Carl, it was a time of anguish for Ted and his mother. And as the years passed and the pain faded, it became
almost as had been the albatross around the Ancient Mariner’s neck for Ted. The release of the ‘albatross’ freed
him to speak as his own man, yet the ghost of his father was ever present, at times a silent friend, at times a fierce
competitor, and almost unknown to both, seeking to express love and to be loved. Frieda, in the meantime, worked
to support Ted in his studies. He attended Immanuel College in Adelaide, South Australia, and then the University
of Adelaide, and worked during holiday periods to assist pay for his education. At the university, where he was
known simply as ‘Strehlow’, he immersed himself in linguistics and English literature but also enjoyed being a
member of the university’s senior hockey team and (as was then common) learnt ballroom dancing.
In mid 1931 Ted’s mother returned to the rest of her family in Germany, never to return to Australia. She had
lived her life in large part for her youngest son, until he was about to make his own destiny. He graduated Bachelor
of Arts with Honours in English Literature and Linguistics at the end of the year. During the course of his studies,
he had intended to pursue a conventional academic career, but a senior University friend suggested that Strehlow’s
background offered him unique opportunities. It was as though a door had suddenly been flung open. He stepped
back into the sunshine of Central Australia.
At this time, there was a widespread belief in the various Australian governments, and the Australian public
at large, that the Aborigines were doomed to inevitable extinction. (Tragic statistics tended to support this view
until the 1940s, in fact). Strehlow, and many other gifted academics and dedicated amateur students of Aboriginal
culture, believed this and, through various scientific institutions, received grants to allow study of certain cultural
aspects. A tendency was to parcel out the land and its peoples to the different researchers, and this had the
unfortunate consequence of making the researchers possessive. Strehlow was by no means alone in developing
this tendency, but develop it he did—particularly if he thought anyone was ‘trespassing’ in ‘his’ Aranda areas.
However, contrasting with this jealous protection (which had to some extent also been practised by his father), was
a generosity of spirit and hard working assistance if the scientific interest was not in his field, or if he considered
the work entertaining but not academic. Illustrative was his support for the University of Adelaide Expedition to
Mount Liebig in 1932, which contributed to its success and his later support for Bill Harney’s writings, and his
contributions to books about various artists.
Strehlow had left Central Australia as a boy of 14 years, on the edge of the age for Aboriginal initiation, and
returned at the age of 24, when all Aboriginal males in the Centre were ‘full men’. He was therefore a man who
was still a boy, and aware of it. By assiduously learning the adult language, the songs and the poetry of the people
and land, the myths and rituals and legends, he became a man of wisdom in Aboriginal terms. In time his desire
to ‘follow knowledge, like a sinking star’, led him to stand beside another legendary ingkata, or Aranda leader—
his own father. It was a title rarely given—Frank Gillen was probably the first to have been accorded the title, in
the 1890s, in Central Australia.
Another early travelling companion was his wife Bertha Gwendoline Alexandra, nee James (1911–1984),
whom he married in Adelaide in December 1935. The daughter of George Pugh James and his wife Rosamond
Dehlia, she was an Arts graduate from the University of Adelaide. She perceived him as ‘a man of courage and
compassion’ who had ‘a great depth of understanding of, and love for, his Aboriginal friends.’ Bertha had these
same qualities. After an early introduction to life at Hermannsburg, she shared a 2 000 kilometre camel trip from
Hermannsburg to the Oodnadatta area, then from Charlotte Waters to the Petermann Ranges and return. Thereafter
she was rarely involved in other major travel, particularly after nearly losing her life through haemorrhaging
on one trip, but instead in the 1930s was his ‘support staff’ at Jay Creek, west of Alice Springs—a community
established by Ted for the Northern Territory administration. During this time, Strehlow undertook research of
Central Australian songs, dialects and traditions for the Australian National Research Council and between 1936
and 1941 was a Native Affairs Patrol Officer in the Northern Territory.
Strehlow had begun to publish but, much as his early works were well reviewed and rightly praised, they were
but preliminaries for much greater studies. Then, as for most of the world, the cataclysmic upheaval of the Second
World War intervened in his life. As had been his father and mother before him, so Ted too was attacked for
being a German spy. The claim was outrageous, and naturally upsetting, yet with brothers who were among
the German forces, perhaps the rumour mongering was to some degree understandable. It is equally certain that
disgruntled station owners and other bush workers who had been reported by Ted for illegal relationships with,