Ted Strehlow foremost authority on Aboriginal language and culture embroiled in collection controversy in Adelaide
Theodor (Ted) Strehlow wrote a book combining Greek and Norse mythological analogies with Aboriginal Arrernte verse and totems.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Theodor (Ted) Strehlow, born in 1908 at Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission in the Northern Territory, became one of the foremost 20th Century authorities on Aboriginal culture and language.
The youngest of six children, Strehlow was left at Hermansburg in 1910-11 while his missionary father Carl, wife Frieda and the other children visited Germany. Young Theodor made friends with Western Arrernte children, learning their language. Strehlow was schooled on the mission, with his father's strict instruction in Greek, Latin, music and scripture.
During World War I, Stehlow was exposed to his parents' anxiety about the mission’s fate and, in 1922, to his father’s death from dropsy while being carried south for treatment in an improvised horse-drawn vehicle via the Finke River to the Oodnadatta railhead. Taken to Adelaide by his mother, Stehlow attended Immanuel College until 1927, then studied classics and English literature at Adelaide University. He excelled in Greek and Latin, winning the Barr Smith and Andrew Scott prizes and, at the English honours school, the John Howard Clark prize.
Strehlow was guided by his classics professor J. A. FitzHerbert. Aware of Theodor's unique ability as an Arrernte-speaking classicist, FitzHerbert trained him in phonetics and encouraged him to apply for an Australian National Research Council grant to study the Arrernte language.
Strehlow returned to Central Australia in 1932. He began an intensive survey of the Arrernte dialects, travelling by camel with an Aboriginal guide. Strehlow's project of “salvage linguistics” widened to include Aboriginal "literature, history and antiquities, religion & philosophy". In 1935, Strehlow was appointed patrol officer in Central Australia, the first full-time federal public servant dedicated to Aboriginal affairs, He fought fiercely for their rights, becoming “the most hated man in Central Australia”.
Ironically, when World War II started, Strehlow had to defend himself against charges of Nazism.
Strehlow’s later life was marred by becoming estranged from many people who supported him. When he was appointed reader in Australian linguistics at Adelaide University in 1954, tensions developed with the university hierarchy. Among the books he wrote in the 1950s was Songs of Central Australia, combining Greek and Norse mythological analogies into his own and his father's research into Arrernte sacred verse and totemic geography.
Strehlow's attempts to start a research base at Adelaide University collapsed when it refused to give his second wife Kathleen full academic status. Strehlow and his wife set up the Strehlow Research Foundation at their home at the Adelaide suburb of Prospect in 1978. The collection had 4,500 Aboriginal song verses and more than 100 myths (in Arrernte and Loritja dialects), 800 ceremonial acts on tape and 26 hours of film, maps of several hundred ceremonial and mythical sites, 8000 photos, 150 detailed genealogies and 1200 sacred artefacts.
Strehlow’s intent to pass this collection and its intellectual property on to his new wife breached promises to Arrernte elders. His sale in 1977 of restricted ceremonial photos to the German magazine Stern led to publication in Australia in 1978, incensing his critics and alienating old Arrernte friends.
This dispute was settled after Strehlow died in 1978 in Adelaide, and the Northern Territory government bought most of the collection from his widow for the Strehlow Research Centre at Alice Springs.
