Today (Tuesday) was our first full day of research here, and we spent it at the State LIbrary of South Australia. Such an impressive ediface, adapted for modern functionality, but repectful of architecture and tradition. Fabulous collections, of course.
The signature setting of the SLSA is the Mortlock Chamber–cornerstone laid in 1879, with construction stretching well into the 1880s. A grand vision for a library and related cultural institutions of an idealistic state. Stacks up above, but mainly now a showcase for exhibitions and events. Currently decked out for Christmas.
We spent the day in the modern research library, remaining until it closed at 7pm. We registered as researchers and commenced ordering documents for delivery to the reading room.
I’ll try to explain what we’re working on. We’ve resumed work on a line of research that is, in a real sense, a physical, not just metaphorical, line–a south-north transect spanning the Australian continent from Adelaide to Darwin. In travels over the past couple of decades we have, first, come to realize the significance of this continental passage through the desert (the route of Stuart’s explorations, of the overland telegraph, of the Ghan Railway, of the Stuart Highway), and second, identified some specific topics situated long the line that we are interested in and about which we think we can say something meaningful. For instance, years ago we learned that when the Australians retreated inland following the Japanese bombing of Darwin, it was the 147th Field Artillery, activated out of Pierre, South Dakota, that arrived to invest the city’s (hopeless) defenses. We maybe can’t tell Australins much about their sutuation during World War II, but we sure can tell them some things about the boys of he 147th, because we have their records. Plus, it’s both fun and sobering to locate and visit their camps, their anti-aircraft batteries, and their graveyards in the Northern Territory.
Now, here in Adelaide, we’re focusing on a suite of connected subjects: the immigration of Brandenburg Prussians (Evangelical dissenters) to the Barossa of South Australia in the 1840s; the activities of the Hermannsburg (Hanover) Missionary Society, which founded the Lutheran mission among the Arrernte people at Ntaria, in the desert west of Alice Springs; and the whole question of interaction of Indigenous peoples and German missionaries. There has been a lot of writing about the Fink River Mission, named Hermannsburg after its founders, among the Arrernte, but we think we can bring some incremental insights to the subject. Missionary agriculture, central to the Lutheran vision for Aboriginal salvation, failed. Because we ourselves have 150 years of experience farming in semiarid grasslands (as compared to the missionaries, who had none), we think we can make some observations about what happened. Moreover, there’s the Lutheran connection. Years ago we chanced upon the monument to the Lutheran missionaries who departed in 1875 from Bethanien Church, in the Barossa, to drive 2200 sheep across the desert and found the Fink River Mission. The memorial stands in the Bethanien, now Bethany, church compound near Tanunda. Only today, however, working through documents at the state library, did we realize that these missionaries were, like, kinsmen of mine. The year they struck north with that flock, my ancestors, like them Evangelicals from Hanover, commenced their first full year on their farms in western Kansas. Oh, and there’s more. The Evangelical Lutherans at Bethany, having dispatched the missionaries to Fink River, and after that gone through a local schism, reformed and constituted their own organization in Australia, which in turn affiliated with and American body, the Deutsche Evangelisch-Lutherische Synode von Missouri, Ohio und andern Staaten, the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. My ancestors, including great-great-grandpa Fritz, who sent four of his kids out to quarter-sections he purchased in Kansas from the Santa Fe Railroad, lived in a Hanoverian community in Auglaize County, Ohio, and were members of the same synod (after 1947 simply the Missouri Synod) as were the folk at Bethanien in the Barossa. So we know something, too, about Lutherans of the type that undertook mission work in central Australia. Heck, I used to watch Lawrence Welk on Sunday nights with a couple of them.
Pretty complicated, huh? Amazing connections across distances and oceans and deserts. Still today, here, we expanded our list of compelling topics along our line. I’m fascinated at the pellmell investment of social scientists out of Adelaide who invested the Hermannsburg mission immediately after the arrival of the first Ghan train in Alice Springs in 1929. It was like a gold rush of anthropologists and psychologists intent on documenting the primitive folk of the desert before they should perish from the face of the earth. It’s all disturbing and comic at the same time.
And of course, the Barossa is a world-class node of the new world wine industry, so there’s that. We’ll develop themes and stories here. In the meantime, we’re on to the South Australian Museum tomorrow.
