What Australia Owes the Strehlows

The Aranda’s Pepa: An Introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1907–1920)
by Anna Kenny
ANU Press, 2013, 310 pages, $28

Man walks through these forests of symbols. — Baudelaire

Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines (1988) has become famous for the way in which Chatwin was able to communicate to a popular audience the richness of the Aboriginal song cycles or Dreaming tracks that criss-cross vast regions of Central Australia. Chatwin had read T.G.H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia (1971), greatly admiring the idiosyncratic nature of Strehlow’s work. It was Strehlow’s depth of scholarship combined with his comparison of Aranda song with other literary traditions across the globe that attracted Chatwin—and which also incensed the anthropological community.

Songs of Central Australia is a genuine masterpiece of Australian prose—one that has had more impact on our literary culture than on Australian anthropological thought. This may be due to the fact that T.G.H. Strehlow was influenced by the work of his father Carl Strehlow, which itself grew out of European literary traditions. In her recent book The Aranda’s Pepa: An Introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, Anna Kenny argues that Carl Strehlow was unique in early Australian anthropology in that he drew on the theories of culture and language that developed during the period of German Romanticism. This made him and his son anomalies in the Anglo-Australian anthropological establishment. It may also explain why T.G.H. Strehlow’s work, and particularly Songs of Central Australia, has had such a pronounced influence on Australian literary culture. The virtue of Kenny’s study is that we can now understand the origins of the Strehlows’ distinctive approach in the literary sensibilities of nineteenth-century Germany. Further, the influence of that tradition on the work of T.G.H. Strehlow may help to clarify the attraction his work has held for fiction writers and poets in Australia.

In Aranda Traditions (1947) T.G.H. Strehlow recounts a Northern Aranda song cycle about a creative being, Ulamba, who after a deep slumber beneath the earth, awoke and began his travels across the primordial landscape of the Central Desert. What lingers during these travels is a desire to a return to his place of origin, to again be absorbed into the earth out of which he originally arose. Strehlow quotes two lines from his translation of the original Aranda cycle:

High in the heavens shines the afternoon sun:
His heart is filled with yearning to turn home.

What is significant is that the places—be they springs, waterholes or caves—out of which the ancestral beings arose, and which after their wearying journeys across the landscape they again re-entered as they descended back into the earth, became the sacred ceremonial sites of Central Desert religious practice. These are the celebrated dreaming sites associated with Aboriginal ritual. As Gertrude Levy argued in her famous cross-cultural study of cave art and symbolism, The Gate of Horn (1948), Aboriginal religious systems are resonant with those of the Mediterranean. For example, the caves of ancient Greece and Rome were portals to the underworld of dreams and the realm of the dead from where reincarnated spirits emerged into the upper world. Given this symbolic resonance of caves and the underworld, and the correspondence between subterranean realms and the unconscious mind, it is little wonder that Freud chose as the epitaph for The Interpretation of Dreams a line from Virgil’s Aeneid about Aeneas’s descent to the underworld through the cave of Cumae: “If I can’t bend those above, I’ll stir the lower regions.”

In Aranda traditions, the landscape features surrounding these sacred sites are also thought to be traces of the ancestor and his journeys, physical embodiments or objectifications of a once living body; for example a hill may be the ancestor’s body where he rested during his travels through that part of country. The places from which the ancestors emerged from the earth are also believed to be places of fecundity where spirit children created by the ancestor may vivify the foetus in a woman’s womb as she walks through country. In this sense her child becomes a living embodiment of the creative ancestor who is thought to be slumbering in various features of the landscape.

This is a way of thinking that is difficult for European Australians to grasp. This sense of an alien religious world was even more pronounced when Strehlow wrote Aranda Traditions in the 1940s. One of his main objectives in writing the book was to highlight the fallacies evident in earlier accounts of Aboriginal culture that had been responsible for exacerbating as opposed to diminishing such incomprehension.

Having been raised at the Hermannsburg Mission, a Lutheran settlement about a hundred kilometres west of Alice Springs, and having spoken Aranda as one of his mother tongues as a child, T.G.H. Strehlow was perfectly poised to critique earlier anthropologists who relied on accounts given to them by Aranda men for whom English was a second language. Strehlow was able to notate the songs in Aranda, grasp their full emotional resonance, and then translate these aesthetic qualities into equivalent forms of English expression. Strehlow’s greater proficiency in Aranda language and linguistics meant he was able to understand and interpret Aranda culture in a way that had not been achieved previously. For example, when discussing the complexities involved in translating the above couplet, he explains the complex nature of Aranda verb formation, and how a sophisticated metrical and grammatical system differentiated ceremonial song cycles from everyday Aranda speech:

“Eraritjaritjaka” is an archaic poetic term, meaning “full of longing for something that has been lost”, or “filled with longing to return home”. “Albutjika” is an infinitive meaning “to go home”, “to turn homeward”. The translation “His heart is filled with longing to turn home” tries to express the force of the archaic poetic term “eraritjaritjaka” … The original rhythm of the verse—which is very effective when it is being chanted mournfully—naturally defies all efforts to recapture.

The caves from which ancestral beings are thought to have emerged from the earth, and where the spirit children created by those beings await their incarnation as humans, are also often the storage places of sacred objects used in ceremony. But again those objects, the famous wooden boards or stones referred to as tjurungas, are also embodiments of the creative ancestor in the same way that features of the landscape, animals and humans are. This is the complex idea Strehlow was trying to convey: the creative beings, the traces they left as landscape features during their travels, the animal species they created, the spirit children they deposited in various sacred sites and the human beings who were created from those spirit children, are all consubstantial, all of one and the same substance. The attraction and emotional power of traditional ceremony result from this sense of identity between the actor or dancer and the ancestral being he or she is portraying. However, to call it a portrayal is probably inaccurate; the dancer actually becomes the ancestor who created them and who they are a physical and living embodiment of. As Strehlow writes of the Aranda sense of identity with ancestral beings:

The whole countryside is his living, age-old family tree. The story of his own totemic ancestor is to the native the account of his own doings at the beginning of time, at the dim dawn of life, when the world as he knows it now was being shaped and moulded by all-powerful hands … [He] clings to his native soil with every fibre of his being. He will always speak of his own birthplace with love and reverence. Today, tears will come into his eyes when he mentions an ancestral home site which has been, sometimes unwittingly, desecrated by the white usurpers of his territory.

Strehlow follows these comments with a pertinent remark linking the human experience of country and community and that portrayed in myth: “Love of home, longing for home, these are dominating motives which constantly re-appear also in the myths of the totemic ancestors.” Aboriginal art and ceremony represent a complex and interwoven system, where sacred objects, the natural world and human beings are all symbolic embodiments of the spiritual potency of totemic ancestors. This sense of symbolic resonance establishes a sense of identity, symbiosis and affinity between disparate entities. It is for this reason I suspect that the emotional longings of totemic ancestors, when expressed as part of a ceremonial dramatisation, evoke similar feelings from performers and spectators. They recognise in the actions of the ancestors their own inner nature. The virtue of Strehlow’s work is that he was able to humanise these art forms and demonstrate how they expressed the riches of Aranda emotional life.

T.G.H. Strehlow was reacting against the reigning paradigm in anthropology which had grown out of social Darwinism. Sir James Frazer, author The Golden Bough, that massive compilation of literature on fertility rites that formed the mythopoeic substrata of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land”, had sought to interpret religion in Darwinian terms. The evolution from a primitive state of technological development to a more complex one, from spears and stone tools to Victorian steam power, was thought to be paralleled by similar advances in culture and mental evolution. For Frazer the “magical practices” of fertility rites represented a primitive form of culture out of which Christianity developed. The fertility rites of Aboriginal culture were similarly considered to be an example of such a primitive cultural form. By studying such evolutionarily primitive cultural practices Frazer believed science could learn about the earliest stages of human evolution. Baldwin Spencer, who co-authored with Francis Gillen one of the pioneering texts of Australian anthropology, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), accepted Frazer’s schemata and interpreted Aranda culture as evidence of an earlier stage of human evolution. He assumed lack of technological development was accompanied by primitive forms of cultural, artistic and intellectual development.

Being on the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder, it was inconceivable that Aranda song and ceremony could have aesthetic qualities rivalling those of the Nordic sagas or Shakespeare. Yet T.G.H. Strehlow, with his advanced language skills and ability to feel and experience Aranda culture from within, and his ability to share in the old men’s emotional responses to the songs they shared with him, felt such songs matched in pathos and sensibility any of the world’s other forms of literary or aesthetic expression. In Aranda Traditions we get a sense of a deeper and richer portrayal of the inwardness of Aranda religious experience than had previously been expressed by Australian writers. The book is consequently a seminal text in Australian anthropology for it signals a shift from the study of Aboriginal people as objects of scientific interest to subjects of their own unique kind of religious and aesthetic experience.

T.G.H. Strehlow also criticised Spencer for assuming the Aranda were a culturally homogenous group. For The Native Tribes of Central Australia Spencer collected data from different groups in the Aranda language block and then compiled a composite picture which elided the diversity of custom and practice in the region, diversity which he seemed unaware of. T.G.H. Strehlow criticised Spencer on this point, highlighting the diversity of belief among the different Aranda groups. For example, in discussing acacia bushes that are found outside a sacred cave in the Western MacDonnell Ranges he discusses how the wood of such trees is thought to embody the potency of the ancestor who is thought to be slumbering deep within the cave. Sometimes the wood from these trees was used to fashion small bull-roarers which would be wrapped up in hair-string and placed in the small wooden vessels mothers carried their infants in. These small carved objects would bear the markings of the infant boy’s totemic ancestor, and their presence in the vessel, it was believed, would increase the growth of the child and keep it safe from sickness.

There is a complex cosmology and understanding of human ontogeny going on here. The small bark bull-roarers are considered to be, like the child, physical embodiments of a creative ancestor. As the child is born and begins to grow he is essentially being separated or dissociated from the origin of fertility and power which gave rise to his own existence, power which lay dormant deep within the cave where the ancestor still lay slumbering. By placing the small bull-roarers in the child’s carrying vessel the link with that creative power is maintained. Later in life he will maintain that connection through dance and song, which again awaken the ancestral beings slumbering in sacred sites such as caves or springs—and which also I suspect awaken and renew people’s sense of emotional affinity with those sites.

T.G.H. Strehlow, however, had another reason for quoting this custom. His father, Carl, had mentioned the practice of placing such items alongside children in their carrying vessels amongst the Western Aranda in Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien. Spencer had been told that such a practice would have been thought sacrilegious and on that basis he attacked Carl Strehlow for proposing what he thought to be an absurdity. However, Carl was talking about a custom practised by the Western Aranda. Spencer had heard—quite rightly—that the Northern Aranda would have found such a practice abhorrent. But from this piece of information he generalised to the Aranda people as a whole and therefore assumed Carl Strehlow must have been mistaken. In fact Carl was only describing the custom of a specific sub-group of the Aranda. As with his social Darwinist schemata, in this case Spencer had again tried to fit facts to theory, as opposed to collecting data in a more systematic and objective manner that would foreground cultural specificity and difference. Unlike Spencer, Carl Strehlow and his son were well aware of the cultural diversity within the Aranda language block.

In The Aranda’s Pepa Kenny quotes the relevant passages from this debate. The point of highlighting T.G.H. Strehlow’s defence of his father against Spencer’s criticisms is for Kenny to emphasise the sense of indebtedness that T.G.H. Strehlow owed to his father’s early work. It was from him, she suggests, that he acquired his acuity in linguistic analysis and his ability to respect the diversity that exists among the Aranda.

Carl Strehlow served the Aranda people as a missionary from 1894 to 1922 at Hermannsburg. His masterpiece, Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, was only ever published in German and has remained unduly neglected, particularly in Australia, for over a century. Kenny is part of a team headed by ANU’s Professor Nicolas Peterson which is undertaking a research project titled “Rescuing Carl Strehlow’s Indigenous cultural heritage legacy: The neglected German tradition of Arandic ethnography”.

Over the last forty years the work of missionaries has been tainted and neglected, often under the mistaken assumption that they were if not instruments, then accomplices, of cultural genocide. Further, at the turn of last century the British-Australian anthropological establishment, headed by Sir James Frazer in Britain and Baldwin Spencer locally, maligned and denigrated the work of Carl Strehlow because he was a missionary. The assumption was that by preaching Christianity he was contaminating the “natives” with anti-scientific nonsense; and being a Christian himself most of what he wrote, it was argued, would be unscientific in any case. Much of this seems to be have been outright prejudice fuelled by professional jealousy for what Carl Strehlow possessed and what Spencer lacked: intimate understanding of the language and culture of the Aranda people acquired from decades of living and working with them.

John Strehlow, Carl Strehlow’s grandson, made these claims in The Tale of Frieda Keysser: Frieda Keysser and Carl Strehlow: An Historical Biography (2010). In this mammoth book the amount of primary sources that John Strehlow marshals makes a compelling case that his grandfather was unfairly maligned and his work denigrated by Spencer so that his own theories would not be undermined.

John Strehlow’s broader polemical intent that his grandfather was neglected by the anthropological profession does hold when considered in an Australian-British context. But as Kenny demonstrates, this definitely was not the case in Europe.

For example, when Frazer, based on his correspondence with and professional association with Spencer, published his rejection of Carl Strehlow’s work, both Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim wrote in L’Annee sociologique in 1913 that Frazer’s position was unjustified. Marcel Mauss went on to praise Carl Strehlow’s magnum opus in terms that reflect its significance more accurately than the critiques offered by Spencer and Frazer. Kenny notes:

Possibly the true nature of Strehlow’s work was most evocatively rendered by Marcel Mauss when he remarked that the volumes represented a form of an Aranda Rig Veda. This ancient collection of Hindu hymnal chants is also one of the earlier records of Indo-European language and thereby a philological treasure. Perhaps the same might be said of Carl Strehlow’s work on myths collected in Aranda and Loritja language as well of his son’s later work.

What makes The Aranda’s Pepa an important contribution to the current reassessment of the role of missionaries in Australian frontier history and in the history of anthropology is Kenny’s analysis of letters written between Carl Strehlow and Baron von Leonhardi, a researcher based in Germany who collaborated with Carl and edited his masterpiece. Von Leonhardi had read all of the major anthropological theorists of the time and was well aware of the debates between Edward Tylor, James Lang and James Frazer that were occurring in Britain. Many of the issues being discussed made reference to the work of Spencer, work which Carl, with his more intimate knowledge of Aranda language and culture, had expressed reservations about. Carl, in his remote outpost, was not able to keep fully abreast of these developments. Yet by formulating questions in a way that would elicit appropriate responses from the old Aranda men, von Leonhardi was able to guide Carl, from the other side of the world, in developing an empirically-based methodology that would solve some of the major issues being debated at the time in Britain and Europe.

Von Leonhardi was sceptical of the social Darwinist approach adopted by Frazer and Spencer. He noticed that Carl’s views contradicted many of Spencer’s views—but because of Spencer’s institutional clout and the fact that Carl was writing in German many of these problems were either not known about or were overlooked. Von Leonhardi abhorred theoretical assumptions determining how facts are interpreted, a fault he felt Spencer had succumbed to in The Native Tribes of Central Australia. He was interested in rigorous collection of data and the fine-grained analysis of culture.

Carl, in order to respond to the queries in Von Leonhardi’s letters, questioned not only the Aranda repeatedly about the same issues, but also his own previous assumptions. The result was a wonderfully detailed linguistic analysis of a vast body of Aranda myth and song that paid attention to the specificities of cultural singularity—a work that represents a deeply informed appreciation of Aranda religious life, aesthetic experience and intellectual achievement. As Kenny writes, so “absorbing was this task, and illuminating, that less than a year before he died Strehlow confidently repudiated any suggestion that the Aranda’s modest technology might reflect a limited intellectual life: ‘Never,’ Strehlow said.”

Kenny traces the origins of the ideas that informed Carl Strehlow’s work to German Romanticism and particularly the theories of language and culture developed by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). Herder was an influential writer of the period who is also remembered today for being friends with and having significant influence on the intellectual growth of the young Goethe. Herder emphasised the particularity of language to cultural distinctiveness, establishing a tradition in German thought that would find itself opposed to the schematic thinking of social Darwinism, which ranked cultures according to the rung they occupied on the evolutionary ladder of progress towards civilisation.

Herder was a central figure in the development of European Romanticism. In opposing the overt rationalism of the Enlightenment, Herder sought the origins of folk culture and poetry in the deeper emotional substrata of the self. Through the indirect influence of these ideas on Carl Strehlow we can understand in what ways his approach was different from that of the Anglo-Celtic tradition in Australian anthropology. Carl Strehlow’s work and his approach to culture had firm roots in European literary Romanticism—something that may also help us understand the importance of the Strehlow legacy to Australian literary and cultural life. As well as his influence on European Romanticism more generally, Herder’s work also had a significant impact on the Grimm brothers, who pursued his notion that the soul of a people was embodied in their language, folklore and myth.

Carl Strehlow organised his collection of Aranda material into the same categories of myth, folklore and fairy tales in which the Grimm brothers organised their European material. Although these categories represent an attempt to fit Aranda material into a European frame of reference, the approach did provide Carl Strehlow with a system with which he could organise the vast amount of data he was collecting. During this period systematised methodologies for the collection of ethnographic field data had yet to be formulated, so in this sense Carl was using all that was available to him at the time. And his approach had virtues over that of the British-Australian Darwinians; the songs and myths he collected were presented as an expression of the richness of Aranda cultural experience as opposed to evidence of evolutionary backwardness. This focus on myth and song as cultural expression was to form the basis of the work of both father and son, a focus that differentiates it from the majority of anthropological work in Australia.

As a Lutheran missionary Strehlow was taught to follow the demotic edict of Luther of preaching in the vernacular—which in Australia required intensive language study and translation of scripture into Aboriginal languages before the actual process of preaching could be properly conducted. This required a great deal of intellectual effort and commitment, for which Carl had been sufficiently prepared at the Neuendettelsau seminary in Germany, where he was an excellent student of Latin and Greek.

With his deeper understanding of the language Carl was able to correct the over-simplifications evident in the less linguistically astute work of Spencer and Gillen. For example, in The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Spencer and Gillen had interpreted the Aranda word alcheringa as “dream times”. Carl responded that the Aranda did not use this term to refer to a specific period in the past. His consequent investigations represented an extremely agile grammatical analysis of the various forms of semantic transformation that the Aranda applied to the word altjira, which as a noun was used to describe totemic ancestors.

Carl realised that altjira are connected to a mother’s conception place and the associated dreaming stories—which may be sites such as the caves or springs referred to above. Further, this noun has a verb form; with the addition of rama, which means “to see”, we get the verb altjiererama, which means “to see god”. Carl emphasised that this verb form refers to “a totem god which the native believes to have seen in a dream”. Carl was establishing a connection between dream-life and religious experience of the kind we find in Greek and Roman antiquity. The parallel also extends to the notion that the gods that visit humans in dreams reside in caves and in hidden realms beneath the earth. This linguistic insight into the Aranda worldview was one of many in which Carl was able to enter into and understand a culture profoundly different from his own. What is remarkable is that such cross-cultural understanding was occurring at a time when European Australians had little sense of the inner lived experience of Aboriginal people.

It was the combination of the Lutheran emphasis on the vernacular and German Romanticism’s focus on language and cultural distinctiveness that differentiated Strehlow’s work from the British-Australian Darwinians. A correlate of Carl’s rejection of the Darwinian model, which argued that evolutionarily inferior races are doomed to become extinct, was a belief in the Aranda’s ability to adapt and survive in the changing conditions brought about by colonisation. He was virtually alone in adopting this position in the nineteenth century—but for him it was a natural consequence of his belief in the humanity and intelligence of the Aranda themselves.

Kenny’s book is an attempt to revise the canon of Australian anthropology by giving Carl Strehlow his rightful place after over a century of neglect. Her views on this issue are pertinent:

The singularity of Carl Strehlow’s work is underlined not merely by the contrast it presents to Spencer’s and Gillen’s texts but also by the contrast that the work on Aboriginal myth of the Strehlows, father and son, presents to the rest of Australian anthropology. Save for the work of Roheim, also at Hermannsburg shortly after Carl Strehlow’s time, there is nothing in the Australian literature quite like their early attempts to specify an indigenous ontology.

T.G.H. Strehlow was marginalised by the anthropological community during his lifetime, and although he did receive support from some quarters, an emphasis on language and song was not immediately amenable to the models that became orthodox paradigms in the academy in the twentieth century. Carl suffered a worse fate for the reasons outlined above.

However, despite this neglect, the influence and importance of T.G.H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia has been significant. In the future, I suspect its importance in Australian writing will grow as other works fade from our canon of prose about Aboriginal culture. The Aranda’s Pepa reminds us of the indebtedness that Songs of Central Australia owes to the work of its author’s father.

Going back and looking at Carl’s work afresh, and now that the historical forces that shaped his work have been explicated, we can see the degree to which the German traditions of language and culture that grew out of German Romanticism indirectly shaped Songs of Central Australia. This fact also provides suggestions as to why its approach and its focus on the subjectivity of Aranda aesthetics is beyond the purview of more objectivist approaches in anthropology that emphasise social structure, kinship or technology. The German traditions that both father and son inherited, I suggest, may have made them more sensitive to the richness and significance of language as an expression of people’s experience, of their inner nature.

Given this inheritance it is not surprising that the work of T.G.H. Strehlow has had such influence on Australian writers and poets. From the 1930s onwards Strehlow became an important influence on the Jindyworobak poets, who looked to Aboriginal myth and song in order to indigenise their verse.

In his Conditional Culture (1938) Rex Ingamells, the founder of the Jindyworobak movement, stated that T.G.H. Strehlow’s writings “certainly prove the fertility of the aboriginal mind in imagination and poetry”. As Barry Hill has highlighted in his biography, Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession, Ingamells and Strehlow often met and corresponded to discuss the development of an “indigenous poetic tradition”. Roland Robinson, one of the best of the Jindyworobak poets, wrote in his autobiography The Shift of Sands (1976) of the friendship and the support Strehlow gave him. Strehlow wrote the foreword for Robinson’s collection of Aboriginal myths The Feathered Serpent (1956).

It is not surprising therefore that Songs of Central Australia ends with the following prediction:

It is my belief that when the strong web of future Australian verse comes to be written, probably some of its strands will be found to be poetic threads spun on the Stone Age spindles of Central Australia.

Barry Hill extended the impulse of the Jindyworobak aesthetic of “joining together” Aboriginal and European literary traditions in his sequence of love poems The Inland Sea (2001). In Songlines Chatwin pays homage to T.G.H. Strehlow’s work, being particularly appreciative of the depth of cross-cultural analysis in Songs of Central Australia. Reflecting on the idiosyncratic and melancholic dimensions of Strehlow’s work, he describes it as an oeuvre of “great and lonely books”.

The most significant legacy of the German tradition that found its expression in the work of both father and son is in the poetry and prose of Les Murray. In his essay “The Human-Hair Thread”, in which Murray details the influence of T.G.H. Strehlow on his own work, we get the sense that he would not have become the poet he is without the influence of Aboriginal song upon on his own creative development. As well as the Anglo-Celtic dimensions of Murray’s oeuvre, it may be the constant resonances of Aboriginal poetry and song that give his work the sense of being firmly grounded in a distinctively Australian ecological and social context.

In his lecture “Defence of Poetry”, delivered in 1998 at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, Murray made what may be some of the most insightful comments offered about Aboriginal culture by a European Australian. In echoing Strehlow, Murray writes that Aboriginal law in “its richness, its psychological depth and the dream-like shockingness of its stories … is a match for the mythologies of Greece or Rome or any other ancient culture”. To quote further from the lecture:

The continent on which I live was ruled by poetry for tens of thousands of years, and I mean it was ruled openly and overtly by poetry. Only since European settlement in 1788 has it been substantially ruled by prose. The sacred law which still governs the lives of traditional Aborigines is carried by a vast map of song-poetry attached to innumerable mythic sites. Each group “sings” the tract of country it occupies, just as each initiated person sings the ceremonial songs of the holy places for which he or she is responsible within that territory. A person may unselfconsciously say “That mountain is my mother: it is her ancestor and mine; it is the body of our ancestor, and the story we sing and enact there is her body. We are her body, too, and the songs are her body, and the ceremonies are her body.” That is the Aboriginal Law.

Murray is evoking the symbolic resonance inherent in the Aboriginal view of the world: ecological features, human beings and sacred objects are symbolic embodiments of totemic ancestors. Further, the potency of such ancestral power is thought to be hidden from everyday view, from the sensory field of waking consciousness, only to be made manifest in dream and ritual. This sense of a “split cosmos”, according to Fred Myers in Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, is expressed for the Pintupi people in the words tjukurrpa and yuti. Yuti means something which is seen or visible; whereas tjukurrpa, which translates as “dreaming”, usually connotes something which is hidden and only made manifest in dream or in ritual. It also denotes the hiddenness of the ancestors; they are hidden in caves and beneath the earth, just as dream-life is hidden beneath the surface of waking consciousness.

The fact that caves are thought to be the places where ancestral beings remain hidden, where they depart from the profane world and enter the underground world of their eternal slumber, parallels similar notions from the Mediterranean. In The Aeneid, it was the Cumaen cave through which Aeneas descended to the underworld, the realm where the spirits of the dead exist and from where both reincarnated spirits, and also dreams, emerge into the upper world. It is not surprising that the symbolic embodiments of the ancestral dead—the sacred tjurungas of Aranda tradition—are often housed in the caves from which spirit children emerge to embody themselves in human form. In both traditions caves are the realm of the dead and the realm from which new life emerges. It is the realm of gods and totemic beings—which in Aranda traditions, according to Carl Strehlow’s translation of altjiererama, are not only embodied in ritual performance but also seen in dreams.

Aboriginal religion may be thought of as a symbolic system in which objects in the outer world bear the projections of human inner life. Carl and his son decoded this symbolic system, making the inner world of Aranda religious experience accessible to European Australians. It is doubtful that we would have been able to come to such an appreciation of the traditions that have enriched our sense of living amongst Australian nature—its rivers, mountains, flora and fauna—if it weren’t for the assiduous researches undertaken by Carl and his son.

What we and our literary traditions make of the rich contribution Aboriginal peoples have made, and will continue to make, to our national cultural life is yet to be seen. Often Aboriginal people talk of sharing their dreaming stories—which today they frequently do through visual art—in terms of the bestowal of a gift. There is no doubt this is the most adequate and concise expression of what such cultural exchange entails.

The consequent enrichment of the consciousness of European Australians is a process I envisage will continue into the future—the texts of both Strehlows, father and son, providing some of the most erudite works we have to facilitate this process of exchange and enrichment.

Gary Clark lives in Adelaide. He discussed John Strehlow’s book The Tale of Frieda Keysser in the April 2014 issue.