The Good Life on the Missions

Blind Moses: Aranda Man of High Degree and Christian Evangelist
by Peter Latz
IAD Press, 2014, 179 pages, $34.95

This modest little book from an indigenous-based publisher in Alice Springs is one of the most important yet written about Australian history. It is the nearest we yet have to a “horse’s mouth” account of how Aborigines reacted to white occupation.

Reliable historical information about Aborigines and the first white settlers in their lands—mostly graziers but often missionaries too—has always been scarce and fragmented. This book confirms the sketchy impression from other parts of Australia that a cautious, shrewd and prickly welcome to modernity was most typical, on pastoral stations as well as missions, though a lot could go wrong.

There is not a lot of evidence for the invasion/resistance/massacre/dispossession cliché. Peter Latz says it is pointless to argue whether or not whites should have come in the first place—they did—but from an Aboriginal viewpoint there were many advantages, as well as the more unmeasurable disadvantage of “dispossession”.

Latz has had the unique experience of growing up, the son of lay missionaries, at the Hermannsburg Lutheran mission in the MacDonnell Ranges west of Alice Springs. Aborigines there “grew me up”, he says. He loved the life and says Aboriginal life at its best was very good. He played mainly with indigenous children, became naturally fluent in their Aranda language and has the knack of seeing black and white as ordinary people, without much apparent sense of difference or a racial gap. In adult life he became a botanist and was until he retired Senior Botanist in the Northern Territory. (He prefers Aranda to the newer spelling, Arrernte.)

The book is a “life and times” biography of Moses Tjalkabota Uraiakuraia, the first Aborigine ordained as a Lutheran pastor. Moses ministered at Hermannsburg but also brought the Christian message to wide areas of Central Australia, although illness made him blind at the age of thirty-five. He dictated some memoirs but died in 1954 before he had finished. His memoirs, along with several mission histories, documents and the memories of the author and others, are the sources for the book. Latz knew him well as a boy.

Moses was born in 1872, five years before missionaries from Germany established Hermannsburg. White graziers followed soon after, towards the end of a century of white settlement across the continent.

The most urgent problem facing both the early missionaries and the Aborigines was the precipitous fall in population, due to venereal disease causing a low birth rate, infanticide (killing unwanted babies) and the high death rate from tribal warfare and “payback”. Payback killing often continued over generations. The Western Aranda exterminated one whole neighbouring people because it had seriously violated tribal law.

“I have often been told by elderly locals that the Mission days were the happiest time of their lives,” Latz says. “Although they were poor and conditions were harsh, the rule of law prevailed, and they were no longer afraid of being unjustly punished for some infringement of the Old Law, by themselves or outsiders.”

Death caused by other Aborigines comes over as the worst feature of tribal life. Latz says 25 per cent of Moses’s Aboriginal acquaintances were killed by other Aborigines.

The VD came from the age-old Aboriginal custom of men lending their women—who in principle, if not always in practice, were the men’s possessions—to visiting men in return for gifts. Once VD had infiltrated the long-isolated society, this ancient custom ensured that it spread among the tribes.

Whites certainly introduced and spread VD, but Latz quotes a view in the Northern Territory that it also came from Sulawesi fishermen who visited the northern coast from about 1720. Historians have long suspected this additional cause and the view quoted here is one of many in Latz’s book that strengthens probabilities noted elsewhere about the historic white–black interface and the problems of tribal life.

The Christian principle of faithful marriage and “Thou shalt not kill” (however inadequately observed) brought a gradual change in Aboriginal behaviour in Central Australia, both from converts and from more indirect influence, without which the people of the Centre might have died out.

The anthropologist Baldwin Spencer believed the Aboriginal people were doomed to become extinct, as part of natural selection. The missionaries were more hopeful, says Latz, and often clashed with him—disagreement which the proud Spencer did not always appreciate. This “inevitably dying out” view influenced government policy until as late as 1953, when Paul Hasluck became Commonwealth Minister for Territories, Latz says.

The missionaries also stood up for Aborigines against the sometimes overbearing grazing interest.

The Aborigines loved white food, which the missionaries introduced through their own livestock grazing and planting of fruit and vegetables. Working on pastoral stations in return for rations was a common way in most of Australia for Aborigines to begin integrating into the new society.

It was especially valued during droughts. Latz shows that even in grazed areas there was enough food for all in good (by Central Australian standards) seasons. But even in ungrazed areas severe drought brought starvation among the Aborigines, drawing them to the missions and grazing stations. Raids on cattle, white homesteads and other tribes also intensified during droughts.

This is an important point for Australian history generally. As far as we can tell from records, violent white–Aboriginal conflict on the grazing and farming frontier was mostly a problem during droughts. Frontier conflict in a previously fairly peaceful southern Australia suddenly erupted in 1838, a time of severe drought. The troubles lasted for up to five years.

Punitive death apart, the racial relations Latz depicts seem more like country town rivalry and gossip than great drama. There was tension between generations, with the young more open to mission influence and the new ways, and fathers sometimes hostile to their sons as a result. There were Pauline conversions, when dogged adherents of the old ways suddenly saw the light of the new. As ever, a few dusky converts learnt to bend religion to their own advantage. Some, but not all, of the Lutherans could be strict about their own dogma, and charity was not entirely present when a new Catholic mission near Alice Springs snapped up the neighbouring Eastern Aranda whom the Lutherans had eyed for conversion.

Latz says a mixture of old and new, respecting the Aranda way, worked best. “White people telling Aborigines what to do is a total waste of time,” he observes. “The Aborigines have to work it out for themselves.” His relaxed campfire yarning style makes these and other cultural differences seem as everyday and as human in scale as they would be in any other society.

One problem was that Aboriginal women often liked white men and wanted to stay with them, as distinct from being lent for a short time. “White fella doesn’t knock you round so much, better tucker,” one is quoted as saying. The missionaries abhorred violence between husbands and wives and among the tribes people generally and did their best to reduce it. They also sought to reduce the overpowering belief in evil spirits, innumerable fearsome taboos and the rigid, unquestioning obedience to the tribal elders which often led to bullying.

The Aborigines believed stubbornly that evil spirits caused illness, which was common and frequently fatal—how far it originated with the whites is not clear—but at least in the early days they rejected advice about how to treat it, and suffered and died unnecessarily. Latz says he understands the Aboriginal tendency to take life one day at a time, as distinct from the work ethic of the missionaries, because they had so little control over nature and fate’s vagaries.

Violence from whites did not seem to be a very big problem by comparison, but there was some. The crusty South Australian police constables Willshire and Wurmbrand, with their squads of mounted Aboriginal troopers, despatched some rather rough summary justice but Latz says several good police worked well with the Aborigines.

He adds extra light on the massacre at Coniston station north-west of Alice Springs in 1928, the last recorded white massacre of blacks. Aborigines killed a white dog trapper, Fred Brooks, and another settler was lucky to escape. In the police-led reprisal, up seventy blacks were killed, according to the Aborigines.

The context was the terrible drought of the time in the Centre. Starving, but traditionally warlike Warlpiri Aborigines from the neighbouring Tanami Desert moved into the station, putting pressure on the Northern Aranda living there whose numbers had declined through disease. Latz says the settler who had been attacked had infringed Warlpiri customs and, though he had three Aboriginal mistresses, “wanted to break in all the young women”. The trapper, Brooks, gave nothing in return for sexual services. Enter the Aranda man “Police Paddy”, who his tribesmen said “killed a hundred blackfellows”, all Warlpiri. Paddy would have seen the punitive party as an excellent chance to kill as many Warlpiri as possible and drive the rest back to their land, Latz says. “Of course the white party members would have been well aware of the situation and would have given Paddy plenty of ammunition … and probably also gave him a helping hand.”

He recounts one other bush massacre by whites on a station near Alice Springs, and another squatter who had a reputation with the blacks for “knocking off niggers” but the evidence here is only of him threatening them with a gun. These are examples of the tangled situation which has from time to time resulted in whites killing blacks in big numbers, but also of the many rumours based on little more than threats from guns brandished or fired off in a tense situation.

The courage and commitment of the missionaries are awesome—used in its correct sense—especially the early ones who came from Germany into some of the driest and most remote and inhospitable country on Earth. Their many feats included translating hymns and the Gospels into Aranda. The book is dedicated to the Rev. Carl Strehlow, who as pastor, manager and brilliant linguist made it all work, and to his family.

At home in mid-nineteenth-century Hermannsburg, Germany, the Lutherans had wanted “heathens” to convert. The MacDonnell Ranges, a spectacular relative oasis in the desert, provided a substantial supply of them. The mission wanted conversion where possible, but also to spread the Word more generally and bring education and health assistance as well as religion. They faced a three-way language hurdle—German-English-Aranda—as well as frequent financial squeezes, drought and other visitations from nature, hurtful suspicion in two world wars and frequent incomprehension from both the civilian and Lutheran authorities in Adelaide. (The Northern Territory was part of South Australia until the Commonwealth took responsibility for it in 1911.)

In the 1970s missionaries came for a time to be widely condemned as arrogant destroyers of the oldest living culture on earth, but the Aboriginal MP and sometime Northern Territory minister Alison Anderson sees it differently. In an afterword to this book, she says:

An Aboriginal evangelist and a blind one at that! People were amazed—here was one of their own bringing them God’s word, a message of spiritual love. And before churches were built, worship happened in their country, in a riverbed, on the side of a hill, under a tree. There was connection and attachment straightaway.

I was told the stories of Blind Moses and his wife Sofia, who was leading him around, by my grandmother and my mum and aunties. I never heard anything bad from them about that time, mission time. There wasn’t the violence (except for some tribal fighting) nor the alcohol and drugs that we see today. With his message of love and respect Moses brought people together across the Western Desert, even total strangers.