According to the Koori Mail (12 March 2008, p-46), “the story of South Australian anthropologist Ted Strehlow and his controversial relationship with the Aranda people of Central Australia is being immortalised in opera”; and the opera project is in process. I did some research on this controversial anthropologist on the internet since there is not much information about him in the Koori Mail article; and I came across a very detailed article about him by John Morton( on www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1060.html). According to this article:
Theodore George Henry Strehlow was born in 1908 at Nthariye (or Hermannsburg), west of Alice Springs, the traditional homelands of Western Aranda (Arrernte) people. His father was Reverend Carl Strehlow, the head of the Finke River Mission started by German Lutherans in 1877. Ted’s father died when he was fourteen years old, and he left the mission with his mother to live in Adelaide. After completing his education, he came back to Alice Springs as an anthropologist.
Ted Strehlow grew up among the Aboriginal people and learnt Western Aranda as a first language. When he returned to Alice Springs, he began his career as a linguist and ethnographer of Aboriginal culture. As John Morton points out, “ Between 1932 and 1978 (the year of his death) Strehlow collected and produced an impressive collection of artefacts and records, most of which relate to the cultures of Aranda people” and “he published widely, translated Christian texts into Aranda for the Lutheran Church and was regularly involved in ‘native affairs’.”
When he returned to Alice Springs in 1932, Strehlow met an old man called Micky Dowdow, (also called Akwerre or ‘Gura’=’Bandicoot’ by his totemic affiliation) a goat shepherd who was the traditional owner of sites in north of Alice Springs in Northern Aranda country. Gura told Strehlow that “he was the last of the great ceremonial chiefs of the gura bandicoot centre known as Ilbalintja,” and that he wanted Strehlow “to accompany him there to inspect the sacred-secret site which had been placed under his undisputed control by his long-dead forefathers and tribal elders.” And Gura told that “ all the old men of his tribe had held a conference that morning, and had come to the decision that, unless someone they could trust assumed responsibility for the preservation of the sacred secrets, they would all die with the old men.” Gura and other old men thought that their sons and grandsons were not responsible enough and could not be trusted with the secrets, the tjurungas and other objects. Since Strehlow showed a genuine interest in their culture, they wanted him to “accept responsibility for all their sacred things”. As John Morton points out :
Strehlow always maintained that he was invited to amass his collection as a kind of sacred trust and many Aboriginal elders came to believe that Strehlow’s ethnographic endeavour was the best way to preserve their knowledge for posterity in the face of the invasive threats of Euro-Australia. While Strehlow had certain misgivings about this trust, he took it on with ardent enthusiasm.
Collecting, preserving, understanding and disseminating central Australian culture became the hub of his life. Yet his story unfolded in uneven ways. While Strehlow’s relationship with Aboriginal people began smoothly enough, and progressed quickly and dramatically, it ended steeped in controversy. After his initial encounter with Micky Dowdow, Strehlow, aided by his Western Arrernte assistant Tom Ljonga, went on to travel through Northern, Upper Southern and Eastern Arrernte country in the 1930s, witnessing and recording some 166 ceremonial acts.
There was a lull in his ethnographic work after 1935, when Strehlow turned his attention to other matters, but the work resumed in 1948. Between 1950 and 1964 Strehlow witnessed most of the other ceremonial acts that can be found in his records, so that his major ethnographic efforts could be said to have finished by the time he finally published his magnum opus – Songs of Central Australia – in 1971.
Advances in technology and transport helped him to complete his work more extensively and thoroughly after 1950, but there were also significant social changes going on in Australia at that time. Indeed, the 1960s were a true turning point in Strehlow’s life, just as they were in the lives of many Aboriginal people.
By 1971, many of the senior old men who trusted him with their secret-sacred business were dead, and there was a new generation of Aboriginal people who wanted to take over the secret-sacred ceremonius and objects. Strehlow did not trust them. He became very possesive of the secret-sacred business and said that he had been given “a mandate to preserve the Law, and it had been bolstered by testimony from elders that the system of authority and transfer of rights in secret-sacred business was breaking down: the old men said that the young men could no longer be trusted with atywerrenge(men’s sacred-secret objects).” And he said that “In accordance with the Aranda rules of tjurunga inheritance, these traditions would be regarded as becoming my personal property after the deaths of their original owners.” And Strehlow published photographs of and his knowledge of secret-sacred ceremonies, and object in his books after the death of the old men. When he sold the ceremonial photographs to the German magazine Stern in the final year of his life this created a big controversy in the final year of his life between him and the Aranda people who “were outraged at what they understood to be insulting and unethical use of their secret-sacred business.”
He did not want to leave his collection of the Aranda secret ceremonies and objects to a public institution and established an organisation called the Strehlow Research Foundation which opened in Adelaide on 3 October 1978; and “Strehlow died just a few hours beforehand, his last words reputed to have been Arrernte, as he attempted to explain Aboriginal culture to visiting dignitaries who had arrived prior to the opening.” His wife has been the head of the foundation since his dead. Although now most of the collection is back in central Australia, and open to the Aboriginal people, the controversy still continues.
You can read the whole story about Ted Strehlow by Dr John Morton on http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1060.html
PS- the Koori Mail is Australia’s national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Newspaper. It is 100 percent Aboriginal owned and controlled. www.koorimail.com
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