We will arrive in the Barossa at peak jacaranda. Reviewing the sentence I just spoke, I realize I am speaking gibberish as far as my neighbors in Dakota territory are concerned. So I’ll explain.
Jacaranda is a genus of lavender-flowering trees native to South America. One particularly ornamental species of jacaranda originating from Argentina and Bolivia was introduced to Australia before 1850—details indeterminate, but of course, Australians introduced all sorts of plants and animals that came back to bite them.
Jacarandas, however, are a horticultural icon, heavily planted by town and city landscapers, bedecking avenues with purple blossoms and bewitching scent. Which brings me to the Barossa, a region of South Australia populated by German-speaking Prussians beginning in the 1840s. Such folk peopled the hill country of South Australia at the same time they also migrated to the hill country of central Texas.
With a common result: both regions possess world-class vineyards and wineries. The Barossa, particularly, which is the unofficial capital of that sector of the new world wine industry devoted to the red wine known as Shiraz. The Germans of the Barossa also joined in the Australian passion for jacaranda. So when Dr. Kelley and I travel later this month to the Barossa on a research junket, we will arrive at peak jacaranda, seeing the country in spectacular blossom.
It takes about thirty hours of travel time to get there. I remember about fifteen years ago a supper table conversation when my aged mother, knowing my reputation as a prairie historian, asked me, Why do you have to travel to such faraway places for your work? Meaning Australia, Norway, New Zealand, and so on. And I told her, Mom, because I can. She understood immediately. I wish now I could talk with her about the jacaranda.
And about Lutherans, to which subject she surely would warm. I come from a family of Missouri Synod German Lutherans, and the German folk of the Barossa are members of the Lutheran Church of Australia.
A decade ago Dr. K and I were nosing around the church compound of one of its churches, Bethany Lutheran of Tanunda, in the German-speaking, grape-growing heart of the Barossa. Parting the shrubbery in a corner of the lot, we read the inscription on a modest monument:
In Commemoration of the Departure of the Pioneer Missionaries from Bethany 22nd October 1875 / To establish the Hermannsburg Mission among the Aborigines in Central Australia /Unveiled 19th October 1975.
The missionaries from the Barossa crossed half the continent to the Arrente Ntaria settlement where they founded the Hermannsburg mission, which Dr. K and I had visited previously. They drove 2220 sheep along with horses, cattle, and goats from waterhole to waterhole through the desert. It was epic. The story is not without controversy, as historians along with the public have brought a critical eye to bear on missionaries and mission schools throughout the colonized world. It is still epic, if not purely valorous.
We’re going to begin our investigation of it at the starting point, and amid the jacarandas of Tanunda, will attend Lutheran services at Bethany in two weeks. I’ll let you know how it goes.
