It was a lovely spring morning when we arrived early for Sunday services at Bethany Church, in Tanunda, South Australia, in the heart of the Barossa region. I inquired after the congregational president, who was up in the loft, preparing to ring the bells.
After introducing myself and being welcomed, I did what a Missouri Synod Lutheran would do in this situation: I requested permission to attend communion with the members, to which my host readily acceded. I know, to many of you, the closed-communion thing seems a bit much, but it’s still the way with conservative German Lutherans.
There was a reason beyond the doctrinal or spiritual for my inquiry. I wanted to acknowledge, and make it known, that despite the thousands of blue Pacific miles separating our homes, we were kin. I have no ancestors, none, who were not evangelical Lutherans from the province of Hanover. The German-speaking colonists of South Australia in the 1840s were similar folk, from Silesia (Prussia), with a missionary leavening from a seminary in Hanover. At one time, in fact, despite distance, the people at Bethany in the Barossa were adherents of my own Missouri Synod in America. I wanted our new friends to know that I know how things are done.
I guess I was playing the Lutheran card, but I’m confessing it now, so I think we’re good, right?
The Silesians commenced arrival in South Australia under the leadership of Reverend August Ludwig Christian Kavel. We visited his grave at the Langmeil Cemetery in Tanunda a few days ago. We also, at the old Bethany Cemetery, stood at the gravesite of Friedrich Topp, forty-four years the schoolmaster at Bethany School, organist at the church. I’ve been reading his mail at the Australian Lutheran Archives, in Adelaide. His handwriting, I would describe it as prim, and oh so tiny—I photographed pages to blow up on screen for translation.
Another, greater point of interest: in front of Bethany Church is a modest monument commemorating the departure in 1875 of a missionary expedition led by Georg Adam Heidenreich, who had been sent out from the Hermannsburg missionary seminary in Hanover. (We visited his grave, too.) Bethany was the home base of the Lutheran party who drove 2200 sheep overland into the heart of the Australian desert to found an agricultural mission to the Arrernte people at Ntaria, on the Finke River. The mission persists, and boasts a world-famous Aboriginal women’s choir. The agriculture, that didn’t do so well.
There are questions, too, now, in the twenty-first century, about the educational and cultural initiatives of the missionaries at Finke River. Schoolmaster Topp at Bethany, we know, applied the cane so vigorously that there is a ballad about him. Corporal punishment at the Finke River mission is a critical question among historians of the enterprise. Much of the discussion resonates with that around American Indian boarding schools here on our side.
There has been quite a bit written about the Lutheran missionaries and the Arrernte people at Finke River, but we are determined to look into the matter, historically. By “we” I mean me and Dr. Kelley, my collaborator in all Astralasian research. What can we bring to the discussion that able Australian historians have not already done?
First, at the heart of the Finke River initiative was agriculture, the attempt to establish model farms and a model agricultural community. That pretty much failed, and how could it have succeeded, when it was directed by missionaries from Hanover, inexperienced in anything like this desert country? On the other hand, my family has 150 years of mostly successful farming experience in a semiarid land, and I am an agricultural historian. I think I can bring some expertise to the post-mortem on Lutheran agriculture at Finke River.
Dr. Kelley, further, is a former elementary teacher with solid academic training in human development. She is the one to investigate and reflect upon what went right or wrong in the educational and child-rearing aspects of the mission. We both know our way around archives and are comfortable doing fieldwork far from home. I should probably look around and see if I can find my mother’s membership papers in the LWML, the Lutheran Women’s Missionary Society, just in case.
