Barry Hill - Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession

A group of men, their heads and bodies shaking rhythmically, chanting with the enthusiasm that made them forget age & weakness & becoming young again in spirit the rising and falling of the chant melody, like the breathing that gives us life, what an unforgettable scene!

Thus wrote T.G.H. Strehlow in 1935, during an early journey that enabled him to write Songs of Central Australia . That book, now rare and out of print, is generally acclaimed as one of the great books of world literature, and a seminal text for Australia. Barry Hill in Overland called it a huge, marvellous, astonishing gift of a book a gem, the great source book of the poetic lore of the region, the text that most extensively tables, with the authority of the Torah , the ancient poetry

T.G.H. Strehlow was the son of the German Lutheran Pastor Carl Strehlow of the Hermannsburg mission in Central Australia. He grew up speaking Aranda; he had Greek and Latin from his father by the time he was 14. After a first-class honours degree in English at the University of Adelaide, he began collecting songs in 1932; he inducted himself as bushman, and with his camel boy, Tom Ljonga, as his sole companion, travelled thousands of miles to camp with knowledgeable Aboriginal men. For the next three decades he continued to collect, regarding himself as ingkata , or ceremonial chief, and writing in the elegiac mode, in the sunset, he thought, of Aboriginal culture.

Strehlow was the first Patrol Officer of Central Australia when economic and sexual exploitation was rife. He was a friend of the Aborigine: for his trouble he was branded in the Federal Parliament as a Nazi in 1941. After the war Strehlow was also translating the New Testament into Aranda. As the translator of songs, he was akin to Shakespeares Caliban; but as a man of the Gospel he was Luthers Caliban, who secretly thought of himself as a Black Missionary. Out of both cultures, he sought to affirm what was eternal, and to articulate the essence of belonging in Australia.

As a public intellectual Strehlow had sharp things to say about religious rights, assimilation, Max Stuarts conviction, the N.T. Land Rights Act, the Aboriginal industry, customary law and Aboriginal futures: he was never far from controversy. His huge collection of secret-sacred objects was hotly contested when Aboriginal identity become politicised. Finally ironically, and tragically he was accused of betraying sacred images he had obtained in trust, a scandal that greatly damaged his reputation.

Prize-winning poet and historian Barry Hill, with exclusive access to Strehlows diaries, offers a deeply layered intellectual recovery of Strehlows life in translation, and, by implication, a placement of it in the context of contemporary anxieties about cultural degeneration and continuity. This is both a critical study of the work and an intimate narrative of Strehlows yearnings. Broken Song straddles a century of Australian history, from the race wars on the frontier to the modern era, and flowing through everything is Strehlows passionate ambivalence towards Aranda cultures mode of sustaining desire.

Indigenous readers are advised that Broken Song includes material which might be regarded as sensitive or distressing. Material from the Strehlow Collection used in the book has been vetted by the Strehlow Research Centre and all attempts have been made to exclude information or images which might offend the cultural values of Aboriginal people.

A group of men, their heads and bodies shaking rhythmically, chanting with the enthusiasm that made them forget age & weakness & becoming young again in spirit, glowing fires a windbreak of boughs, a moon dripping through fleeing clouds, the rising and falling of the chant melody, like the breathing that gives us life,what an unforgettable scene!

T.G.H. Strehlow, 1935

poetically, man dwells

Hlderlin/Martin Heidegger, 1951

Jesus can you mend this broken song?

Neil Murray, 1993