AustLit

'The son of Carl Strehlow, who established the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg in 1896, TGH Strehlow grew up speaking Aranda. Schooled in the classics, and with an honours degree in English from the University of Adelaide, Strehlow returned to Central Australia when he was 24 to embark on a series of demanding journeys, recording Aranda songs, myths and rituals, and collecting secret-sacred objects—a mission itself, of documenting for posterity presumably doomed traditions. In Barry Hill’s meticulous and compelling narrative of Strehlow’s life, it becomes clear that Strehlow’s mistaken assumptions, typical of his epoch, would ultimately doom him too. He died, an aggrieved and broken man, in 1978, wilfully blind to the evidence of cultural continuity and political resurgence in Aranda life, and unable to slough off the colonial fantasy of being the true custodian of the culture he had appropriated.'  (Introduction)