Imperial literacy, choice and F.W. Albrecht’s Lutheran experiments in Aboriginal education in post-war Central Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that Aboriginal children’s engagement with education in the central Australian region of the Northern Territory in the mid-twentieth century can be understood as strategic engagements with formal western education systems and assimilation policies. It addresses a methodological problem stemming from a project that focuses on the work of the Finke River Mission (FRM) and its head missionary Friedrich Wilhelm Albrecht who, during the 1950s and 1960s, initiated an education scheme that targeted ‘half-caste’ Indigenous girls living on pastoral stations in central Australia. The scheme demonstrates the key concern of this special issue in that it is an example of the entanglements of transnational forces with local expressions of Indigenous education in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Albrecht
• German Lutheran missions
• imperial literacy
• assimilation

Acknowledgements

Dedicated to the memory of Tracey Banivanua Mar, who encouraged us to progress her ideas further and work together in an effort to build bridges between the discipline of Australian history and the field of Indigenous Studies. Thanks to Beth Marsden and Divya Rama Gopalakrishnan for their expert research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approval

This project has been approved by the La Trobe University HREC, reference n umber 1749627.

Notes

¹ ‘Half-caste’ is a historical term that is now accepted as an offensive term in Australia, referring to people of mixed Aboriginal and European descent.

² For details about our collaborative research methodology, see Katherine Ellinghaus and Barry Judd, ‘Writing as Kin: F.W. Albrecht, Assimilation Policy and the Lutheran experiment in Aboriginal Education, 1950s–1960s’, in Indigenous–Settler Relations in Australia and the World, ed. Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2020), 55–68.

³ See Regina Ganter, The Contest for Aboriginal Souls: European Missionary Agendas in Australia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2018). Ganter discusses F. W. Albrecht on pp. 126–8 and 196, but also offers an extensive account of German missionary work in Central Australia.

⁴ Barbara Henson, A Straight-Out Man: F.W. Albrecht and Central Australian Aborigines (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1992). Other historians who have discussed Albrecht include Peggy Brock and Jacqueline Van Gent, ‘Generational Religious Change among the Arrernte at Hermannsburg, Central Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 120 (2002): 303–18; Peggy Brock, ‘Nakedness and Clothing in Early Encounters Between Aboriginal People of Central Australia, Missionaries and Anthropologists’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 8, no. 1 (2007), doi: 10.1353/cch.2007.0015; Joanna Cruickshank, ‘Race, History, and the Australian Faith Missions’, Itinerario 24, no. 3 (2010): 39–52, Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt, ‘Corporal Punishment and Moral Reform and Hermannsburg Mission’, History Australia 7, no. 1 (2010): 1–17; Iris Domeier, Akkulturation bei den westlichen Aranda in Zentralaustralien (Bonn: Holos, 1993); Andrew W. Hurley, ‘Farewell My Country? Hermannsburg, Gus Williams, and the Indigenised Heimatlied’, Journal of Australian Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 18–31; Tim Rowse, White Flour, White Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 80–91; Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, ‘“We are Lutherans from Germany”: Music, Language, Social History and Change in Hopevale’, Aboriginal History 36 (2012): 99–117; Jacqueline Van Gent, ‘Changing Concepts of Embodiment and Illness among the Western Arrernte at Hermannsburg Mission’, Journal of Religious History 27, no. 3 (2003): 329–47; and Jacqueline Van Gent, ’Blickwechsel: Arrernte Encounters with Lutheran Missionaries in Central Australia’, in Luther zwischen den Kulturen: Zeitgenossenschaft – Weltwirkung, ed. Hans Medick and Peer Schmidt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 396–420.

⁵ The term ‘stolen generations’ was coined by historian Peter Read in 1981: Peter Read, ‘Reflecting on the Stolen Generations’, Indigenous Law Bulletin 8, no. 13 (2014), 3–6. The most comprehensive accounts of the practice are found in Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Families (Commonwealth of Australia, 1997); and Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).

⁶ Albrecht initially funded the scheme by drawing on the Northern Territory’s boarding allowances for children living away from their families to attend school in Alice Springs – this was problematic because H. C. Giese, Director of Welfare, at first refused to extend these provisions for children outside the Territory. Albrecht also used Finke River Mission funds, sometimes without the knowledge or the approval of the FRM board. The families also received child endowment. Donations from Lutheran families supported the scheme, especially in later years, and Lutheran boarding schools played an important part. See letters in Box 25, Albrecht Correspondence with Board 1959–61, Finke River Mission Archives, UECLA, especially Brother Reuther to F. W. Albrecht, July 2, 1959.

⁷ Henson, Straight Out Man, 196.

⁸ Penny Lee, Lyn Fasoli, Lysbeth Ford, Peter Stephenson and Dennis McInerney, Indigenous Kids and Schooling in the Northern Territory: An Introductory Overview and Brief History of Aboriginal Education in the Northern Territory (Batchelor: Batchelor Institution of Indigenous Tertiary Education, 2014), 39–47.

⁹ Beth Marsden, ‘Histories of Aboriginal Education and Schooling in Victoria, 1904–1968’ (PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 2021); Beth Marsden, ‘“The System of Compulsory Education is Failing”: Assimilation, Mobility and Aboriginal Students in Victorian State Schools, 1961–1968’, History of Education Review 47, no. 2 (2018): 143–54; and Kath (Apma) Travis Penangke, Minnie, Mum and Me: The Black Headed Snake (Melbourne: self-published, 2019).

¹⁰ Haebich, Broken Circles, 477–8.

¹¹ R. Marah, Assistant Secretary, Welfare & General Services to Mr. McCarthy, January 18, 1955, NAA A1734, NT1972/1908.

¹² Barry Judd and Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘F. W. Albrecht, Assimilation Policy and the Education of Aboriginal Girls in Central Australia: Overcoming Disciplinary Decadence in Australian History’, Journal of Australian Studies 44, no. 2 (2020): 5.

¹³ F.W. Albrecht to Rev. M. Prenzler, May 2, 1959, Box 82, Finke River Mission Archives, UECLA.

¹⁴ Bringing Them Home, chapter 10, https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/bringing-them-home-chapter-10#Heading65 (accessed 14 November 2021). Sana Nakata makes a similar point in her account of the role of teenager Elizabeth Eckford’s activism at Little Rock in 1957. Nakata asks us to consider the political action of her parents, and those of the other children who were not present at the school that day: Sana M. Nakata, ‘Elizabeth Eckford’s Appearance at Little Rock: The Possibility of Children’s Political Agency’, Politics 28, no. 1 (2008): 19.

¹⁵ Albrecht to Penzler, May 2, 1959.

¹⁶ Henson, Straight-Out Man, 209.

¹⁷ Ibid., 212.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Box 25 Albrecht Correspondence with Board 1955–1958, Finke River Mission Archives, UECLA.

²⁰ Albrecht to Reuther, July 21, 1959, Box 25, Albrecht to Reuther, August 5, 1959, Box 82, Fink River Mission Archives, UELCA.

²¹ Albrecht to Reuther, December 14, 1960, Box 25, Fink River Mission Archives, UELCA.

²² Henson, Straight-Out Man, 246.

²³ Shino Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History’, Australian Historical Studies 50, no. 3 (2019): 285–304.

²⁴ Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (New York: Routledge 2020), first page of preface.

²⁵ Richard Broome, ‘Aboriginal Victims and Voyagers, Confronting Frontier Myths’, Journal of Australian Studies 18, no. 42 (1994): 72.

²⁶ Broome, ‘Aboriginal Victims’, 72.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines, xi.

²⁹ Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870 (New York: State University of New York Press, 2012), 12–13.

³⁰ Russell, Roving Mariners, 6–7.

³¹ Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies 45 (2014): 300. For a summary of these debates see Jane Carey and Ben Silverstein, ‘Thinking With and Beyond Settler Colonial Studies: New Histories after the Postcolonial’, Postcolonial Studies 23, no. 1 (2020): 1–20; Jane Carey, ‘On Hope and Resignation: Conflicting Visions of Settler Colonial Studies and its Future as a Field’, Postcolonial Studies 23, no. 1 (2020): 21–42; and Shino Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History’, Australian Historical Studies 50, no. 3 (2019): 285–304.

³² Patrick Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, nos. 3–4 (2013): 274.

³³ Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata, ‘Introduction: Questioning Indigenous–Settler Relations: Reconciliation, Recognition, Responsibility’, in Questioning Indigenous–Settler Relations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata (Singapore: Springer, 2020), 10.

³⁴ Similar debates have taken place regarding the extent to which children’s voices from the past can be accessed or read, and to what extent their agency can be found in the historical record. See Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove and Carla Pascoe, ‘Hearing Children’s Voices: Conceptutal and Methodological Challenges’, in Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove and Carla Pascoe (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019), 9.

³⁵ Nakata, ‘Elizabeth Eckford’s Appearance’, 19.

³⁶ Jarvis Robyn Brownleigh and Mary-Ellen Keln have accused three books of Canadian history of going ‘beyond the argument for the recognition of Native agency to one that uses evidence of Native resilience and strength to soften, and at times to deny, the impact of colonialism, and thus, implicitly, to absolve its perpetrators’. See Jarvis Robyn Brownleigh and Mary-Ellen Keln, ‘Desperately Seeking Absolution: Native Agency as Colonialist Alibi?’, Canadian Historical Review 75, no. 4 (December 1994): 543–56. See also Mona Gleason, ‘Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education’, History of Education 45 no. 4 (2016): 446–59; and Daniel Bray and Sana Nakata, ‘The Figure of the Child in Democratic Politics’, Contemporary Political Theory 19, no. 1 (2019): 20–37.

³⁷ Sana Nakata, ‘The Infantilisation of Indigenous Australians: A Problem for Democracy’, Griffith Review: First Things First 60 (2018): 104–16.

³⁸ Russell McGregor, ‘Governance, not Genocide: Aboriginal Assimilation in the Postwar Era’, in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004): 301.

³⁹ Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. S. Kalberg (London: Routledge, 2012).

⁴⁰ See A. Kenny and C. Strehlow, The Aranda’s Pepa: An Introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece, Die Aranda-Und Loritja-Stamme in Zentral Australien, 1907–1920 (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013).

⁴¹ See J. Morton, ‘Restoring the Chain of Memory: T.G.H. Strehlow and the Repatriation of Australian Indigenous Knowledge’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 30, no. 3 (2019): 330–2.

⁴² Anglosphere here refers to the British Empire, particularly the white self-governing Dominions of New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, as well as the former British colonies of the first empire that became the United States of America.

⁴³ B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London: Macmillan, 1899).

⁴⁴ See J. Kline, Leo Frobenius (Hackensack: Salem Press Biographical Encyclopaedia, 2020).

⁴⁵ V. Spencer, Herder’s Political Thought: A Study of Language, Culture, and Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). See also J. K. Noyes, Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

⁴⁶ M. Lohe, Hermannsburg: A Vision and a Mission (Adelaide: Lutheran Publishing House, 1977). See also Andrew W. Hurley, ‘Remembering Hermannsburg and the Strehlows in Cantata Form: Music, the German-Australian Past and Reconciliation’, Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 1 (2018): 113–29; Christine Nicholls, ‘Mission Accomplished: The Hermannsburg Potters’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 13, no. 1 (2013): 126–45; and Fiona Hiscock, ‘Ntaria (Hermannsburg) Story’, Journal of Australian Ceramics 59, no. 2 (2020): 134–5.

⁴⁷ S. Hall, D. Held and A. G. McGrew, Modernity and Its Futures (London: Polity Press in association with the Open University, 1992).

⁴⁸ A. Day, V. Nakata, M. Nakata and G. Martin, eds., ‘Indigenous Students’ Persistence in Higher Education in Australia: Contextualising Models of Change from Psychology to Understand and Aid Students’ Practices at a Cultural Interface’, Higher Education Research and Development 34, no. 3 (2015): 501–12.

⁴⁹ There are too many to mention here, but see for example Many Voices: Reflections on Experiences of Indigenous Child Separation, ed. Doreen Mellor and Anna Haebich (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2002), Doris Pilkington-Garimara, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996) and the film adaptation, Phillip Noyce, dir. Rabbit-proof Fence (Sydney: Australian Film Finance Corp, 2003).

⁵⁰ HREOC, Bringing Them Home, chapter 1.

⁵¹ Bain Attwood, ‘The Stolen Generations and Genocide: Robert Manne’s “In Denial: the Stolen Generations and the Right”’, Aboriginal History 25 (2001): 163–72.

⁵² Anna Haebich, ‘“Between Knowing and Not Knowing”: Public Knowledge of the Stolen Generations’, Aboriginal History 25 (2001): 70–85.

⁵³ Bain Attwood, ‘A Matter for History’, Australian Financial Review, December 15, 2000.

⁵⁴ Interview with Lorna Wilson, February 13, 2018.

⁵⁵ See, for example, Noah Riseman, ‘Escaping Assimilation’s Grasp: Aboriginal Women in the Australian Women’s Military Services’, Women’s History Review 24, no. 5 (2015): 757–75; and Gregory Morgan, ‘Memory and Marginalisation: Aboriginality and Education in the Assimilation Era’, Australian Journal of Education 50, no. 1 (2006): 40–9.

⁵⁶ Odette Best and Don Gorman, ‘“Some of Us Pushed Forward and Let the World See What Could Be Done”: Aboriginal Australian Nurses and Midwives, 1900–2005’, Labour History, no. 111 (November 2016): 149; In Our Own Right: Black Australian Nurses’ Stories, ed. Sally S. Goold and Kerrynne Liddle (Sydney: Content Management, 2005).

⁵⁷ Sadie Canning, ‘My Story: The Beginning, Childhood, Ambitions and Achievements’, in In Our Own Right, 8.

⁵⁸ Beth Marsden, ‘Aboriginal Mobility, Scholarships and Anglican Grammar Schools in Melbourne, 1958–65’, Australian Historical Studies 51, no. 1 (2020): 54–69; Beth Marsden, ‘”The System of Compulsory Education is Failing”: Assimilation, Mobility and Aboriginal Students in Victorian State Schools, 1961–1968’, History of Education Review 47, no. 2 (2018): 143–54.

⁵⁹ Ann Curthoys, Ann Genovese and Alexander Reilly, Rights and Redemption: History, Law and Indigenous People (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), 136.

⁶⁰ Henson notes that when it became known around town that some of the first children were going south to school, other part-Aboriginal parents spoke to Albrecht. ‘Obviously’, Henson argues, ‘there were others who wanted their children to have wider opportunities’. Henson, Straight-Out Man, 213.

⁶¹ Nor was the valuing of literacy in English unique to the Northern Territory. See Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press 2007), 18; and Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse’, Aboriginal History 37 (2013): 1–28.

⁶² See, for example, Frederick Cooper, ‘Introduction’, in Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 9. For discussion of Aboriginal activists strategising in the Northern Territory, see Ben Silverstein, Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

⁶³ Banivanua Mar, ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights’. See also Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past’, Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 3 (2015): 340–55; Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Tracey Banivanua Mar and Nadia Rhook, ‘Counternetworks of Empires: Reading Unexpected People in Unexpected Places’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 19, no. 2 (2018). doi: 10.1353/cch.2018.0009.

⁶⁴ See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).

⁶⁵ Barry Judd, ‘“It’s Not Cricket”: Victorian Aboriginal Cricket at Coranderrk’ La Trobe Journal 85 (May 2010), http://latrobejournal.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-85/t1-g-t5.html.

⁶⁶ Anna Haebich, For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900–1940 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1988): 142–3.

⁶⁷ Ganter, The Contest for Aboriginal Souls, 212.

⁶⁸ Gayatri C. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

⁶⁹ Judd and Ellinghaus, ‘F. W. Albrecht, Assimilation Policy and the Education of Aboriginal Girls in Central Australia’.

⁷⁰ See Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800 (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council grant [DP200103269].

Notes on contributors

Katherine Ellinghaus

Katherine Ellinghaus is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Archaeology and History at La Trobe University, where she teaches Australian settler colonial history. She is of Irish and German descent and has researched and written extensively on Indigenous assimilation policies. Her most recent work explores new methodologies of historical work shared equally and ethically by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and the ethical use of archives by historians.

Barry Judd

Barry Judd is Pro-Vice Chancellor (Indigenous) and Director of Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is a leading Australian scholar on the subject of ‘Aboriginal’ history and the unfitness of the discipline to recall an Indigenous past. Barry was a founding member of the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network (NIRAKN), the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS).