John Strehlow

John Strehlow (born 1946) is an Australian stage director, playwright, biographer, and set designer. He is best known for ''The Tale of Frieda Keysser'', a two-volume biography about his grandparents, the Lutheran missionaries Carl and Frieda Strehlow, who served for many years at Hermannsburg Mission in the Northern Territory.

Born in Adelaide, South Australia into a family closely involved with Aboriginal people for three generations, Strehlow studied Classics at Adelaide University from 1964 to 1966. He switched to Modern European and Asian History in 1967 and graduated with Honours in 1969. His thesis analysed Mahatma Gandhi’s use of tradition to further the Indian independence movement. In 1989, he received a diploma in the History of the Fine and Decorative Arts from The Study Centre in London (V&A). He attended lectures and seminars run by the London-based Institute for Cultural Research from 1983 until it went defunct. He speaks fluent German as well as some French and Dutch.

From his early training in music, Strehlow developed an interest in theatre, partly due to the Adelaide Festival of Arts. After spending some years in business in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, he started teaching drama in Darwin schools and writing plays for children in 1974. He began researching ''The Tale of Frieda Keysser'' in 1994, publishing the first volume in 2011 and the second volume in 2019. He also wrote the play '' Eliza! Eliza! The Doolittle Sequel'', a provocative projection of developments into 1922 which provides an alternative to George Bernard Shaw’s version of what happens to Eliza after '' Pygmalion''.

Early life

Strehlow is the second son of TGH Strehlow and his first wife Bertha née James, and was educated at Adelaide Boys High School from 1958–63. While at school he studied the piano and the clarinet, later switching to the organ, winning the Organ Music Society of Adelaide’s competition in 1967. At university, he reviewed theatre and film for the student newspaper ''On'' ''Dit'', and in 1967 ran the student Film Society with a friend, pioneering seasons of films by Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Federico Fellini, François Truffaut and Jean Renoir. The Society founded the magazine ''Cinesa'' to stimulate interest in film. It also hosted the first film of the Australian cinematic revival, ''Time in Summer'', which was booked for Cannes in 1969.

In 1969, Strehlow spent four months in India, mostly in Calcutta, meeting Satyajit Ray, Sarbari Roy Chaudhuri, Subhas Mukherjee, Ram Kinka, as well as Amrit Rai in Allahabad, and others from that intellectual circle. He then spent two months travelling through Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. He briefly visited Hong Kong before returning to Australia, where he spent two years teaching in state schools in South Australia before moving to Alice Springs in mid-1972. He ran a clothing shop in Alice Spring. In 1974, he began teaching drama in several Darwin schools.

Professional Training and Higher Education

Strehlow earned BA Honours in History from the University of Adelaide in 1969. His thesis “Gandhi and Tradition in Gujarat” investigated the link between Gandhi’s ideas on non-violence derived from Leo Tolstoy and ancient traditions of non-violence in western India. In early 1971, he undertook a course in the Aboriginal language Pitjantjatjara, part of the Western Deserts language group, at Adelaide University under instruction by Rev. Bill Edwards. The first work on this language was done by John’s grandfather Rev. Carl Strehlow, from around 1900 to 1909, but it was not published due to the death in 1910 of Carl’s sponsor in Germany, Baron Moritz von Leonhardi. In 1988–9, Strehlow took the London Study Centre’s diploma course on the History of the Fine and Decorative Arts. Also in London, he attended lectures under the auspices of the Institute for Cultural Research from 1983 until it went defunct. In recent years, he has taken up the study of hypnotherapy through Uncommon Knowledge.

Career

From 1970 to 1972 Strehlow taught drama in South Australia, and during this period he met and established relationships with many Pitjantjatjara people and groups from the Flinders Ranges. It is because of this that Strehlow decided to learn the Pitjantjatjara language, and undertook a course at the University of Adelaide under Bill Edwards. From 1972 to 1975 Strehlow lived in Alice Springs, where he established a clothing business.

In 1975 Strehlow left Alice Springs after receiving a grant from the Australian Schools Commission to tour theatre and run workshops in all NT towns, as well as 12 Aboriginal settlements, performing to all age groups under a wide range of conditions for six months. A big reason for Strehlow doing this was to try to understand the predicament of Central Australia and the plight of the Aboriginal peoples living in the communities round Alice Springs, which so many of his family had devoted their lives to doing.

In 1976 Strehlow returned to Adelaide, where he established a theatre company which would travel the world and perform to more than 300 theatres in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. Of the more than 50 productions performed, specialising in Shakespeare's plays, four were written by Strehlow: ''Ali Baba''; ''Revolution's Son''; ''The Slaying of the Dragon King''; and ''The Elusive Reality''. During this period, for almost 30 years, Strehlow based himself in London.

In addition to writing plays, Strehlow has written for newspapers and magazines, given interviews for radio and television, and acted as an adviser for numerous cultural institutions holding materials relating to Aboriginal Australians.In 2000 he contributed to ''Mr Strehlow's Films'' (directed by Hart Cohen), a documentary film based around the work of his father Ted Strehlow.

In the 1990s Strehlow became increasingly curious about the lives of his grandparents, Carl and Frieda Strehlow after discovering the existence of Frieda's diaries, written in old script German, in Berlin and the realisation that this personal record of her life in Hermannsburg, from 1897 and 1908 which revealed previously unknown details of their lives their and happenings in the community and more generally around Central Australia. Strehlow began work on what would become a two-volume set in 1994, and the final volume was published, in two parts, in 2019; the launch was held at The Residency in Alice Springs on 17 December 2019. At this launch Ted Egan said that Strehlow had "contributed monumentally to the historic records of the NT" and that this work "will be of benefit to all scholars".

Strehlow records these stories in the first person, saying:

Research for this work took Strehlow to more than 50 archives in the UK, Germany and Australia and rests not only on Freida's diaries, but other untapped sources only published in German (which Strehlow learnt for this purpose). The ultimate result includes a detailed record of day-to-day life at Hermannsburg, the forming of stations in the area, the survival of the Arrernte and Luritja people in the area, and the pressure the missionaries faced.

Publications

The tale of Frieda Keysser: Frieda Keysser & Carl Strehlow, an historical biography; Volume 1 / by John Strehlow.

The tale of Frieda Keysser: Frieda Keysser & Carl Strehlow, an historical biography, between three worlds,1910-1922; Volume 2 / by John Strehlow.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Strehlow, John
1946 births
Living people
People from the Northern Territory
20th-century Australian writers
Australian dramatists and playwrights
People educated at Adelaide High School
University of Adelaide alumni
Australian people of German descent