John Strehlow

John Henry James 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, Carl and Frieda Strehlow, who served as Lutheran missionaries at the Hermannsburg Mission in the Northern Territory, Australia.

Born in Adelaide, South Australia, Strehlow studied Classics at the University of Adelaide 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 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 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 2022 play Eliza! Eliza! The Doolittle Sequel, which provides an alternative to George Bernard Shaw’s version of what happened to Eliza Doolittle after Pygmalion.

Since 1978, Strehlow has permanently resided in London, producing innovative productions of William Shakespeare’s plays and established modern British classics for general public audiences. By 2012, he had directed and toured over 50 professional productions (including four of the plays he had written and directed himself) to more than 300 theatres in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland as part of their scheduled programs, as well as to festivals in Italy (Cuneo, Asti, Florence and Rome).

Early life

Strehlow was born in Adelaide, South Australia into a family closely involved with Aboriginal people for three generations. He is the second son of TGH Strehlow and his first wife Bertha née James. He 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. In 1967, he ran the student Film Society with a friend, screening 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, meeting Satyajit Ray, Sarbari Roy Chaudhuri, Subhas Mukherjee, and Ram Kinka in Calcutta, Amrit Rai in Allahabad, and others from that intellectual circle. He then spent two months travelling through Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. After briefly visiting Hong Kong, he returned to Australia, where he spent two years teaching in state schools in South Australia before moving to Alice Springs in mid-1972.

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 of Carl’s sponsor in Germany, Baron Moritz von Leonhardi, in 1910. 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 at 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

Playwright and Stage Director

Strehlow taught at Daws Road High School in 1970 and Elizabeth West High School in 1972, running drama workshops. In 1970, he directed a student production of Fernando Arrabal’s The Two Executioners. At the same time, he pursued his interest in the Aboriginal people by establishing contact with people from the Flinders Ranges. In 1971, he toured eastern and northern Australia, making contact with urban aboriginal groups in New South Wales (Sydney, Taree, Wauchope and Woodenbong), Queensland (Brisbane and Townsville), and Alice Springs. While in the Northern Territory from mid-1972 to 1975. he ran a clothing business in Alice Springs. He also spent some of that period living in close contact with fringe dwellers at the Mt. Nancy camp just outside Alice Springs.

In 1974, Strehlow taught drama in at Larrakeya Primary School, Jingili Primary School, Berrimah Primary School, and Casuarina High School in Darwin. He wrote four plays during this time—Alloway, an original story written for children (performed by children at Berrimah Primary School and Brown's Mart); a treatment of Don Quixote suitable for adolescents (never performed); Maaruf the Cobbler of Cairo (performed by students at Casuarina High School); and Aladdin, the latter two plays based on the stories in The Thousand and One Nights.

At the end of 1974, Strehlow was awarded a grant from the Australian Schools Commission to tour live theatre and run workshops in Northern Territory towns. His direction of Aladdin drew from Polish director Jerzy Grotowski's ideas on a "poor theatre"—which placed the emphasis actor's body and its relation with the spectator, largely doing away with costumes, sets and music—that he saw in Polish productions through the Adelaide Festival of Arts. Using simple costumes, Aladdin relied almost entirely upon dialogue, collage and carefully choreographed movement. It was performed in Darwin, Alice Springs, Batchelor, Nhulunbuy, Katherine and Tennant Creek. Additionally, Strehlow toured a variety show, which included Punch and Judy as a shadow play with actors instead of puppets, at twelve Aboriginal settlements—Amoonguna, Areyonga, Santa Teresa, Papunya, Yuendemu, Warrabri, Roper River, Yirrkala, Rose River, Bamyili, Alyangula and Angurugu—to all age groups under a wide range of conditions. The tour lasted for six months and ended with an open air production of Macbeth at Darwin High School. The project report was at one time considered for publication.

In 1976, Strehlow travelled widely in New Guinea and Europe, writing Revolution’s Sons, a play about the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, while living in Paris.

The Triad Stage Alliance

After returning to Adelaide, Strehlow established a theatre company in 1977 as an ensemble under the name Triad Stage Alliance. Some of the ensemble members had studied classical mime at Flinders University under Zora Šemberová, who had herself studied under Marcel Marceau in Paris.

After a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Triad toured Aladdin to South Australian schools to a total of 55,000 primary school students. In 1978, Strehlow wrote two plays—Ali Baba (toured South Australia, receiving a little support from the South Australian Arts Development Unit and reaching 60,000 children); and The Slaying of the Dragon King, a play based on the Chinese political fable by Wang T’ieh. Even though it was selected for a season of new writing in Adelaide, The Slaying of the Dragon King was not performed there. Additionally, John staged Twelfth Night for the 1978 Adelaide Festival of Arts, followed by Revolution’s Sons later that year. The Elusive Reality, a poetry dramatization, was toured to secondary schools to promote the appreciation of poetry.

The Triad made its international debut at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival Fringe with its highly acclaimed, movement-based An Arabian Nights Spectacular, comprising Aladdin and Ali Baba. The production received critical acclaim. In his review of Aladdin and Ali Baba, Sandy Neilson of the Brunton Theatre wrote in The Scotsman that they employed “some of the most controlled and imaginative ensemble work it has ever been my pleasure to witness… Even one empty seat during this extraordinary piece of theatre constitutes a criminal waste.” This success was in part due to the instruction in mime from Šemberová. The Elusive Reality was also performed and received positive reviews.

The first Australian company to perform on the Edinburgh Fringe, the Triad won a Fringe First and received critical acclaim from the Scottish and international press, with segments of the production broadcast on ITV and BBC radio and television. Aladdin and Ali Baba were subsequently toured through Europe and the United Kingdom for the 1979 Year of the Child, with a week at festivals in Wales, Belgium and Germany. It also ran for two weeks at the Roundhouse Downstairs in London. In 1979-80, each play was booked for a week by the Unicorn Children’s Theatre based at London’s Arts Theatre.

Seven Faces of Sindbad

In 1979, John wrote Seven Faces of Sindbad, a dramatisation of the Thousand and One Nights story, intended to appeal to equally children and adults. Each of Sindbad’s seven voyages was given a different stylistic treatment. There was no scenery, lighting effects, or recorded sound. The actors were only dressed in tights, plus a top for the one actress. The only props were six wooden sticks, one for each actor, and five low platforms which were moved around during the performance. Using these few props and some basic chanting, the actors created the violent storms, shipwrecks, whales, man-eating pythons, and primate attacks of the original story.

With financial assistance from the South Australian Arts Development Unit, the Triad rehearsed Seven Faces of Sindbad in Perugia, Italy. The production premiered at the Edinburgh Festival, where it won Strehlow a second Fringe First. Relying heavily on classical mime and choreographed movement in addition to the dialogue, the production was given high praise by the critics. For example, Sally Magnusson wrote in The Scotsman that “Seven Faces of Sindbad is a triumph of imaginative conception and execution – an enthralling spectacle for both adults and children.” The production ran for four years, touring extensively in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Belgium. It received critical acclaim from Rotterdams Nieuwsblad (“crême de la crême”) and Soir Bruxelles (“two hours of pure magic”). Sindbad also toured around Britain to ecstatic reviews. The Guardian described it as a “a magical show, played with energetic and assured expertise. . . Triad deserve a salute.” It was performed at London’s Arts Theatre for a week in 1981, and at Jacksons Lane in 1982.

Despite its immense critical success, the production was plagued by ill luck. Because one of its Edinburgh venues was known by a different name to the locals, many audiences were unable to find it. For this reason, even though nine separate observers recommended it for the Best of the Fringe at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, Sindbad was rejected by Brian Rix for the Shaftesbury season without him seeing it. The play was also considered for production by BBC Television, but it was rejected because it was concluded it would require too many expensive costumes and sets. A tour scheduled by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust for South Australia was also cancelled for unknown reasons shortly before the Triad was due to return to Adelaide.

The bad luck continued for its Heidelberg appearance. The day before, the first ferry strike in sixty years was announced, meaning the set was sent ahead of the cast. Meanwhile, the cast were booked on to a plane which broke down in Belfast. Although they managed to find seats on a British Airways flight, they arrived in Frankfurt at the time they were due to appear on stage in Heidelberg almost 90 kms away. The performance started almost an hour late after a 100 mph dash by taxi along the motorway, after half of the audience had already left.

Despite the setbacks, the performance received high critical acclaim. In its review, the Rhein-Neckar Zeitung described it as “ . . . completely magical and brilliant theatre. Power, quickness, abundance in language and storytelling, mime and absorbed exactitude, precision in dance and movement, the ability to transform themselves with a gesture, faultless brilliance in performance. Acting artistry of rare brightness. A touch of the high-wire; what the seven members of this group so rightly winning many international awards brought to fulfilment was theatre without speculation, without ‘ifs and buts.’”

The worst luck for Sindbad came in 1982. Staged at Festival of Rome in a tent theater, the play was interrupted when a thunderstorm accompanied by torrential rain knocked out the power for the whole suburb. With an emergency generator roaring outside, the cast had to carry on as if all was normal, even though the audience was barely able to hear a word.

The production never recovered its costs. In 1983, after a successful week’s tour in the Netherlands, the play was given its last performance at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury to another rapturous reception. Afterwards, the ensemble was disbanded.

Macbeth

The ensemble was replaced by a traditional company that performed well-known classics of English theatre in innovative productions. The impetus for this was a successful production of Macbeth, premiered in Edinburgh in 1980. Mounted partly in response to financial difficulties, it won wide critical acclaim. Allen Wright, the leading drama critic for The Scotsman, wrote:

…the main interest lies in the interpretation of Macbeth himself. He is played by David Clisby as a darkly elegant and studious figure, more obsessed with witchcraft than passionately enamoured of his wife.”

The Festival Times, Edinburgh (“This is an excellent production") and the Times Educational Supplement (“John Strehlow’s Triad has rare style. Its intelligent interpretation of Macbeth brought out new dimensions in Shakespeare’s inexhaustible text”) agreed. German critics were equally enthusiastic. Darmstädter Echo wrote that "Macbeth . . . auf die Füße gestellt." Similarly, the Rhein-Neckar Zeitung wrote in its review:

Ausdruckskraft kam aus der Vitalität der Darsteller, sowie aus der sprachlichen Präzision, mit der die Blankverse an die Zuhörer kamen....

Unlike Sindbad, Macbeth had many sold-out performances in an extensive tour of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. This enabled the ensemble to continue operating. It was revived in 1982 and toured the United Kingdom and continental Europe for six months to audiences totaling tens of thousands, both general public as well as students (adolescents or of mature age) learning English as a foreign language.

The Slaying of the Dragon King

In 1981, The Slaying of the Dragon King was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival after rehearsing in Florence, Italy. With colourful costumes, Chinese gongs, stylised ensemble movement and tight dialogue, it told the story of how the Chinese Communist Revolution came to a remote village controlled by corrupt Confucian headman Zodiac Mah and his assistant Inky Nob. When the crops failed due to drought, Zodiac urged the villagers to pray for rain instead of irrigating. The production received excellent reviews,

In its review, The Scotsman wrote:

With much bashing of gongs and a minimum of props, Triad present a delightful parable of life in a post-revolutionary Chinese village, the backwater of Mah’s Bend.

In another positive review, The Glasgow Herald wrote:

The tale itself is so strong because it is so basic—old traditions versus new ideology. But even as the old ways are rejected, they are also celebrated. The production reverberates with movement and colour. Tai chi-style gestures are cleverly choreographed into dances (performed with swagger and precision), gongs tinkle and boom dramatically while the cast switch, at the drop of a coolie hat, from one role to another. Damyn Lodge’s whipper-snapper selling peanuts, her garrulous old peasant and her snivelling young wife are full of pithy character, while David Clisby’s scheming, greedy mandarin is every inch the wily oriental gentleman.

The production played to full houses during the Festival and won Strehlow a third Fringe First. It was listed in ‘6 of the Best’ on the Fringe. Unlike Australia, where intelligent interest in China was already considerable and growing, interest in the play was slight outside the Festival. Therefore, it only toured to a handful of venues in the United Kingdom—Canterbury (Marlowe), Rotherham (Studio), Dundee (Bonar Hall), Glasgow (The Third Eye), Torrington (Plough Theatre), Washington (Arts Centre), and London (Jacksons Lane and Cockpit Theatre). In continental Europe, it appeared in Rotterdam (Theater Zuidplein), Amsterdam (de Meervaart), Haarlem (Stadsschouwburg), Arnhem (Schouwburg), Utrecht (de Blauwe Zaal), Groningen (Schouwburg), Heidelberg (Städtische Bühnen), Stuttgart (Städtische Bühnen), and Florence (Teatro Tenda). It was not revived after completing its touring commitments.

Later career as a stage director

After winning his third Fringe First for The Slaying of the Dragon King but finding no market for it, Strehlow stopped writing for the stage, basing the company in London and specialising in Shakespeare’s plays and modern British classics. For the next three decades, the company toured their plays to more than 300 theatres in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. Their productions have consisted of plays by Shakespeare (Macbeth, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice) as well as modern classics such as The Importance of Being Earnest, An Inspector Calls, Blithe Spirit and Private Lives, Look Back in Anger, The Glass Menagerie, Black Comedy and Equus, Pygmalion Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound. Relatively Speaking, Time and Time Again, The Caretaker, I Ought to Be in Pictures, and Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure at Sir Arthur Sullivan's by Tim Heath.

Strehlow has also worked as a freelance director in Australia (Tony Strachan’s Harlequin Shuffle for the Stage Company in Adelaide in 1985) and Germany (Michael Cadman’s I thought I heard a Cuckoo for White Horse Theatre in 1987). In 2007, Strehlow successfully staged an experimental German production of The Merchant of Venice (Der Kaufmann von Venedig) in the E.T.A.-Hoffmann-Theater in Bamberg, using a half-English, half-Germany cast.

Contact with Aboriginal Groups

Strehlow had extensive interactions with Aboriginal people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Apart from his family background, he made contact with Aboriginal people at Quorn, Hawker and Copley in South Australia, as well as urban people in Sydney, Brisbane and elsewhere. Strehlow's interest in contemporary aboriginal developments was sparked in 1975 by an educational project funded by the Australian Schools Commission to tour aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory. Since then, he has maintained contact with traditional Aboriginal people, including many whom he met during that period in Central Australia. These include mainstream politicians, activists, academics, mission workers, Land Rights lawyers, artists, authors, descendants of the original community formed by Carl and Frieda Strehlow at Ntaria, and persons generally interested in the evolution of black/white relationships in Australia.

Biographer: The Tale of Frieda Keysser

Family background played a large part in Strehlow choosing to write about this topic. His father, Prof. TGH Strehlow, recorded secret-sacred ceremonies in Central Australia for over thirty years. Additionally, his grandfather, Rev. Carl Strehlow, collaborated with fellow missionary JG Reuther at Bethesda Mission in South Australia on the first ever complete translation of the New Testament into Diyari in 1897. While staying at the Hermannsburg Mission from 1894 to 1922, Rev. Carl Strehlow produced definitive vocabularies and grammars of the Aranda and Loritja languages (not published in his lifetime) as well as the major anthropological tract Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (English: The Aranda and Loritja Tribes of Central Australia). Additionally, Carl and his wife Freida Keysser both played a key role in ending the extermination of Central Australia's aboriginal population, which followed closely behind white settlement and the establishment of cattle stations that monopolized the scarce water supplies in the Outback.

John Strehlow's interest in his grandparents Carl and Frieda Strehlow was spurred by learning of the existence of Frieda’s diaries in Berlin, and the realization that her personal record of life on the Australian frontier during the late 1890s and early 20th century was part of a much larger, mysterious past, about which little was known beyond hearsay and family legend. He also started to question certain widely accepted views he found in academic writings which did not accord with his own findings based on a wide store of documented original data. Therefore, starting in 1994, he began working on what became the historical double biography of his grandparents. Researching in 86 archives in the United Kingdom, United States, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Australia, Strehlow was initially assisted financially by the Institute of Community Studies through Lord Michael Young. Subsequently, he found assistance from a number of other official and private supporters. The biography was completed in 2019.

In July and November 1995, articles by Strehlow about the biography were published in the The Adelaide Review. He wrote the entry for Harry Hillier in The Australian Dictionary of Biography (Supplement) and for the Strehlows in Josie Petrick’s The History of Alice Springs Through Landmarks and Street Names. He has given interviews on television and radio in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, and Australia. In 2000, he appeared in Hart Cohen’s documentary Mr. Strehlow’s Films for SBS Television, subsequently shown at festivals in Durham and Florence.

In September 2002, he gave a paper “Shifting Focus – TGH Strehlow and the Carl Strehlow Legacy” at an international conference in Alice Springs called Tradition in the Midst of Change. A major paper “Re-appraising Carl Strehlow through the Spencer-Strehlow Debate” was published by the Strehlow Research Centre in Occasional Paper 3 in 2004. In 2014, he organized the seminar Where Do we Go from Here? at the Araluen Centre, as a consequence of which the Friends of the Strehlow Research Centre was set up to defend and further its work in Alice Springs.

The biography proper was initially funded by a grant from the History Awards Committee of the Northern Territory in 1994 with the backing of Prof. David Carment of the Northern Territory University in Darwin, followed by a grant from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in 1996–97 with the support of Prof. John Mulvaney of the Australian National University in Canberra. The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust contributed financially to his work in 2001. Strehlow was later assisted by private sponsors Alan and Maria Meyers, Helen Miller, James Hagan, Glen Auricht, Peter Latz and Lorenzo Ferrari. Publication of Volume II of the biography was funded by Mission EineWelt of Neuendettelsau through the efforts of Drs. Gernot Fugmann, Traugott Farnbacher, Hans Hoerschelmann and Thomas Paulsteiner. From start to finish, work on the biography itself took 25 years.

In addition to using the better known archival sources in Britain, Germany and Australia, Strehlow conducted an exhaustive investigation of government records, police records, official and private letters, contemporary newspaper articles, as well as material from family sources not available to the general public, in particular Frieda’s personal diaries.

Although much had been written about Carl, almost nothing had been written about Frieda. Virtually no serious research had been conducted on either person, because at least sixty percent of the relevant sources were handwritten in German, so they were ignored even when they were readily available. Instead, information about Carl's work largely comes from Carl’s rival Baldwin Spencer of Melbourne University. Much of this was disinformation fabricated to discredit Carl’s work in the eyes of a naïve international readership lacking any first-hand experience of Australia or its indigenous population. Even though it had not been part of John Strehlow's original intention, the biography took on new dimensions as a reappraisal, seeking to set the record straight and incorporate essential new information on a large scale. In particular, the biography ensured that the context in which Carl and Frieda lived was given due weight, not just quickly passed over to avoid contradicting prior theories.

Volume I

Volume I of The Tale of Frieda Keysser covers Frieda’s family background and early life, Carl’s early life and training, how the couple met, his and JG Reuther’s work on the first complete translation of the New Testament into Dieri, and the first crucial years at the Hermannsburg Mission, during which Carl began researching the languages, beliefs and customs of the Western Aranda and the Loritja. His research culminated in Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, which laid the foundation for his son TGH Strehlow’s work. Baron Moritz von Leonhardi became Carl’s sponsor for its publication by the Frankfurt Völkermuseum. In the process of writing it, Carl questioned certain aspects of Spencer and Gillen’s famous work The Native Tribes of Central Australia, fuelling a debate in London which ran for a number of years. Meanwhile, Freida addressed the infant mortality and social breakdown resulting from the Aranda's switch from living as hunter-gatherers to a settled way of life, inadvertently challenging Spencer and Gillen’s key doctrine that Australia’s entire aboriginal population was "doomed." Volume I ends with the family returning to Germany in 1910 without any firm intention of returning to Australia.

Volume I was published in 2011. Prof. Marcia Langton of Monash University launched it at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs on December 1, 2011. Its publication drew comment from persons interested in the topic of Australia’s relationship with its Aboriginal peoples.

Alison Anderson, Member for Macdonnell in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly, announced its publication in the House on 30 November 2011. Her remarks are recorded in Hansard, from which the following quote is taken:

“I applaud John Strehlow for the enormous amount of detailed research which has grown into this work. I hope it corrects some of the misunderstanding and misinformation that has been spread over the years about the relationship between the missionaries and the Aranda people. I am the product of grandparents who lived with the missionaries, and for that I am thankful. The missionaries left us with our culture, songs and history intact. They gave us the opportunity to understand and learn about the new world with which we had come into contact . . . For those of us who grew up with missionary history in Central Australia, there is never a bad word said about the missionaries . . . This book provides a lesson for anthropologists, past and present. Anthropologists always need to be careful about assumptions they make, especially since there is often no-one except their peers who check their work. This book calls into question many things that have been written earlier about Hermannsburg . . . I congratulate Mr Strehlow on the completion of a thorough documentation of a piece of our shared history in Central Australia. I hope and pray that this book helps correct the negative portrayals of the Lutheran missionaries put forward over the years.”

After launching the book in South Australia on 12 February 2012 at the Australian Lutheran College in Adelaide, she made a second speech along similar lines. Her remarks in this speech are also recorded in Hansard. Lyall Kupke, archivist at the Lutheran Archives in Adelaide, reporting on the Adelaide launch in FoLA (Friends of the Lutheran Archives) News, February 2012, said:

“I believe that this book will make a very important contribution to the history of this country and to the understanding of indigenous affairs in our land, in addition to improving our appreciation of the role of Lutheran missions in Australia.”

Reviewing Volume I in The Weekend Australian of 11 February 2012, Nicolas Rothwell described it as:

“an indispensable contribution to the literature of remote, indigenous Australia . . . Biography. History. Cultural investigation, Strehlow’s Tale is all these things, but it would not be truly Strehlovian if it were not, at its heart, a story of exile, displacement and return, an evocation in words of the Inland, its hard, serried paragraphs sheltering abrupt passages of romantic lyric force . . . This book is a written incarnation of country, the desert in the mind, the same landscape Carl Strehlow found waiting for him when, barely twenty, fresh from his Franconian seminary training he was transferred to the Centre, to the world of the Aranda. It was the beginning of a love affair, a strange obsession that forms the key theme of this narrative. The Aranda living with him at Hermannsburg became the heart of his life. He mastered their language in its finest details. They were part of him and he would never be fully at ease within his mind again . . .”

In The Monthly, April 2012 Prof. Peter Sutton wrote:

“For all its gritty attention to detail, the book has a heroic largeness of spirit, a kind of opulence of time and space and credible personalities that is so often missing from what is written by scholars of the past and from the bush. It is like the Red Centre itself.”

Prof. Maurice Schild in The Lutheran Theological Journal, August 2012 wrote:

“The Tale of Frieda Keysser is a superb achievement, and an important cultural event. It may well promote respect on several fronts. It comes as an antidote to much popular as well as academic derogatory parlance on missions and the mark they’ve left. At the same time it offers balm for the still hurting and abused image of Australia’s Aboriginal people – and it does them honour. It also honours ordinary faithful people of the time: ‘this handful of Lutheran families’ who undertook ‘what the State of South Australia could or would not, the care and nurture of those tribes broken by white settlement.’ ”

Dr. Lois Zweck wrote in Lutheran Women, August 2012:

“John Strehlow’s book offers us illuminating insights into the beginnings of Aboriginal mission in this country, the often underrated work of the first Hermannsburg missionaries, the world of Neuendettelsau and its seminary, and the South Australian Lutheran community that supported the mission. But above all, by highlighting Frieda’s perspective and portraying the everyday occurrences of life at Hermannsburg in such depth, The Tale of Frieda Keysser offers a new understanding of the difficulties, tensions and disappointments, but also the patient and painstaking achievements of the men and women on the missions. I cannot imagine a better monument to them.”

Volume II

Volume II starts with Carl and Frieda’s time in Germany from late August 1910 to November 1911, with Carl making a lecture tour of German mission societies in Lower Franconia and, in January 1911, addressing packed houses at the Frankfurt Museum for the local Anthropological Society. Leonhardi’s sudden death in October 1910 left Carl’s book without an editor. Its linguistic research was cut by Prof. Bernhard Hagen and F.C.A. Sarg of the Frankfurt Museum, who took over publication. Neither of them had any interest or competence in that field, but the success of the Frankfurt lectures meant that the work continued to be published in sections under a variety of editors, albeit very slowly. Section V only appearing in 1920. At the end of 1911, Carl, Frieda and their youngest son, Theo, returned to Australia, when the chairman of the Mission Board, Rev. Kaibel, after making a series of ill-conceived changes to the way the Mission was run, begged them to return to restore order.

Meanwhile, still reeling from Carl’s criticisms of his and Gillen’s work, Baldwin Spencer had arranged for damning reports on Hermannsburg to appear in the southern press, so that the Commonwealth Government would resume the Mission. He wanted to set up an orphanage for half-caste children in its place as part of the program known today as "The Stolen Generation." Alarmed by what was happening, the Aranda population wrote letters to Carl, begging him and Frieda to come back. Frieda was overwhelmed with guilt about leaving their five other children in Germany. World War I offered Spencer the chance to push through his plans for Hermannsburg, but officials in Australian government circles. such as John Anderson Gilruth in Darwin, backed by Police Sergeant Robert Stott in Alice Springs, opposed this. Because of their efforts, Hermannsburg survived.

Frieda’s work with the mothers and children meant its population grew. As the war progressed, Carl used the censorship of his letters to communicate directly with government ministers and, sensing that the Lutherans were losing the will to carry on their missions, asked Bishop Gilbert White if the Anglicans were willing to take over if Hermannsburg was abandoned. Even though the Lutherans did not give up on the Mission, no successor for Carl could be found after the war ended, so he delayed his return to Germany until 1923. His own health began to fail. Having secured Hermannsburg’s future with Administrator Urquhart at the end of July 1922, he began the journey south on October 10, 1922 to reach a doctor. He died on that journey at Horseshoe Bend Station, halfway to the railhead 400 miles away, on 20 October, leaving Frieda to carry on south with young Theo on her own.

Volume II was published late in 2019. It was launched by Ted Egan at The Residency, Alice Springs on 17 December 2019 and at the Northern Territory Library in Darwin on 31 October 2020. In his speech, Egan said John Strehlow had:

“contributed monumentally to the historic records of the Northern Territory by accessing the crucially important diaries of his grandmother in Germany . . . We now have first-hand reminiscences of the pioneering days at Hermannsburg through the eyes of a totally Christian woman, a point of view previously unknown. There’s so much in John’s work based on his grandmother’s diaries that will be of benefit to all scholars . . . you deserve our congratulations for devoting the majority of your life to this important task.”

Articles by Amos Aikman appeared in The Australian on 10 November 2020 and by Jasmine Burke in the Centralian Advocate on 30 October 2020. The complete work was comprehensively reviewed by Dr. Hartwig F. Harms in the Zeitschrift für Bayerische Kirchengeschichte, 90. Jahrgang 2021:

“But this is far more than the biography of Frieda Strehlow née Keysser, missionary wife in Hermannsburg in Australia from 1995 to 1922, even if she is of course one of the main players. It is also not an historical treatment of the contribution of Carl and Frieda Strehlow to mission work in the Australian Hermannsburg, as the subtitle leads one to assume, although there is much about Carl Strehlow’s mission principles and successes. It is also not a documentation of his ethnological studies, even though ethnological research and Carl Strehlow’s differences with Baldwin Spencer, then the most influential anthropologist in Australia, take up much space. It is all of these things together and still more: an exciting tapestry of family, mission and historical details with illuminating excursions into the cultural anthropology of the era – provocative, enriching, it makes you think. For mission scientists, anthropologists and all for whom Aborigines and the question about the ‘right’ stance towards them is close to the heart, of the greatest interest.”

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.