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Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession
Book by Hill, Barry
818 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
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53 people want to read
About the author
Barry Hill
83 books3 followers Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, essays, biography, history, criticism, novels, short stories, libretti and reportage. His major works include Sitting In (1992), Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), and Peacemongers (2014). Each book has been groundbreaking in different ways: deeply, originally researched, crossing genres, multi-disciplinary, combining the personal with the generically philosophical. As a writer Hill's voice is informed by his Australian working-class and militant union background, which has been distilled by his higher education. After a decade working as a teacher, educational psychologist, and a journalist in Melbourne and London, he has been writing full-time since 1976-mainly based in Queenscliff, Victoria, but with stints at the Australia Council flat in Rome, where he finished poetic/dramatic works on Lucian Freud and Antonio Gramsci, and returns to Central Australia. In recent decades he has deepened his studies in Chinese and Japanese, which is in keeping with his long-term interest in Buddhism. Hill's voice is unique, and his insight both profoundly important and capable of taking the reader to places not glimpsed before or imagined visible. This collection of essays, reviews and reportage amply demonstrates the quality and enduring importance of Hill's contribution, in these genres, to Australian literary and intellectual life.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 6, 2013
Not an easy read but never the less an engaging study of the process of poetic translation
November 8, 2024
This 800+ page book is a long, demanding read. I felt stimulated, awed, challenged, bored, disappointed, and even (at times) excited. I would like to be skilled enough to write something here worthy of the enormous commitment it must have been to write this book, but for all my ineptitudes here are a few of my thoughts on a book that I initially wanted to give 5 stars but ended up with 4 because of what I think are shortcomings.
In January 1933, my father (who was then 20 years old), along with companions Authur Murch (artist) and Stanely Larnach (animal and skull collector) travelled by camel from Hermannsburg Mission through the western MacDonnell Ranges as far as Mt. Liebig. My father then headed off on-foot alone to the south for a few days. The small group was guided by senior Aranda law-man, Hezekiel. For the first few days they were also accompanied by the young, 24 year-old, T.G.H Strehlow and from time to time the Aranda missionary Titus (who my father thought a bit of a fool). Like Strehlow, my father and his companions collected a variety of artefacts including tjuringa (of which I have now become the custodian). They also kept journals, took photographs (some of Strehlow) and even cinefilm. They witnessed the last great gathering of the Nalliae, Loritcha and Pintupi groups out near Mt. Liebig where my father saw/heard what he referred to as an atypically complex but descriptive Duck Flying Away Song sung by the Loritcha in an ancient but lost language. I’ve been immersed in their end-of-frontier story and its context for most of my life. I'm not sure why it has taken me so long to read Barry Hill’s impressive biography of T.G.H. Strehlow. He was a fascinating man. It intrigues me that Barry Hill makes no reference to my father's expedition (material online since 1995 as The Flight of Ducks) but that was his choice. In it are several photos of the young Strehlow as well as of Menasseh Armstrong who, in 1977 spat on Strehlow in contempt (p.728). The two volumes of Spencer and Gillen's Arunta, as well as Strehlow's Aranda Traditions and two copies of his The Songs of Central Australia sit on my bookshelf beside me. I look forward to reacquainting myself with these works and hope that Barry Hill's insights will make them more accessible.
Most of what Barry Hill writes about in Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession is generally familiar to me. Just as Barry Hill himself was known to me when he was a much younger man and knew my now wife. Barry's Herculean task has been not only to document the details of Strehlow's life - as he takes a conventionally chronological view of his life, but to find the man, and perhaps more importantly provide some guidance towards appreciating Strehlow's great work The Songs of Central Australia which so few Australians have heard of. I am in awe of his contextual reading.
After many attempts to augment diary entries with psychological and Freudian insights, by about page 200 I sensed a drag on the narrative. The young man that Barry is invoking has his feet firmly on his Lutheran past (and God). His life’s work is calling. But at this point there is an uneasy shift, as Barry takes the reader into his confidence:
Perhaps this is why Barry's erudite prose style begins to falter and we begin to wade though more and more turgid grammatical constructions such as
Midway, after leading the reader through the depressing doldrums of the War years when some readers may have put the book down due to its plodding tedium, there are suddenly trumpets. Part IV begins with an almost unintelligible essay about translation which arrives at the truism,
Barry employs two persistent conceits to explain Strehlow: Luther and Caliban. Thery begin to wear thin after repeated and tedious examinations of the minutiae of the difficulties of translation in relation to Christian concepts. Much as I admire Barry's tenacity with identifying the Christian contamination of Songs not to mention the Lutherian tradition of translation, it's probably my own failing that I have little patience with such matters and would have preferred more analysis (even celebration) of the songs themselves. Broken Song would be a much more balanced book if instead of speculating about difficulties of translation, it had delved into the significance of Songs themselves and positioned The Songs of Central Australia in Australia's cultural landscape if only as a possibility. Regarding Strehlow's use of secret/sacred words and motifs, it is fascinating that so much was conducted in an archaic speech. Perhaps this was part of the progress towards lost languages? It may also have something to do with maintaining authority. My understanding was/is that one of the dimensions of the use of secret/sacred by the old tribal men in Central Australia was that the metering out of secrets was an instrument of social control, in as far as it helped control the young men. When white settlement began to intrude, the young men began to look elsewhere (e.g. to Alice Springs), the rigours of initiation and consequent entitlements began to be less attractive and the old men lost their authority.
The Chapter on the Stuart case exemplifies some of the stylistic difficulties that I struggled with throughout the book. First, it was often difficult to follow the points Barry is making through the minutiae of detail. Second, it is difficult to distinguish commentary and qualifications from fact that, again, obscure the main argument.
There are so many metaphors when a country like Australia has a heart at its centre that is envisioned and understood as a giant red rock. It's worth unpacking the wonderful title Broken Song that works on so many levels and dimensions. Simply to ask whose song, opens complex issues. That Strehlow saw the loss of traditional Aranda cultural practice as irreversible speaks of his blindness (Old Blind Moses) to what was not lost or broken. That he refused to reseed the process of cultural reconstruction points to the failure of his own broken song as well as its incompleteness. That it became his own song is the substance of the book.
In January 1933, my father (who was then 20 years old), along with companions Authur Murch (artist) and Stanely Larnach (animal and skull collector) travelled by camel from Hermannsburg Mission through the western MacDonnell Ranges as far as Mt. Liebig. My father then headed off on-foot alone to the south for a few days. The small group was guided by senior Aranda law-man, Hezekiel. For the first few days they were also accompanied by the young, 24 year-old, T.G.H Strehlow and from time to time the Aranda missionary Titus (who my father thought a bit of a fool). Like Strehlow, my father and his companions collected a variety of artefacts including tjuringa (of which I have now become the custodian). They also kept journals, took photographs (some of Strehlow) and even cinefilm. They witnessed the last great gathering of the Nalliae, Loritcha and Pintupi groups out near Mt. Liebig where my father saw/heard what he referred to as an atypically complex but descriptive Duck Flying Away Song sung by the Loritcha in an ancient but lost language. I’ve been immersed in their end-of-frontier story and its context for most of my life. I'm not sure why it has taken me so long to read Barry Hill’s impressive biography of T.G.H. Strehlow. He was a fascinating man. It intrigues me that Barry Hill makes no reference to my father's expedition (material online since 1995 as The Flight of Ducks) but that was his choice. In it are several photos of the young Strehlow as well as of Menasseh Armstrong who, in 1977 spat on Strehlow in contempt (p.728). The two volumes of Spencer and Gillen's Arunta, as well as Strehlow's Aranda Traditions and two copies of his The Songs of Central Australia sit on my bookshelf beside me. I look forward to reacquainting myself with these works and hope that Barry Hill's insights will make them more accessible.
Most of what Barry Hill writes about in Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession is generally familiar to me. Just as Barry Hill himself was known to me when he was a much younger man and knew my now wife. Barry's Herculean task has been not only to document the details of Strehlow's life - as he takes a conventionally chronological view of his life, but to find the man, and perhaps more importantly provide some guidance towards appreciating Strehlow's great work The Songs of Central Australia which so few Australians have heard of. I am in awe of his contextual reading.
After many attempts to augment diary entries with psychological and Freudian insights, by about page 200 I sensed a drag on the narrative. The young man that Barry is invoking has his feet firmly on his Lutheran past (and God). His life’s work is calling. But at this point there is an uneasy shift, as Barry takes the reader into his confidence:
They had appointed a linguistically proficient young bushman all right: there was none better. But they would have on their hands someone as internally complicated, really, as the whole business of translating on the colonial frontier. (p 237)
The authority here, for Strehlow, as well as anyone travelling with him in this way, is not God but the diary, with its cunning ability to seduce the diarist into a strange double life. The doubleness for the diarist consists of the phenomenon of writing for oneself directly, sensately, cathartically (or any of the terms that indicate a minimum of self-consciousness) while at the same time cultivating a second reader at one’s elbow. (p. 248)Suddenly the reader is alone, in the shoals of the night, standing beside Barry, wondering just who this man is. He does not seem to be the man that a reader like me or a writer like Barry Hill wants him to be.
Perhaps this is why Barry's erudite prose style begins to falter and we begin to wade though more and more turgid grammatical constructions such as
Furthermore, as a patrol officer he was now himself (a)sic member - at least nominally - of the kaki gentry. He had the authority to uphold, which was not to say, however, that he could not share one fundamental truth with them: that everything that they said about their dark friends (their mates, as Idriess said, a term that Strehlow could never have used) underlined them as victims of white colonisation. Kaki gentry or not , Strehlow came to share this. p. 282)- not to mention thickets of typos and missing words (e.g. '56 adults (24 men, 32 men) p. 304). I'm disappointed that a reputable publisher like Knopf would oversee such editorial sloppiness. This book deserves better.
Midway, after leading the reader through the depressing doldrums of the War years when some readers may have put the book down due to its plodding tedium, there are suddenly trumpets. Part IV begins with an almost unintelligible essay about translation which arrives at the truism,
...translation turns on notions of equivalence. (p. 383)I use the word unintelligible because as Barry tries to weave literary traditions (Dryden, Arnold, Pound), landscape and geography into the notion of loss, he gets lost. But he is unable to conceal his excitement that at last he can show us The Songs of Central Australia. That, so far, this book has been a preamble to Strehlow's great work which we can only glimpse through a congestion of tongues (p. 395).
We get the sense reading Strehlow, that his English is often a kind of paraphrase of German, that somehow, somewhere inside himself, he was affected by the genetic presence of that original. (p.394) ...He was heavy with language (p.395)There is renewed vigour in Barry's sentences when he arrives at the Songs and after dispensing with the Jindyworobaks, which I guess is a way of positioning the Songs as authentically Australian. But then he veers off-course, never to get back to the main trajectory. Instead he bravely attempts to explain the intricacies of the translation problem, the poetics of psalms, and even has a go himself. Hats off to Barry here. If ever I felt spoken to directly, this was the moment in which I felt I was in the presence of an author who had written a book greater than its subject.
To point all this out is not implying a challenge to the accuracy of Strehlow's analysis, or to diminish the greatness of Songs. It remains a central text, central in more ways than one: of a region, of an ancient and living culture, and of a continent that has come to mythologise its centre, even as the nature of black and white histories are being contested there. Songs of Central Australia stands as a book of teachings, a kind of Torah, for black and white citizens, and this is the way Strehlow obviously intended it. (p. 448). He fails to mention that this is such a rare and increasingly expensive book (only 1,000 were printed by Angus & Robinson) that it is difficult to find a copy and consequently it is largely unknown. It's lack of availability is a dimension of our National story that is yet to be allowed to be discussed. That an unread book of songs should be so central to Australia's cultural and geographic landscape is somehow metaphorically apt. Just as the exquisite irony of a man who seeks to deny paganism becomes its failed champion. But Australian culture celebrates failure, so perhaps he is in good company?
Barry employs two persistent conceits to explain Strehlow: Luther and Caliban. Thery begin to wear thin after repeated and tedious examinations of the minutiae of the difficulties of translation in relation to Christian concepts. Much as I admire Barry's tenacity with identifying the Christian contamination of Songs not to mention the Lutherian tradition of translation, it's probably my own failing that I have little patience with such matters and would have preferred more analysis (even celebration) of the songs themselves. Broken Song would be a much more balanced book if instead of speculating about difficulties of translation, it had delved into the significance of Songs themselves and positioned The Songs of Central Australia in Australia's cultural landscape if only as a possibility. Regarding Strehlow's use of secret/sacred words and motifs, it is fascinating that so much was conducted in an archaic speech. Perhaps this was part of the progress towards lost languages? It may also have something to do with maintaining authority. My understanding was/is that one of the dimensions of the use of secret/sacred by the old tribal men in Central Australia was that the metering out of secrets was an instrument of social control, in as far as it helped control the young men. When white settlement began to intrude, the young men began to look elsewhere (e.g. to Alice Springs), the rigours of initiation and consequent entitlements began to be less attractive and the old men lost their authority.
He would place the Christian message where it needed to be, in the hearts of the natives whose songs had been broken. (p.536)To return to authority, so much that is now regarded as cultural propriety, revolves around the notion of authority and its authorised story. Such authority sits uneasily and is even incompatible with the prevailing non-Aboriginal pluralist culture where anybody feels entitled to tell their story - any story. To the extent that Strehlow was acting with authority over his (appropriated) story seems to me entirely compatible with the authority of an Ingkata
...on the strict Lutheran model, translation was an exercise in embattled authority rather than relationship, of delivering the Word... (p.544).
The Chapter on the Stuart case exemplifies some of the stylistic difficulties that I struggled with throughout the book. First, it was often difficult to follow the points Barry is making through the minutiae of detail. Second, it is difficult to distinguish commentary and qualifications from fact that, again, obscure the main argument.
There are so many metaphors when a country like Australia has a heart at its centre that is envisioned and understood as a giant red rock. It's worth unpacking the wonderful title Broken Song that works on so many levels and dimensions. Simply to ask whose song, opens complex issues. That Strehlow saw the loss of traditional Aranda cultural practice as irreversible speaks of his blindness (Old Blind Moses) to what was not lost or broken. That he refused to reseed the process of cultural reconstruction points to the failure of his own broken song as well as its incompleteness. That it became his own song is the substance of the book.
He was a country with two great rivers flowing through him. (p.740)
December 29, 2020
I'm sorry to admit that I didn't finish Broken Song. I carried it around with me for months.
But what I did read made a deep impression on me.
I love Hill's insight into the influence of the German Lutherans in Central Australia and the light his work shone on anthropology there. Strehlow was fated to be an interesting person because of who he was and where he grew up. He did great and important work and one or two things that were terrible.
The book helped me understand the experience of my friends and their families in Central Australia through the continuing dispossession and colonisation.
I will get back to it.
Feeling it deserves five stars anyway for the two-thirds I've read.
But what I did read made a deep impression on me.
I love Hill's insight into the influence of the German Lutherans in Central Australia and the light his work shone on anthropology there. Strehlow was fated to be an interesting person because of who he was and where he grew up. He did great and important work and one or two things that were terrible.
The book helped me understand the experience of my friends and their families in Central Australia through the continuing dispossession and colonisation.
I will get back to it.
Feeling it deserves five stars anyway for the two-thirds I've read.
Read
November 23, 2014I only read a few paragraphs of this enormous 800-page book that Annabelle had.
TGH Strehlow, born 1908, son of missionary, ended up a highly controversial figure in Australia because of his collection of Aboriginal sacred artefacts. These are kept in a museum [of Strehlow's things] in Alice Springs, now managed by a relative, I think.
He grew up among Aboriginal children and learned the language[s] well.
What I read of Barry Hill's account was so 'poetic' that I couldn't really follow what he was saying.
I'm afraid I would prefer a 100-page condensation of his book, giving just the life story of Strehlow.
TGH Strehlow, born 1908, son of missionary, ended up a highly controversial figure in Australia because of his collection of Aboriginal sacred artefacts. These are kept in a museum [of Strehlow's things] in Alice Springs, now managed by a relative, I think.
He grew up among Aboriginal children and learned the language[s] well.
What I read of Barry Hill's account was so 'poetic' that I couldn't really follow what he was saying.
I'm afraid I would prefer a 100-page condensation of his book, giving just the life story of Strehlow.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews