John Strehlow, author, theatre director and more, has lived in the Northern Territory ‘off and on since 1972 as has taken an amused interest in the practice of importing experts from the rest of Australia to aid its development, This book is the result of his observations on this fascinating phenomenon’. Here are some cartoon illustrations from The Southern Expert’s Handbook…
A running joke in the book is that if a southern expert actually does take their job seriously they will be banished to far off Borroloola. As it happens Borroloola is now one of the centres of the innovative and effective Indigenous Learning on Country Program – (as I have learned from my brother Hugh), It is about shared respect and meaning. Sharing of knowledge and experience of living and working together through two-way learning.
More seriously, John Strehlow is the author of The Tale of Frieda Keysser, the 2400 page history of his grandparents, missionaries Carl and Frieda Strehlow, sparked by the discovery ‘of Frieda’s diaries, written in old script German, 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.’ John Strehlow sets straight the controversy stemming from Professor Baldwin Spencer’s denigration of Carl Strehlow’s anthropological research – and ‘exposes Spencer as a major scientific fraud‘.
Evidence of the Strehlow legacy can be heard in this episode of the ABC Word Up podcast – ICTV journalist and translator Damien Williams shares a Western Arrernte word with a German influence.
Contact John at Wild Cat Press john@strehlow.co.uk
Simon Kneebone - cartoonist and illustrator 