The Tale of Frieda Keysser

Arriving newly married in Central Australia in late 1895, Carl Strehlow’s wife Frieda was horrified to find that almost every child born at Hermannsburg died before the age of five. Determined to change this, she set out to discover what was going wrong, and how to change it.

Based on Frieda’s diaries and Carl’s official letters, the book goes into how she and Carl worked together, in the process debunking the fashionable ‘doomed race’ theory espoused by world famous anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen.