The Tale of Frieda Keysser
Frieda Keysser & Carl Strehlow: an historical biography
The inspiring story of victory over death and despair by Christian missionaries, who saved from extinction a nomadic people in the Australian desert, considered a “doomed race” without a future by anthropologists steeped in Darwinist race theory.
Late in the afternoon of 2 July 1894, the Horn Scientific Expedition reached the abandoned mission station of Hermannsburg 80 miles west of Alice Springs, and Oxford-educated Baldwin Spencer, Professor of Biology at Melbourne University, later author and world expert on the Aranda tribe, looked at its collapsing buildings and population ravaged by syphilis, and dismissed the work of the Mission as a mistake.
The Aranda would be extinct within 100 years, he predicted. Darwin’s theory made this a foregone conclusion: the Australian Aboriginal was fated to vanish off the face off the earth. Three months later, Carl Strehlow then aged 22, arrived to revitalise Hermannsburg – and proved Spencer wrong.
Two volumes, hard bound
