Biographer, playwright, theatre director, and set designer, John Strehlow was born in 1946 in Adelaide, South Australia into a family closely involved with Aboriginal people for three generations.
John studied Classics at Adelaide University from 1964-6, switching to Modern European and Asian History in 1967, graduating 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 in London (V&A). He attended lectures and seminars run by the London-based Institute for Cultural Research from 1983 until it was wound up, and speaks fluent German, some French and a little Dutch.
From early training in music he developed an interest in theatre partly due to the Adelaide Festival of Arts so, after spending some years in business in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, in 1974 he started teaching drama in Darwin schools and writing plays for children. He began researching his grandparents’ two-volume biography, The Tale of Frieda Keysser, in earnest in 1994, publishing the first volume in 2011 and the second volume late in 2019.
He has recently written a play, Eliza! Eliza! The Doolittle Sequel, a provocative projection of developments into 1922 which provides an alternative to Bernard Shaw’s version of what happens to Eliza after Pygmalion.