Work on my next book, Investigating a Forgotten Past is proceeding apace, though as yet I can’t give a definite publication date, since some of the material I need to access is in Alice Springs, while I am still in Faversham in Kent “enjoying” the long nights and cold, gusty days typical of winter in this part of the world. Quite a lot of the information I need to include in this new book goes back almost thirty years, so I have forgotten some essential details, and in any case hope to avoid careless errors of fact wherever possible, which means going back through the copious notes I took back at the beginning of the project.
This current newsletter is being sent to some subscribers through an automated system and manually to others, since there have been a few teething problems holding things up. Hopefully by the time Newsletter Three appears these problems will have been resolved. I have received some most interesting emails in reply to Newsletter One, especially with regard to the visit to Killalpaninna I made with my friend Tony Flower in 2008. It seems many people remain fascinated by the story behind this long-abandoned mission and some, like me, have made the trip there in order to see for themselves what remains. Historically, it is the site where the first ever complete translation of the New Testament into an aboriginal language was produced by Carl Strehlow and J.G. Reuther, and while that may not resonate with many readers of this newsletter, for present-day aboriginal people descended from the Dieri who worked with those two men, it has a special significance. It was this book which first proclaimed that, contrary to the received wisdom of the day, these two men believed there was a future for these people and this was their way of showing it – by offering what they held to be the most precious endowment in their possession, the New Testament.
The process of doing the translation is mostly covered in The Tale of Frieda Keysser Volume One, Chapter 32 pp. 325–34, with the information drawn mainly from the letters they wrote to their supporters down south, in particular to G.J. Rechner, Reuther’s father-in-law and chairman of the Immanuel Synod Board who, among much else, made sure they were sustained by that indispensable accompaniment for such demanding translation work, a reliable supply of beer. Prior to this, no complete translation of the New Testament had been done anywhere in Australia, while the prevailing view that aboriginal languages were too primitive for such a translation fitted the Darwinist assumptions behind just about everything written about these peoples.
This translation was the first step in challenging these views, and when the finished work was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1897, copies were sent all around the world including to Harvard University in the USA, and in the UK, the British Museum, Trinity College Cambridge, Christ Church Oxford, and the Bodleian Library. It was a sensational achievement, a triumph of knowledge over ignorance, and as such warrants being remembered as the landmark publication it was.
WORTH A THOUGHT: “WITCH DOCTOR”
In my books I always use this expression to refer to the men who have been trained in secret magical knowledge in aboriginal societies, while those who quote me usually change it to something like “traditional healer” or “medicine man”, since the word “witch doctor” is held to be demeaning of aboriginal culture. This is a questionable practice, since the men in question are not necessarily skilled in medical matters, and what they do, according to Carl Strehlow in his book Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, is to use evil powers to remove spells and so neutralise evil and/or illnesses caused by other witch doctors. They are not healers or medical practitioners in our sense at all. Carl indicates that he finds this use of evil to do good contradictory but in accordance with his own precepts, records the views of his informants, not what he personally believes, so does not “correct” it as other researchers might have done. Since there was a great deal of traditional knowledge about the healing powers of plants, with Missionary Kempe producing a pamphlet on the subject, it is worth considering whether most healers in our sense may in fact have been women, since they spent much of every day digging up roots or picking leaves and fruit from plants, so must have been at the very least knowledgeable about their various qualities for this reason alone. Probably at least some were genuinely expert.
What follows is based on what we were told during a brief course in Comparative Philology when I was studying the Classics at Adelaide University in the 1960s, and is offered up as something worthy of consideration by those interested in this matter.
The word “witch” is a word of great antiquity in the English language, and is cognate with the archaic word “wot”, as in “God wot” (i.e. “God knows”) and also with the word “wise”. In German the relevant word is of course “wissen” (to know) from which come “Wissenschaft” (knowledge, but also science) and “Wissenschaftler” (scientist). In ancient Greek the word appears in Homer as Foida, though the “F” (pronounced “w”) had been dropped by the time of the classical period in the golden age of Athens. In Sanskrit the initial “w” was a “b”, giving us the word used for Gautama (“the Buddha” i.e. the one who knows or has attained knowledge as a result higher spiritual development). Our “witch doctor” therefore might reasonably be regarded as a man with advanced powers of insight and knowledge in the spiritual sense, and able to see what others cannot, so is perhaps even a seer.
In its various languages the word seems to indicate both knowledge and (in)sight: in Latin the cognate word “video” of course means “I see”. I have touched on this in The Tale of Frieda Keysser Volume One pp. 582–4 where Andrew Lang – along with others attached to the Folk-Lore Society and the Anthropological Institute, which includes A.W. Howitt – appears to have thought that these “witch doctors” were those who had attained an altered perception by rising mentally to a higher level through secret initiatory practices and were thus possessors of knowledge on a very high level. One might then call them “men of higher knowledge”. In passing I should point out that as far as I am aware it is only in English that “doctor” is automatically used to describe a physician. In other languages I understand that “doctor” usually means someone who has been awarded a PhD in any subject from a university, and this is the case in German and French. Howitt refers to witch doctors as “wizards” or “doctors”, so our “witch doctor” might best be regarded as a man of advanced learning in arcane sciences. I suspect that the English term “witch doctor” may have been influenced by the German Zauberdoktor (i.e. a man with a PhD in magic), though I don’t actually know if this is the case. For further detail see The Tale of Frieda Keysser Volume Two p. 620.
The use of the word “witch” as a pejorative in English may have arisen from Christianity because traditional knowledge – especially secret knowledge – was seen as a threat to the Church’s authority derived from its monopoly of knowledge and learning. Present day witches in western societies are not at all ashamed of calling themselves witches, as I note from radio programs where I have heard them speaking, as well as personally meeting people claiming to be “(white) witches”.
ECHO FROM THE PAST: Self-editing; Malinowski & Scientific Training
Many people have asked me about the actual process of writing the book, curious as to how anyone could embark upon such a project and actually finish it. The following extract from my diary gives some insight into how I went about it in the closing stages of Volume Two. At this time I was staying in a hotel in Bamberg trying to get the book ready for printing, keen to finally reach the end of this mammoth and life-consuming project.
The reference to Malinowski in my diary came about because in his ground-breaking essay “Baloma” he introduced a paragraph in which he dismissed Carl’s work on the grounds that he was not “scientifically trained”. The paragraph had nothing to do with Malinowski’s topic, which dealt with New Guinea, and has all the appearance of being an interpolation written purely to curry favour with Prof. Baldwin Spencer, who may already have been threatening to get Malinowski interned as a German sympathiser, for he certainly did so later. Malinowski’s remarks have been taken by all manner of people as conclusive proof that Carl’s entire intellectual output was amateurish and fell below acceptable academic standards. The matter is dealt with in The Tale Volume Two pp. 688-690, where what I eventually wrote about this interpolation and the possible reasons behind it can be found. I shall have more to say about Malinowski in a later newsletter.
Mon. Jan. 1, 2018: Rose later than normal, and had a varied breakfast, deciding to try some of the things I normally ignore, and enjoyed them greatly, especially some of the pickles. After this I came back to the room and knuckled down to try and get this formatting back on track, and after spending an immense amount of time trying to correct C41 [= Chapter 41] in InDesign without success, I went back to Word and gradually knocked it into shape. I then had to put the whole thing into InDesign from the start again, and because of various differences in the footnotes, where I couldn’t quite work out what had gone wrong, used up still more time, but at the end had checked everything very carefully and I think all is now correct. At the end of this, half the day had gone but at least I had something presentable in this formerly shambolic chapter. I then powered on with the next chapter, keen to put some distance between me and C41, and by the end of it had, to my own surprise, done the book as far as C60. Of course many of the later chapters were very short and had very few footnotes, but all the same it was wonderful to feel that I was now more or less back on track with this all-important task which makes such a difference to the overall project. I was finished by around 6, so went out and after some wandering round had a meal in Scheiner’s, since Hofbräu was full. . . The goose was rather expensive at €24.50 including tip, but I felt I had something to celebrate. Got back fairly early and just more or less collapsed. My eyes were very tired from all this staring at screens and I must make sure I don’t over-strain them, as could so easily happen. Slept quite well, my head buzzing with ideas to improve on that section in C38 I have thought about so much, changing it to something like: “It was very good of Malinowski to inform us of this, since otherwise we might have fallen into the error of thinking that Spencer and Gillen were wrong about the chants [being gibberish] and that this constituted a major shortcoming in their books, whereas with Malinowski’s help we are enabled to avoid such errors, and can grasp the simple fact that just as with certain religious groups which make gross errors and at times perform even quite base actions, their actions are purified of all wrong because of the group’s advanced spiritual state. So likewise here: when Spencer and Gillen make errors, such is the advanced state of their scholarship thanks to that all-encompassing scientific training, their ignorance becomes knowledgised into unchallengeable fact and truth. How lucky we are to have Malinowski to guide us along such a puzzling, error-ridden path!”
ODDITY OF THE MONTH – “PUT YOUR FAITH IN TWINE!”
Extract from my coming book.
Early in 1994 I finally finished renovating my house in London. Built in 1817, it had had little work done on it apart from bomb damage repair after World War Two, so my renovations were considerable, but at last the job was done and I could concentrate my energies on researching the biography. It was extremely fortunate that my Uncle Karl had produced his exhaustive reconstruction of the Keysser family tree in which – curiously – he had noted the occupations of the various sons down through the generations, often in quite some detail. This was a huge bonus. He paid special attention to those who inherited the two hammer mills in Geroldsgruen in Upper Franconia which were the basis of the Keysser family fortunes. Separately owned by different branches of the family, usually the heir was the youngest son, though in the 18th century on occasion (contrary to everything you read on the subject) the heirs were daughters. Each hammer mill had a small estate attached to it and by the 1860s this land was of considerable value because the town was growing: new industry in the shape of Lothar Faber of Nuremberg’s graphics factory had been established to produce slates which were in great demand as mass education came in and every child learned to write on a slate with a slate pencil.
Despite Uncle Karl’s exhaustive record, there were certain unresolved matters in need of clarification. In Frieda’s father’s case, in addition to blast furnaces at Geroldsgruen itself and Duerrenweid in the valley below, Uncle Karl listed several mines as part of the family holdings: the Blue Heavens Mine, the ironstone mine Wonderful, as well as the slate mine Lothar Heil. This looked like a huge inheritance, though how and when these mines had been acquired was not given in his account. So why, with this flying start in business, did Frieda’s father, Carl Theodor Keysser, run into financial difficulties? A history by the local vicar Huebsch suggested it was due to cheap imports of iron from England, my father thought it was because the family mine had run out of ironstone – in private conversation he intimated that he thought Frieda’s father was lazy and incompetent – while Uncle Karl himself implied it was due to heavy taxation of land and the high price of wood set by the Bavarian government after it took over the Hohenzollern princely state of Ansbach-Bayreuth with Napoleon’s support, treating it as a colony to be exploited. I felt it important to resolve the matter to my own satisfaction.
Uncle Karl indicated that much of his relevant information had been found in the Staatsarchiv in Bamberg, so it seemed as good a starting point as any for me, but before I went I rang a German friend and asked him to check if there was material about the Keyssers to be found there. He was astonished by the number of records, adding somewhat ruefully that he hadn’t found anything at all about his family. This profusion of records was what I was hoping to hear, so off I went to Bamberg in my ageing but still reliable car. My initial research aim was simple: how, in an age when the production of iron and steel was taking off all around the world, was it possible for a man producing iron to go (almost) bankrupt?
Right at the beginning I ran into difficulties with the language, the handwriting and unfamiliar customs. The Staatsarchiv in Bamberg is an excellent facility with highly professional and helpful staff, but finding a German-English dictionary which explained to me that a word like “Hypothekenprotokoll” was most likely to mean in my context “official record of a loan secured against land” rather than simply “mortgage record” was another matter. Then there was the custom of people having three or four Christian names and choosing to use the last, or even a middle name for official use: this was something I only slowly got to grips with.
I had already learned from Uncle Karl’s genealogy that the Keysser family had been in financial trouble for a long time – generations in fact – losing one of their hammer mills at the end of the eighteenth century, so it seemed logical to look at the wills of Frieda’s Keysser forebears, in particular her father’s will. However I discovered very soon that while some of his financial dealings were explicitly recorded – he didn’t inherit any mines, but bought an abandoned mine, renamed it and reopened it as the Blue Heavens Mine – he didn’t in fact make a will, dying intestate. The courts ordered an inventory of his property to be made by the local notary which at least told me in precise detail what he owned and the value ascribed to it: there were no mines in the inventory. After spending considerable sums, Frieda’s father had failed in his attempt to revive the defunct iron industry in the Geroldsgruen district.
It was clear he had been up to his eyebrows in debt when he died, but why this was so remained a mystery. So what about his parents? Had their wills been preserved? I found nothing for his father David Keysser and nothing for his mother – Charlotte Sophie Magdalena Margareta Keysser, who died nearly twenty years after her husband – either. To make matters worse, when Uncle Karl put the genealogy together he felt at liberty to change the spelling of Frieda’s father Carl Theodor’s name to “Karl Theodor” and likewise his own father’s name to “Karl Friedrich Theodor”, even though as a famous published author he was listed in libraries around the world as “Carl Strehlow”. This arbitrary change created unnecessary confusion for me at times when searching through records.
I had also never had to deal with legal terms in German before, so everything was new and daunting for me; the records were in any case in German handwriting and mostly predated the simplified writing reform which seems to have come in around 1870 with mass education, so had far more confusing squiggles than the post-1870 handwriting I was finding hard enough to work with all day anyway, so weeks went by with little to show for it, and though I eventually found my way through the minefield, initially I made very slow progress indeed. It was fortunate I undertook the biography when I did, since there were still people using the archives who had learned to read and write using German handwriting before the Nazis switched to the so-called Latin script around 1942, and these people were willing to help me with the German handwriting when I got stuck. Without them I would probably never have got beyond my first few efforts to decipher this material so would have had to employ someone else to do it for me, with all the hazards of relying on someone else’s judgment as to what was important and what was not – a major flaw in much writing on my topic, where it often happened that the person chosen to decipher the correspondence was violently anti-Christian so sought out everything which made Christians and Christianity look bad and shunned anything which might place this biased approach in question.
I made several trips to Geroldsgruen and the surrounding areas searching through parish records, and I also found that the slate mine Lothar Heil was still in operation. Far from being long since given up, it was in fact the last working slate mine in West Germany, or so they said. Despite his dog barking at me insanely in paroxysms of fury, the owner was most obliging, allowing me to look through the record of former owners “travelling” the mine. The Bavarian government obliged owners to “travel” through their mines on a regular basis, certain that they would then make sure the shoring of shafts and tunnels was safe and so avoid being buried in a cave-in themselves. Frieda’s father had never owned Lothar Heil, it was her step-father Ulrich Krodel who bought it off Lothar Faber, and it was listed in Ulrich’s estate when he died. I didn’t feel the slightest desire to “travel” the mine, even though I suspected Frieda “travelled” it with Ulrich, for she implies as much. I found its yawning mouth with a miniature truck for the slate on a railway line going down into the ground distinctly uninviting.
Aside from this I spent much of my time in Bamberg finding a great many files on Frieda’s wider family as listed in Uncle Karl’s genealogy, which I studied closely and finally felt I was getting to grips with its complexities. It was clear the Keyssers had been a very prominent family producing iron since at least 1550 and probably 1530 at Geroldsgruen, where Frieda grew up almost 350 years later. It even seemed they might have been producing iron for two centuries before that at a place near Marktleuthen called Keyserhammer, though there was no discernible link. All of this was tantalising but inconclusive, for as regards the two specific things I felt I simply had to find – the reason behind Frieda’s father Carl Theodor Keysser’s failing finances, and the fate of Wilhelm Keysser, one of Frieda’s first cousins, who had simply “disappeared” (how was such a thing possible in a prominent family?) – I felt I had run into a brick wall. Had he emigrated to America along with millions of other young Germans of his day, I wondered? I found no answers so decided to go to Berlin to check through Uncle Karl’s research files, which were extensive. The new motorway through the former German Democratic Republic was still being built, so I had a long, slow drive to Berlin impeded by extended tail-backs at roadworks, where huge earthmoving machines were blocking the traffic and inclement late autumn weather fogged the windscreen of my car.
In the Berlin records I discovered that Frieda’s grandmother was generally known as “Sophie” Keysser, not “Charlotte” Keysser as I had assumed. I had been looking for the wrong name! This was at least some progress, even if only slight, and gave me a badly needed lift; less encouraging was that in Berlin my car let me know it was finding the cold weather hard to cope with by refusing to start. Since I had no actual need to use it right then I decided to let it just sit in the street while I waded through my uncle’s voluminous files, by this stage desperate to make substantial progress on at least something. If I failed here, I would go to Bremen to check the diaries of Dr Eylmann, the anthropologist who wrote scathingly about Hermannsburg, and then return to London for Christmas.
Armed with just a few small gains I drove to Bremen after getting my cousin to tow my car with hers, going round the block some four times before my engine finally coughed its way back into life. What a relief! The journey to the seaport was surprisingly quick. I spent some very productive days in Bremen’s Uebersee Museum archives, though was disappointed to find that the artefacts left behind by the worthy doctor were not up to much even if his incomplete diaries were. I then decided to return to London for Christmas, aware that my findings were far below what I had hoped for and hadn’t really made the whole lengthy stay in Germany worthwhile. Effectively, I had failed to achieve my principal aim. I still had no clear idea how or why Frieda’s family circumstances had deteriorated to the extent that by the age of 14 she was orphaned, homeless and disinherited, key factors behind her coming to Australia at the age of barely 20.
Despite the shenanigans in Berlin, I had no difficulty starting the car in Bremen but the sound of its exhaust was now concerningly loud, and just as I was about to swing on to the motorway towards the port of Calais in France there was a sudden full-bodied roar from the engine, while the sound of iron clattering on the road made clear that something was seriously wrong. Pulling to the side of the road, I looked underneath the car to find that the exhaust pipe had broken off just before the muffler in a fairly clean break, possibly rusted through as a consequence of the heavily salted roads, and while the rear end of the pipe was still securely fastened to the underside of the car, a length of about six feet was dragging on the ground. It seemed impossible for anything to be done that day, for it was already growing dark and sleet was starting to fall. To my embarrassment, cars were passing whose drivers were looking with dismissive pity at the English plates of my broken down vehicle (much older than most German cars still on the road), and the expression on their faces clearly said, “So, finally the age of British superiority is over! We always knew it would come to this, we knew this day would come!”
It was that supercilious stare which galvanised me into action. My only hope of going anywhere was to try and bind the two ends of the exhaust pipe together or else I was up for a lengthy (and expensive) stay in Bremen while the car was repaired, probably at special rates for Christmas. But how to do this? Thankfully, my years of driving ageing cars around the back roads of Central Australia now stood me in good stead. I suddenly remembered I had a few wire coat-hangers in the boot of the car with which I could make a type of cradle to support the broken exhaust; I could then hopefully secure this cradle to the engine mountings using lighter, flexible wire to hold it in place. I raced to a nearby service station which was still open but found there was none of the tape used to bind exhaust pipes together and no flexible wire either. The only thing on sale was some thick twine. Would it be strong enough to hold the exhaust in place, and would it burn through from the heat of the engine? Not having any viable alternative, I bought the twine and in far less time that I thought possible – it was by now almost completely dark – twisted a coat-hanger into a cradle, lifted the sagging exhaust off the road until it was in line with the other end of the exhaust coming from the manifold, tied off the twine and, holding my breath, started the engine again. It sprang into life and to my astonishment, though louder than usual, was still well within permissible sound limits. This sudden burst of activity goaded me into deciding that I owed it to myself to make one last effort to find what I had come to Germany to find – the full story behind the collapse of Frieda’s family’s fortunes – so instead of driving west I placed all my faith in the twine and took the A7 motorway south, psychologically gearing myself for the long drive back to Bamberg. There are no speed limits on most German motorways and in any case traffic was light for much of the journey so I made excellent time. Because of the lateness of the hour there was only one tail-back to negotiate, so I arrived in Bamberg some time between 1 and 2 am, sleeping in the car until daylight. As hoped, there were no problems with the twine holding the exhaust in position along the way, none at all. Twine had saved the day.
Around halfway through the journey I crossed the high ridge which I mentally associate with the division between north and south Germany and as I did, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration: on my very first day of researching in Bamberg I had almost certainly come across Frieda’s grandmother’s will under the name of “Sophie Keysser” but rejected it because it was the wrong name. I also deduced that any borrowings by Frieda’s father would be listed under “Hypothekenprotokolle”. If he was losing money he would have been trying to raise finance in the form of loans secured against his land, as indicated by this term. Next morning I was at the Staatsarchiv as soon as it opened and called up Sophie Keysser’s will, in which the whole sorry story of the Keysser family’s descent into near-bankruptcy was revealed. I also called up a clutch of “Hypothekenprotokolle” listed for “Carl Theodor” (not “Karl Theodor”) and sure enough, was able to go through his reckless raising of loans which led to his children being deprived of the traditional family inheritance which the preceding nine generations had enjoyed: thousands and thousands of guilders thrown away on pointless expenditure on wood to make charcoal since, not having access to a source of coal to reach the temperatures required, he was unable to manufacture steel, the must-have product of the age. And it was this, not Napoleon, not laziness, nor high charges for wood set by the government in Munich which sealed his fate as an iron founder and brought the entire family down through debt, even though he did manage to reinvent himself as a manufacturer of wood products. Sadly, for him it was all too late. Now, finally, I had the storyline which would define The Tale of Frieda Keysser. It was the eleventh-hour breakthrough I needed.
The missing male cousin, Wilhelm Keysser, however, remained an unsolved enigma – and is so to this day. What became of him, I wonder? Did he go to America, and if so, what was his destiny? Did he succeed – or did he fail? And did he have descendants in America? Probably we shall never know.