Strehlow was assisted by his wife Friederike, who played a central role in reducing the high infant mortality which threatened Aboriginal communities all over Australia after the onset of white settlement.
As a polymath with an interest in natural history, and informed by the local Aranda people, Strehlow provided plant and animal specimens to museums in Germany and Australia.
Carl Seidel, had begun to educate him in the subjects required for matriculation (Latin, Greek, history, English, mathematics, religion and German) during the four-year preparation for confirmation, which was then obligatory.
This opposition may have arisen from bitterness – in 1856 his father was jailed for two weeks for teaching religious instruction while working in the state system in Seefeld in Farther Pomerania, something forbidden him because he was a member of the Old Lutheran Church.
Strehlow was awarded a "brilliant first" prior to his graduation at Easter 1892, with his final exams delayed possibly because he was thought too young to hold the position of pastor in an American congregation.
[6] The impetus for this is said to have come not from Reuther but from Strehlow who, as the teacher in the mission school, needed printed material in Dieri for his students, a number of whom were older people receiving religious instruction.
[12][13] Strehlow and Frieda Johanna Henrietta Keysser first met when he visited the vicarage at Obersulzbach in Franconia on Maundy Thursday, 14 April 1892, staying only until Saturday 16 when he went to Neundettelsau to receive his Aussegnung on Easter Day.
August Omeis and his wife, and was busy dyeing Easter eggs with Marie Eckardt, the previous housekeeper, who was about to leave for Australia to marry one of Strehlow's fellow students, Friedrich Leidig.
Despite continuing determined opposition from Frieda's family, who thought the whole idea a silly adolescent obsession, Strehlow was eventually allowed to write to her and the two became engaged, but it was made clear that she could not marry before her twentieth birthday on 31 August 1895.
On 25 September 1895, she was married by Leidig to Carl at Point Pass on the edge of the Barossa Valley in a double wedding with Marie and her husband Otto Siebert, another of Strehlow's former fellow students now at Bethesda.
Despite Frieda's initial doubts about what she had done in marrying a man she knew only from letters, the marriage was happy and blessed with six children: Friedrich (born 1897), Martha (1899), Rudolf (1900), Karl (1902), Hermann (1905) and Theodor aka Ted Strehlow (1908).
John Bogner to take over the abandoned Mission Station of Hermannsburg in Central Australia, then largely financed by sales of sheep, wool, horses and cattle.
Those who converted were expected to reside permanently at the Mission, going away "for a spell" only after arranging it with him; their children had to come regularly to school where they learned to read and write in their own language, and the men had to be gainfully employed.
Frieda too became a fluent speaker of Aranda and exercised great influence on the young women and girls, opposing the widespread practice of infanticide (especially the killing of twins),[17] teaching them basic skills like sewing and mending, emphasising the need for hygiene – daily washing, clean clothes, and so on – as well as how to raise their children using nappies.
Increasingly, senior members of the Christian community like Moses Tjalkabota and Nathanael Rauwiraka played a part in instructing new converts, and worked with Strehlow on his translations of religious texts.
Due to Leonhardi's untimely death on 27 October 1910,[b] two weeks before he and Strehlow were to meet for the first time, the book was left without an editor committed to the original vision, so none of this material was ever published.
[24] Spencer and Gillen famously described the Aranda as "naked savages... chanting songs of which they do not know the meaning",[25] and used it as proof that they were a primitive people left behind in the Darwinist struggle for survival.
He also recorded his informants' descriptions of ceremonies and initiation rites, in places using interlinear texts, thus preserving forms which today have the status of classics due to changes in the language.
[citation needed] He collaborated with Moritz, Baron von Leonhardi of Gross Karben in Hessen, Germany, who also suggested he write his monumental anthropological work Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (The Aranda and Loritja Tribes in Central Australia).
[citation needed] Strehlow's knowledge of languages and rapport with senior men like Loatjira, Tmala and (for Loritja) Talku enabled him to publish a major tract on the legends, beliefs, customs, genealogies, secret initiatory life and magical practices of the peoples on the Mission in his book.
To clarify certain confusions surrounding this work, it was written by Strehlow, edited by Leonhardi, and published in sections between 1907 and 1920 under the auspices of Frankfurt's newly established Städtisches Völkermuseum (Municipal Ethnological Museum).
These included the usual spears, boomerangs, woomeras, digging sticks, stone knives and everyday objects, but also tjurungas, ceremonial objects and decorations of various kinds which were usually destroyed when the ceremony was finished, kurdaitcha boots, pointing sticks and so on with a view to enabling Europeans to get a full and comprehensive picture of Aranda and Loritja people and their inner world in conjunction with the explanations in the book.
[citation needed] Strehlow's book challenged some of the findings of Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen in their highly acclaimed work The Native Tribes of Central Australia, at that time accepted as the last word on the Aranda.
This led to a major controversy in London anthropological circles involving Andrew Lang, Sir James Frazer, Robert Ranulph Marett,[c] A.C. Haddon, Spencer and later Bronisław Malinowski.
Thomas in England, by Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Arnold van Gennep in France, by Fritz Graebner in Germany and Pater W. Schmidt in Austria, and were a major source for Bronislaw Malinowski's The Family among Australian Aborigines.
[29][30] Strehlow sent a considerable number of specimens of both fauna and flora to Leonhardi, who lodged it in Frankfurt's Naturmuseum Senckenberg, with some material also going to Berlin, and the botanical gardens in Darmstadt.
Strehlow's response to her when she visited was: "To separate the black children from their parents and forbid them to speak Aranda to each other, and where possible drive the old people away from the station, I will never consent to.
With the eldest son Friedrich in the German army from mid-1915, the Strehlows became the target of rumour, despite Carl being naturalised in 1901, and many attempts, some inspired by Spencer, were made to discredit him and the Mission with a view to shutting it down.
Strehlow was fortunate in having the support of Sergeant Robert Stott, the policeman in Alice Springs, and most importantly, Administrator Gilruth, who was an admirer of his work at Hermannsburg, much to Spencer's chagrin, who had put his former colleague's name forward for the position in 1911.
[35] In September 1922, Strehlow became seriously ill with dropsy, and despite efforts to get a car to transport him to Adelaide, on 20 October 1922, he died at Horseshoe Bend Station, halfway to Oodnadatta while trying to reach medical help.