Join us for BGLA Kaffee und Kuchen with guest speaker John Strehlow.
When: Monday 28th July 2025, 1pm – 3pm
Where: Langmeil Lutheran Church hall, 5-7 Maria St, Tanunda
Important update: July German luncheon cancelled! Our chef is unwell so it was decided to not go ahead with the luncheon this time. We’ll keep you posted on the next lunch date.
Enjoy a talk from our special guest speaker, John Strehlow.
Researching family history is a common enough activity among Australian Lutherans, but when John Strehlow embarked on a book about his family, The Tale of Frieda Keysser, he had no idea what he was letting himself in for. At the beginning his sources seemed manageable enough – the diaries of his grandmother Frieda Keysser’s time at Hermannsburg in Central Australia (1895-1922) and his
grandfather Carl Strehlow’s letters to the Mission Board (1892-1922) – but information quickly multiplied and almost spiralled out of control, as thousands of letters by their friends and colleagues turned up just waiting to be discovered.
Visits to little-known archives in Central Europe soon followed: how was this venture to be encompassed and how was it to be paid for? Investigating a Forgotten Past gives the inside story in a nuts-and-bolts outline of the 25-year project, ranging from descriptions of how to do emergency repairs when your car’s exhaust system falls off on a German motorway, to circumventing attempts by other family members to block the project, with here and there a skeleton turning up in the family closet.
Investigating a Forgotten Past is an easy read about an extraordinary venture with long-term lessons for Australia’s future.
Biography.
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 and graduated 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.