Too hot to handle: A German Missionary's Struggle with Ethnography in Australia

Abstract

Pastor Georg Reuther (1861–1914) was the Lutheran missionary in charge of Bethesda mission at Lake Killalpaninna for eighteen years, from 1888 to 1906, precisely during the three decades when Germany joined the ranks of colonial empires with its own external acquisitions (1884–1915).1 Reuther and his junior colleague Pastor Carl Strehlow accomplished the first Bible translation into an Aboriginal language, the Dieri of the Coopers Creek area of South Australia – also known as Diari, or Dyari. Reuther then continued to engage with Dieri language and customs, producing a massive manuscript that became a translation of Dieri religious texts into German, rather than the other way around. He was quite unaware that this move from missionary translator to ethnographic interpreter represented a paradigm shift: from teacher to learner, from cultural innovator to conserver of tradition. It was the ultimate faux pas of a colonizer, a form of ‘going native’, but of course Pastor Reuther could not conceive of himself as a colonizer – he was a saver of souls, an idealist consumed with the metaphysical, in his own estimation truly the opposite of a self-interested colonial settler.