The Visual Mediation of a Complex Narrative: T.G.H. Strehlow's Journey to Horseshoe Bend

Abstract

This paper refers to a research project that has been launched to compile a range of related resources into a digital repository with the intention of (hyper)linking this material to relevant points in the text. Those elements of the text of potential and particular relevance to the Arrernte (Aranda) community and Aboriginal sense of place (such as specific totems, sacred ceremonies, kinship connections, etc.) will explicitly be mapped into a range of visual representations (including geographic maps and genealogy charts), and then supplemented with (hyper)links to relevant images, documents, media resources and other online collections. Finally, feedback from the Arrernte (Aranda) community on this visually mediated text will be recorded as oral histories, digitised and (hyper)linked to further supplement the specific cultural content of the Journey to Horseshoe Bend text. The project is in its early stages of execution, and this paper is intended to introduce the project and its background, and to place its knowledge interests within a contemporary framework of similar projects. This paper utilises a complex memoire authored by T.G.H. Strehlow, titled Journey to Horseshoe Bend, as a means of indicating the full range of strategies and techniques for the exploration of its narrative elements. These explorations will traverse the geographic locations of sites and specific totems, the conceptual relationships between narrative elements of place, the historical connectedness and physical migration of the Arrernte (Aranda) community over time, cultural ceremonies and myths specific to place, and links between a sense of place and other important motifs in the text. The engagement with the Horseshoe Bend story, itself referenced to the death journey of Lutheran Pastor Carl Strehlow in 1922, continues to have resonances for contemporary Arrernte (Aranda) social practices. Indeed, the cultural work of articulating a modern social existence in a white-dominated civilisation, along with an abiding interest in the continuities of tradition, makes cultural practice active, fluid and dynamic. While the paper is only able to sketch these relationships, it also suggests how the formulation of these interests is related to the full range of remediation strategies available.