This talk takes a look at what happened when the first missionaries encountered the Arrernte people on the Finke River in Hermannsburg, Central Australia. From the Whites’ point of view the experience was about missionaries coming to the rescue of the Aboriginal people. It was about conversion. From the Aboriginal point of view, the experience was very much about invasion and colonisation. Where, if at all, might those two views reconcile?

Bob Kempe is a great-grandson of one of the first missionaries who established Hermannsburg in Central Australia. He is a retired Lutheran pastor and an emeritus lecturer at the Australian Lutheran College. In that role, he served for ten years as the co-ordinator of the Aboriginal Pastoral Training program for the Lutheran Church of Australia. For the past five years he has headed a project to translate from German into English all of the available reports of the first missionaries to Hermannsburg (1875 – 1892). In the process he has developed a deep appreciation of the challenges and complexities involved in the meeting of Whites and Aboriginal people.