Tjalkabota’s story of his life in central Australia begins with his Arrernte childhood: travelling with his parents to hunt and gather food, assembling with larger groups of relatives in good seasons, learning to fear attack by neighbours, and eventually discovering that missionaries with strange animals had come to his region. Tjalkabota’s life and early encounters with Christianity differ in fundamental ways from those of the Xhosa, Tsimshian, and Pacific Islanders. There were no villages where the missionaries could establish a base. They had to build a mission and wait for the Arrernte to come to them. Tjalkabota recounts how men hid women and children before approaching the mission alone. They rejected the gifts of bullock meat and flour the missionaries gave them, alert to the possible dangers of strangers in their midst. After a time the men made return visits, eventually taking women and children with them. Nonetheless, the main focus of Arrernte life continued to lie outside the mission. Tjalkabota would return to the mission periodically, attending the school, then leave to travel with his grandfather and other family members.
When he began attending school, a rift developed with the adults, who maintained an intellectual distance from the missionaries. The boy decided to remain permanently at Hermannsburg, while his parents continued their mobile lives. The rift became more pronounced when Tjalkabota was baptized. His father and other men of the older generation could not comprehend that their children had allied themselves to an alternative source of sacred power. Tjalkabota recalled conversations that suggest they viewed baptism as another form of initiation ceremonies and Christianity as another route to religious knowledge, potentially compatible with their own beliefs. When Tjalkabota accused them of being heathens, people without religion, they were bemused. The young man also challenged the rainmaking abilities of the old men, and questioned their accounts of creation. He claimed to have ridiculed their most deeply held beliefs.
Moses’ text presents his evangelizing as a series of intellectual engagements with his protagonists. He does not mention any attempt to change the way people lived, the food they ate, or their dress. To the Lutheran missionaries clothing was a marker of civilization. They gave the young Tjalkabota clothes and a blanket when he first visited the Hermannsburg mission. But clothes did not mark a transformation in his life, which came only with his acceptance of the Christian God and the rejection of his parent’s beliefs. He describes one incident at the mission when the men performed a religious dance. The missionaries disrupt the ceremony, ripping off the men’s decorations, accuse them of being children of the devil and heathens, and demand they put their clothes back on. But the men refuse until all the community have seen the sacred markings on their bodies. In recounting this incident Moses does not take the outsider’s view that associated nakedness with savagery and the primitive; rather he emphasizes its religious significance.
Most of his preaching was directed not to his father’s generation, but to younger people who were growing up in the colonized world of cattle and sheep stations. He travelled around the stations talking to the stock workers and their families. Peter Bullah, one of the first Aboriginal men to be ordained as a Lutheran pastor, remembered Moses Tjalkabota’s evangelism: ‘One day an old man came to Henbury [cattle] station, old blind Moses. He taught us the word of God. Many people heard God’s word at that place.’
Unlike Clah’s diary, which is anchored to a chronology reckoned by the British calendar, Tjalkabota’s account is driven by a sense of place. Despite having spent much of his life at Hermannsburg, in the township of Alice Springs, and at the Jay Creek ration depot, he talks mainly about journeys: childhood journeys with his family and evangelizing trips after the onset of blindness. He describes in detail the routes he took, naming the places he passed by, where he slept along the way, and the things he ‘saw’. In this and other important ways his text conforms to Arrernte cultural forms rather than any Lutheran missionary template. At the same time there can be no doubt that it is the testimony of a deeply committed Christian who seems never to have been riven by doubts. Thus, an insider-outsider dichotomy is not clear-cut in Tjalkabota’s text. Unlike Tiyo Soga, who suffered in the eyes of his fellows by not having passed through essential rites of passage, Tjalkabota was an initiated man. However, he deliberately placed himself outside Arrernte religious traditions, denigrating religious objects such as tjurunga and helping to desecrate a site sacred to his ancestors. At the same time he was also a cultural broker, a translator of Christian texts into Arrernte, and a source for anthropologists and others seeking information about Arrernte cultural and religious practices.
As a witness to the process of colonization, Tjalkabota was ideally situated to comment on the impact of Empire. He does not do so, perhaps because it was not imposed by overt war and conquest. He experienced the advent of the new order as a series of apparently unconnected intrusions. First came the German Lutheran missionaries when he was about 5 years old. Later other outsiders came to build a telegraph line, followed by pastoralists and miners. These colonial developments revolutionized Arrernte life, but Tjalkabota’s narrative does not bring them to the foreground. His spiritual and physical journeys from the Arrernte cosmological universe into the colonized landscape of twentieth-century Australia receive little comment. Tjalkabota appears to have viewed himself as protected by God from the violence of the early colonial era. On one occasion people were amazed to see him arrive in Alice Springs in a stranger’s truck:
‘That white man is continually chasing us with a rifle. Moses, why did you come with him? He is forever threatening us with a rifle.’
I said, ‘God himself protects me on the road, so that people cannot harm me.’
They said, ‘So it is with God that you travel about so confidently.’
Unlike Soga and Clah, Tjalkabota’s text avoids criticism of colonial society, presenting himself as under divine protection as God’s messenger.