The Night Parrots

Benjamin Gerlach, at 81, is sat in his small asbestos house in an Adelaide suburb in Australa, surrounded by the paper and artefacts that had belonged to his father, Lutheran Pastor Martin Gerlach:

Imagine me, (this is only a few months ago) in my trackpants, an old business shirt, a dressing gown. Unshaved, halitosis, yellow teeth, reading the notes Father left: "Firstly the Kangaroo Song (9 verses), everlasting daisies &c.

Night Parrots speaking, tree tops &c." Thinking, when I get all this down, when people read it, it'll sell thousands, hundreds of thousands of copies... The world will finally understand what Father did (apart from saving souls). I'll call it The Night Parrots. Something enigmatic, hard to pin down, elusive, real but not real, imagined but physical, factual but spiritual.

Stephen Orr's The Night Parrots is and is not Benjamin "Benno" Gerlach's book, but elderly Benno's memories are. Orr has based them on the actual 19-day journey across the Australian Western Desert from Hermannsburg to Horseshoe Bend, taken by the Lutheran pastor Carl Strehlow and his family in 1922, and later recorded by Strehlow's son, Theo (Ted). As remembered by Orr's elderly Benno, this journey is "real but not real," "imagined" and "factual." It is also vivid, immersive storytelling.

In 1998, what Benno wants to record is not just his own memories of that journey—the day-by-day struggle with exhausted horses and donkeys, the broken dray wheel, the boggy sands and the draining heat, the worry—but also his father's ethnographic notes and collection, his dictionary of Aboriginal languages, and the journal he kept as pastor of the Lutheran Mission at Hermannsburg, a settlement in the desert 125 kilometers west of Alice Springs.

Benno has lived a full life, working as a university lecturer, a ranger, a Western Desert Patrol Officer, all the time wanting to record the way his father had done everything in his power to help and protect the Aboriginal people who came to his mission. His memories wander from past to present, often segueing from one to the other, so that a fragment of play with his childhood siblings and friends at Hermannsburg, for example, flows seamlessly into memories of revisiting the mission years later with his first wife and their two children, then of working on specimens with his second wife Kate, and then to a recent memory of telling his young grandson, Tom, the story behind one of the artifacts given to his father by an Aboriginal elder. Sometimes this flow from one place and time to another is confusing, but it soon becomes familiar and easier, and it conveys realistically the ways memory works.

As Tom tells his classmates in a show-and-tell...

"My Grandpop was born on a mission in the desert, and when he was fourteen his dad got sick and they had to get him to this place called Horseshoe Bend, to get help. Right through the desert. Like some film or something. Then when he was older he was a... what was it, Grandpop?"

"A patrol officer."

Benno remembers playing with his siblings and Aboriginal friends before the family returned briefly to Germany. His brothers and sister are left there with their grandparents when he and his parents return to Hermannsburg. He misses them, hears about them years later, and wonders why he was the only one chosen to return.

I grew up minus these strangers, these child-ghosts of middle Europe. Sitting with Father beside a creek, notating the language, collecting ephedra for Mother, watching for the night parrot.

When Martin Gerlach starts to become incapacitated by oedema, and nothing he tries from his Manual for Medical Staff Corps (1883) helps, Aboriginal Ludwig, who works for the pastor on the station, "runs" all the way to Alice Springs to send a message to the mission authorities asking for a car to take the pastor to a doctor. Telling how he ran and flew and sang, and how his people helped him to get there and back so fast, Ludwig says...

I got the grass and waved it about like this, like it was the sun, and the sun could stay high in the sky so I could get all the way to Alice. I put it in a tree, in a knot hole, and it stayed there, holding up the sky, and I ran like a rabbit, singing whatever I could think of. "The snake's tail is hissing through the air" or "Jesus loves me."

The Mission authorities refuse to send a car, so a journey by dray and cart becomes essential. An armchair "throne" is strapped to the cart for Martin to sit in. He needs help to get up and down, so Ludwig accompanies them. So, too, do Jamy, an Aboriginal boy who had suffered brain damage; and Silas, who had been blinded in a measles outbreak, and who knows the scriptures by heart and will preach them at every possible opportunity (much to Benno's mother's irritation). Both of them have been looked after by Father Martin and love him.

The mission teacher, Ignatz Beck, who no longer believes in his work and is anxious to leave, also travels with them, but Benno has discovered Beck is a predatory pedophile. Martin refuses to listen to this; Benno's mother, who is acerbic and cold towards Benno, also detests Beck; so his presence is unwelcome and there is constant tension.

Benno, day-by-day remembers the journey—his companions, his earlier memories of them, the way they all help his increasingly immobile father, the beauty and the richness and the dangers of the land they struggle through, and the disasters they have to overcome. He suppresses any thought that his father might die, although he comes to understand Martin is relying on him to continue his work and keep his records.

There are occasional meetings in the desert with others:

An hour later, Jack Fountain came along on his camel. Old Jack. Our once-a-week Jack, heading for Hermannsburg on His Majesty's Postal Service. Hooves, blinkers and long lashes; the way his body moved as an extension of Irene's. The two of them, no rush; the various mail bags and pots and pans hanging off the old girls" hump.

Jack decides he wants to travel on the dray, so Benno must ride the camel.

Camels are shit. They jag from side to side, up and down, bruise your arse bone. They have one speed, and attitude, and they smell like piss. I felt like I was falling off though I never did. I watched the others comfortable on the dray, and said, "Does anyone want a go?'"

Before Jack leaves them, the camel helps when they get bogged in sand, and again (sort of) when they come to a tricky river crossing, but it is almost disastrous for Benno.

The journey, the land, the people, all of Orr's characters come to life in this book, as do the complexities of what Parson Gerlach was doing in his work at the mission. He is the most complex character in the book, distant from Benno, who longs for closeness with his father.

He insisted but doubted; worked, but wondered why; converted, but came to see that the people were better off with their own familiar uncertainties.

The pastor has learned their beliefs and understands them as an alternative, and acceptable, way of explaining the world.

Orr's The Night Parrots is a compelling story based on fact, and it also reflects the belief and purpose that people like Parson Gerlach lived by, the hardship of their lives, the things they changed for the good, the things we now think of as bad, and the things that they could not change, or like Martin, did not want to.

In his author's note, Orr is philosophical:

Many, I guess, will come to this story with doubts... So, perhaps what's described here, as with Carl's attempt to reach Horseshoe Bend, is no more than a journey through inhospitable landscapes... the story of a father and a son.

It is more than that. It is a story told by a man living his life's memories, personal and often moving. It is a story of Aboriginal life and culture, and how they became woven into Pastor Martin Gerlach's own beliefs. And, as Benno and Tom stand in front of a newly-restored night parrot specimen in an Adelaide museum, arguing about who claimed the night parrot was "just a story, a blackfella story," Benno is happy that in the present, "everything just keeps going."