Friedrich Gerstäcker, the German explorer who travelled up the Murray in a makeshift canoe in the 1850s, is a fascinating character. Celebrated as a travel writer in his home country in the 1800s, he fell out of favour and his work is little known in Australia. Historian Peter Monteath has released a translation that is of significant historical importance – but is also a wonderful read to boot. You can find out more and purchase the book here.

Here we have Gerstäcker’s thoughts on arriving in Tanunda, where a religious war of sorts had split the town …

Tanunda – named after the Indian locality – is a little town of several hundred inhabitants, its buildings perhaps slightly English in taste, but its population entirely German aside from a couple of possible exceptions. It as a very strange feeling for me to find myself suddenly – in a foreign land and continent and even in an English colony – surrounded by nothing but Germans, and in fact a purely German way of life and doings. On occasion, especially when I saw little groups of people standing here and there in the street and heard everyone speaking German, I had to stop and think whether I really was in Australia. But that is exactly how it was, and in the end I even got used to it – I think I would even have got used to it if they had spoken Chinese, since being thrown so quickly from one language into another as I have been incessantly over the last few years makes one rather indifferent to such things.

Tanunda is remarkable not only for its Germanness but also for its religious factions, and I was particularly intent on finding out more about them. The most important congregation among them is that of the Kavelites or Old Lutherans, who have however recently suffered a quite significant dent in their unity because of a few simple arithmetical errors. Previously the congregations of Tanunda, Hahndorf, Langmeil and Lightspass – all German localities – belonged together to one church. Then – and I do not know even myself whether it was in spring this year (1851) or autumn last year – Pastor Kavel had the fateful idea of prophesying in advance the end of the world, precisely to the day and hour, and he was thoughtless enough not to postpone the date for something like a thousand years, but to cut very close to the bone. The result  was the same as befell the famous Preacher Miller in the Yankee states: the good Lord did not deign to do him the favour of lifting the world off its hinges at the prescribed hour; everything continued in its pre-ordained path, except for the Kavelite church.

It is said that at the prophesied hour the whole congregation headed out to a small creek about two miles from Tanunda and half a mile from Langmeil to await the Messiah. But what happened instead was a violent storm that drenched them thoroughly, and that night they slept in their beds again instead of in Paradise.

That made a bad impression on the congregation. The people had absolutely counted on their own destruction, and now they found themselves all hale and hearty – apart from an occasional cold perhaps – and as remote as ever from eternal bliss. The unfulfilled prophecy shattered their faith in the prophet himself, and a portion of the Kavelite congregation seceded from Kavel. So Langmeil chose Pastor Meier, a former missionary to the Australian Indians, as their pastor, and only Hahndorf and Tanunda, and perhaps Lightspass too, maintained the true faith, since the Meierite congregation was strongly sceptical of the imminent end of the world. Pastor Kavel, however, undeterred, postponed it to the transition from 1899–1900.

Pastor Kavel, image from Wikipedia

What people in Tanunda – that is in the unbelieving part of Tanunda’s population, since Tanunda is divided into the Saints and the Children of the World – have to say about the congregation and its beliefs borders on the fabulous, and one must indeed exercise caution in believing their reports, for I almost fear that the Children of the World have exaggerated a thing or two. But of course nothing is impossible in religious mania. In any case, I wished to gather as much information as possible in that short time, and so I visited Pastor Kavel, and was very amiably received by him. I had arrived in Tanunda at a very interesting time, since Pastor Kavel had just been married to his housekeeper several days previously, and the rather unique situation had arisen that although Pastor Meier in Langmeil and another pastor, Mr Mücke, who had established a liberal congregation in Tanunda (to which I shall return later), were both ordained by the government, Pastor Kavel did not consider either of these gentlemen worthy of performing his marriage ceremony and therefore travelled to Adelaide with his bride in order to be married by the civil registrar. The congregation in its turn was not satisfied with this, neither with the civil marriage – although he subsequently on his return to Tanunda had the marriage blessed by one of the elders – nor with the marriage itself, whereby the people felt that he should have avoided ‘appearances’ in such a matter. But in the case of marriage, if one wished first of all to ask permission of the entire congregation, nothing much at all would come about in the end – at least, not in such a way that both parties would be comfortable, and this is something that each man can best judge for himself.

The next day was a Sunday, and of course it was taken for granted that I would attend the Kavelite congregation, after which I was invited to dine with the Pastor. The service was of course the Old Lutheran one, but with an enormous number of hymnbook verses and Bible texts. The singing was never-ending, and although I do not wish to present my opinion as infallible, I really do not believe that our Lord God can be so intent on having half the hymnbook sung to Him every Sunday. That day I had to sing 32 hymnbook verses. And the texts? I am firmly convinced that the people who wrote those hymns – for they can hardly be called poetry – surely had the best of intentions and expressed their most intimate feelings therein, but it nevertheless remains difficult to sing or say, for example, ‘all-beneficent‘ in two syllables.

Pastor Kavel preached well and fluently. By ‘well’ I of course do not mean to say that I was in agreement with the intention of the sermon, but he spoke as though with innermost conviction, and I would like to believe that to his credit. Moreover he spoke in such a way that I can well understand that he could thereby win over the class of people with whom he was dealing. Otherwise his sermon was an extract of the greatest intolerance that any faith is capable of producing. It was only for his chosen few that the kingdom of heaven will be open, and one sentence in his sermon I will never forget: ‘Those who really act according to God’s word but do not have the true faith will, regardless of their good and otherwise God-pleasing deeds, be irredeemably damned and go to the Devil. In fact, God will hate such people all the more, precisely because of their  good deeds, as He sees such deeds as a kind of hypocrisy, since they do not hold the true faith.’ And that is supposed to be a God of love.

Read more on Friedrich Gerstäcker’s adventures here.