German Missionaries in Australia

Early Life

Born as the son of German-born parents Karl Friedrich and Maria Elisabeth Kramer née Reinhardt, little is known about Ernst Eugen Kramer’s early life. Trained as a milling engineer and fluent in German and French, Kramer was not a religious man when he migrated to Australia from Switzerland around 1908. Rather, he was an economic migrant, a trained engineer relocating in the hope of finding work in the rapidly developing young Australian Federation.

Raised in a Lutheran family in Basel, Switzerland, Kramer became agnostic as a young adult, studied engineering and designed saw mills in Switzerland before the stress of work resulted in a nervous breakdown followed by a decision to try his luck in the colonies. Severe seasickness almost saw him end his journey in South Africa, but he continued on and eventually reached Adelaide. On arrival he found that his German qualifications and lack of good spoken English meant that finding engineering work was extremely difficult. He ended up painting fences around Adelaide, probably by this stage becoming desperate in his financial situation and looking for a new opportunity.

Conversion and the 'caravan mission'

It was around this time Kramer met a German Pentecostal Church leader. He quickly converted to the faith and ‘was baptised at the back of the Zoo in the River Torrens.’¹ Shortly after his river-baptism Kramer rode his bicycle from Adelaide to North Melbourne to Janet Lancaster’s Good News Hall.² 

In Melbourne Kramer soon met young Gippsland woman, Euphemia Buchanan, also a recent convert and avid missionary hopeful. In meeting Ernest, Euphemia later wrote that God had sent ‘the very helpmate that I needed right from Switzerland and he alone was working out his own plans and preparing us for each other to labour together for him.'³After a short courtship, the couple returned to Euphemia’s home near Wilson’s Promontory, and on 21 March 1912 they were married under Presbyterian forms. They worked for a short time in Melbourne but felt 'called' to missionary work, Euphemia, by this stage pregnant, as much as Ernest. When their first child Colin was just six weeks old she left Melbourne to join Kramer on the Murray River ‘among dark people with a little one in my arms.’⁴ After eighteen months travelling and camping along the river, the Kramers packed up their young son and sailed down the Murray River to Adelaide.⁵

The Kramers’ resilience and devotion to their evangelical cause were remarkable. Apart from their first trip to the Murray in 1913, they made two lengthy journeys through Central Australia in 1919 and 1921, and proselytised in Port Augusta, along the East-West rail line (then under construction), to Tarcoola, then north from Quorn to Oodnadatta.⁶ Kramer’s first publication about his ‘Australian Caravan Mission’ is full of recollections of how God helped them through the desert. He recounted ‘miracles’ such as finding a spring in timely fashion, receiving unexpected donations, sick animals becoming well, and the safe births of the Kramers' four children - two babies were born in tents in Central Australia. All good things the couple attributed to the love of God and the power of prayer.⁷

The Aborigines' Friends' Association

In 1923, Reverend John Henry Sexton, secretary of the long-running Adelaide-based Aborigines’ Friends’ Association, met Kramer by chance at the city’s Bible House.⁸ Kramer described to Sexton his experiences of many years’ travelling through Central Australia with his wife and children, preaching the gospel to Aborigines and white settlers alike. They had also attempted to assist Aborigines with medical advice and provision of clothing; however, funds were now very low.

The meeting proved fateful: Sexton’s Association had by this time been divested of their original missionary outreach opportunities in South Australia’s more settled areas, and already looked northward to new fields of endeavour. Perhaps Kramer could become their permanent representative in central Australia. Soon after this chance meeting in 1924, Australia’s longest-running non-government organisation dedicated to Aboriginal welfare commenced a partnership with Ernest Kramer, who for the next ten years, helped always by Euphemia, became the Association’s roving agent in Central Australia. Ernest would regularly report on their movements, their contacts, their observations, their challenges and more rarely, their triumphs.

Kramer grew in influence over the years he spent in the interior, as the observations, views and ideas he sent back to Sexton in Adelaide became part of the Association’s national campaigns for the education and ‘preparation’ of Aboriginal children. Kramer and his wife were instrumental in establishing an Aboriginal school in Alice Springs in addition to their medical and evangelical services at their Alice Springs Tabernacle where Ernest and Euphemia both regularly preached to large groups of Aboriginal people.

The Association itself was explicit about Kramer’s role, concluding in their 1934 Annual Report that as a result of Kramer’s work, ‘no society has now a better grasp of the needs and problems of Central Australia than the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association’.⁹ Kramer’s camel train had given him unprecedented mobility in remote areas, which the Association used in its reports to government.

Kramer’s status as an expert guide, his knowledge of local Aboriginal language and his good relationships with both settlers and Aboriginal people also made him popular amongst the growing number of ‘scientific’ and anthropological expeditions to Central Australia from Australia’s universities. In 1932, anthropologist Thomas Draper Campbell asked Kramer to accompany him to ‘assist the Scientists in connection with this year’s visit’.¹⁰ Kramer agreed, and although the AFA approved of this undoubtedly positive public relations move, they reminded Kramer that their permission must always be sought in these matters.¹¹

The Association resisted further still when Dr. John Cleland, Professor of Pathology at the University of Adelaide worked doggedly with the Association for permission for Kramer to join his expeditions. Cleland was a respected Aborigines ‘expert’ himself, who described Kramer as a ‘fearless protector of the rights of the natives’.¹² The Association only relented when Cleland promised to cover all costs and that Kramer could continue his evangelising work during the expedition.

By this time Kramer had become an increasingly important link in an information-gathering process by which governments would shape policies on the Central Australian Aborigines. Certainly Kramer was in a position to offer credible information at the grass roots level and Sexton grew to rely heavily on Kramer’s on-the-spot reports, which gave the Association an edge in its campaigns. But the reverse was also true: under the auspices of the Association Kramer was able to extend his individual contacts and influence upon significant players in indigenous affairs apart from his standing as a representative. The Association was wary of this and attempted to control Kramer’s autonomy. They discouraged new links with any other mission group in the field: Kramer should be recognised as a jewel in their own crown.

Decline of the Alice Springs Tabernacle

At the same time that Kramer’s influence was at its zenith, fractures in his relationship with the AFA were emerging, and his own health began to fail. Furthermore, by the mid-1930s, the white population in Alice Springs was increasing, forcing Aboriginal people out of the settlement. Where once Aboriginal employees had been vital to the tiny town’s survival, new government regulations prohibited Aboriginal people from coming within two miles of the town.¹³ Euphemia recalled that in the earlier days more than fifty Indigenous people would attend her gospel services at the Tabernacle, but by the early 1930s she was receiving less then ten.

With increasingly poor health, Kramer returned from his last trip in 1934 decidedly unwell, and shortly afterwards the Kramers finally left Alice Springs after ten years of service.¹⁴ They returned to Melbourne, and to Euphemia’s undisguised relief, Kramer ‘never sat on a camel since and I sincerely hope he never will.’¹⁵< Euphemia Kramer’s own activism seemed to increase upon her return to Melbourne; perhaps the return to middle-class comforts and with the harsh realities of central Australian life a distant memory, she was able to campaign more vigorously for the rights of people she had earlier described as ‘childlike’ and in need of a firm hand. Certainly, she reminded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union that ‘British Justice around the world ever decrees that there shall not be one law for the rich and one for the poor, but we tolerate in our society one law for the White and one for the Black.’¹⁶

Kramer never returned to Central Australia, but he continued to campaign in Melbourne for Central Australian Aboriginal welfare, eventually returning to Adelaide as a representative for the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1951, remaining there until his death from leukaemia in 1958.¹⁷

Kramer's missionising

Without the settled lifestyle of other colonists, the Kramers’ endless travelling mirrored the nomadic lifestyle of the Indigenous people they sought to convert. Thus, more than most missionaries, the Kramers challenge the notion that twentieth-century missionaries were ‘avowedly assimilationists’ as anthropologists Catherine and Ronald Berndt described them.¹⁸ The Kramers’ itinerant methods may also explain the historiographical neglect of their work. In the context of a limited historiography of mission activity in central and northern Australia, the Kramers have escaped attention, perhaps because they never established a mission station, although their ‘Tabernacle’ in Alice Springs had regular Indigenous attendance. Ernest is generally only mentioned in passing, and is best known as the only missionary allowed to give evidence for the hearing on the Coniston massacre of 1928.¹⁹ Australian mission historian John Harris wrote only that Kramer was ‘well-known in Alice Springs in the 1930s for [his] selfless efforts to assist Aboriginal people.’²⁰ Nonetheless, tirelessly evangelical and conciliatory but eventually compromised, Kramer’s work in Central Australia provides a unique perspective on the complex relationships between government, humanitarians and missionaries on Australia’s final colonial frontier.