ABSTRACT
The first Lutheran missionaries in South Australia, Christian Gottlob Teichelmann and Clamor Wilhelm Schürmann, arrived in Adelaide in October 1838, sent from Germany by the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Society of Dresden. Their lasting—and regenerative—legacy in South Australia was to provide the groundwork that has enabled the partial reclamation of the Indigenous Kaurna language. In contrast, their evangelising mission to the “heathens” was, by any account, an abject failure. While previous discussions of the Dresden mission’s successes and failures focus on the missionaries’ activities in the public sphere, the present chapter looks at the previously unexplored space of the private sphere, focusing on the significance of domestic arrangements and marriage for successful Lutheran mission. It takes as its core the missionaries’ correspondence with their governing body, examining in particular their negotiation of the Committee’s proscription on marriage, which arguably impeded the mission. Teichelmann’s letters especially, by turn affect-laden and analytical, yield clear insight into the centrality of marriage for Lutheran mission(aries). Taken as a whole, the correspondence enables productive and significant connections between this mission work and radical reforms initiated by Luther, both with respect to vernacular translations of the Bible, and his radical reconceptualisation of marriage.
