We weren’t leaving for good. This wasn’t the beginning of our trek to Alice Springs. But we had been in the Festival City for a full fourteen hours now (counting the eight we’d been asleep) and we felt that we had earned a break. A weekend in the Barossa Valley, where the Rhine riesling flowed, seemed just the ticket.

There’s an easy way of knowing when you’ve hit the Barossa Valley; approaching it from Adelaide, you look out for the piano-accordionist in his lederhosen and his little feathered hat, playing outside the Bavarian restaurant at Lyndoch. Thereafter the area need hold few surprises for you. You will take it for granted that you can buy leberwurst and lachschenken at Steinberner’s butcher shop, and you will assume, as a matter of course, that your legal problems will be dealt with by Heuzenroeder and Heuzenroeder, solicitors. In fact, to be strict about it, the Bavarian restaurant and its accordionist are a bit of a tourist aberration. Because this is Lutheran country, not Catholic; the first settlers came from Prussia and Silesia, and they were dissenters not knee-slappers. But at least ‘I laf to goa vandering’ gives you the general idea.

The seriousness of the original settlers’ intentions is more manifest in Tanunda, the geographic and spiritual heart of the valley. We drove into this charming little town from Lyndoch, gently sloping hills of vines on either side of us, and immediately counted four Lutheran churches, all apparently prospering still. Outside one of them we found a plaque bearing testimony to strong wills and extraordinary conjunctions.

Here at Langmeil on 9th October 1866, Pastors

J F Gossling and E Homann and lay missionaries

J E Jacob and H H Vogelsang set out to establish a

Lutheran Mission among the Dieri tribe of Aboriginals.

On the 31st January 1867 they established Bethesda

Mission Station at Lake Killalpanina, Cooper’s Creek.

I didn’t know what to marvel at most, the bravery of these indomitable proselytizers, who had been an entity in the country for scarcely more than thirty years themselves, or their presumption. And I couldn’t decide who would have found the other the more bizarre: the Lutherans the Dieri, or the Dieri the Lutherans. But I knew who my heart went out to. Tramping across the mulga singing hymns was one kind of intrepidity; listening to them coming must have required altogether another.