Looking for Bertha Strehlow : giving voice to silence

Silence is a prevailing theme in the story of Bertha Strehlow (1911-1984). She lived in Central Australia in the 1930’s at a time when very few white women had. Bertha was the first wife of Central Australian anthropologist and linguist TGH (Ted) Strehlow (1908-1978). Her story has been largely overshadowed by the dominance of his career and publications, despite her pivotal role in the development of his work. While examining the historical silence that surrounds her, I explore Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘two books’, to help unravel the problem of fictionalizing the story of an historical character. This conceptual framework explains my impulse to write about this little known woman.The paper also looks at the characteristics of the verse novel and explores how it is an effective genre for the development of a narrative to give voice to historical silences. I include two poems from my creative work: At the end of the frost, a verse novel from Bertha’s point of view, to demonstrate how poetics in the verse novel can illustrate the gaps in the narrative of historical fiction and how it is an effective literary device to explore silence in history.