Photos

Hermannsburg (pop. 500) is on the Larapinta Drive 125km southwest of Alice Springs (the last 30km on a gravel road; no special permission required). In 1880 German Lutheran missionaries arrived in the Finke River plain to bring the Bible, medical aid and education to the Aranda people, after an arduous 20 months' journey from Bethany in South Australia with horses, sheep and herds of cattle. Their settlement, the first mission station in the Northern Territory, was named after a Lutheran seminary in Hannover.
Some 100 Aborigines lived in the mission in the 1880s, and the present mission buildings were erected around 1890 by Carl Strehlow. There were vegetable gardens, fruit plantations and date palms. The missionaries recorded the language and vocabulary of the Aranda.
Among those who lived here was Albert Namatjira, the best-known Aboriginal painter.
In the present, some of the buildings are transformed in museum. They also serve an excelent apple strudel here, which is a traditional german cake.