Bethesda Lutheran MissionariesPrint Page

The monument was erected on the original church site and commemorates the missionaries of the Bethesda Lutheran Mission who worked among the Dieri people at Kopperamanna and Killalpaninna from 1867 to 1917.

On 9th October 1866 a small party set out from Tanunda (South Australia) to establish a Lutheran mission station in the salt-lake areas of the north-east of South Australia. It consisted of two missionaries Johann Friedrich Gößling and Ernst Homann, and two lay brethren, Hermann Vogelsang and Ernst Jakob. 

After a difficult three-month journey from Tanunda, they established their mission station at Lake Killalpaninna (about 40 km south of Cooper`s Creek) and tried to convert the Dieri (Diyari) people to Christianity. Anthropologist and linguist Carl Strehlow worked on the mission from 1892 to 1894, before moving to Hermannsburg. Strehlow and Johann Georg Reuther translated Christian works into the Diyari language, and also documented the grammar and vocabulary of the language.

The South Australian Royal Commission on the Aborigines gathered evidence from the mission in 1914, and recommended that the mission be taken over by the government. The mission was closed by the state government in 1915. At that time, there were 70 Aboriginal children living at the mission.  After the mission closed, it became a cattle station. The school continued to operate until 1917, when the government closed all Lutheran schools.

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