QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

“Wir sind nun da”

The zealous efforts of a group of Germans to bring Christianity to the ‘heathens’ of Moreton Bay – better placed in context as the first free settlers in the future Queensland – are reviewed by Robin Kleinschmidt. When the Moreton Bay penal colony was founded in 1824, an exclusion zone, variously reported as 30-50 miles (48-80km), was proclaimed in which free settlement was forbidden. Fourteen years later, however, an important exception was made, by decree of the Governor of New South Wales allowing a group of German missionaries to establish themselves seven miles (11km) north of the penal settlement. They were the first free settlers in what was to become Queensland. The mission was the initiative of Sydney’s indomitable Presbyterian clergyman Dr John Dunmore Lang, in cooperation with Pastor Johannes Gossner of Berlin’s Bethlehem Lutheran Church. Lang had a heart for the Aboriginal people – both their physical welfare and their prospects for conversion to Christianity – but knew that he would not be able to find enough English and Scottish missionaries for the task. He was able to persuade the British government to support his scheme before he approached Gossner. As well as allocating £150 to equip and ship three trained missionaries out to the colony, the government agreed to provide an annual subsidy matching any money raised for the venture by Lang’s Presbyterian Church. In 1836 Johannes Gossner established the Gossner Mission Society, an independent training centre based on the premise that the most effective form of Christian evangelisation was to place among the ‘heathen’ a community of pious Christians whose life and example would provide a strong witness to the gospel and encourage others to follow their example.

Dr Lang recruited the first graduates of Gossner’s Mission Society to work among the Turrbul and other Aboriginal peoples of Moreton Bay. The Gossner mission party left Berlin in July 1837 and sailed from Greenock on the Minerva in September. It comprised two ordained pastors, the leader C Wilhelm Schmidt and Christoph Eipper, a former medical student, Moritz Schneider, and nine other men, six of them with their wives. Embracing a range of trades, the nine were Ludwig Döge (gardener), Carl Franz (tailor), Wilhelm Hartenstein (weaver). Gottfried Haussmann (farmer), Peter Niquet (mason), August Olbrecht (shoemaker), August Rode (cabinetmaker), Gottfried Wagner (shoemaker), and Leopold Zillmann (blacksmith). The ship was quarantined on its arrival in Sydney on 23 January 1838, and Moritz Schneider died there of typhoid fever. A party of 14 under Pastor Eipper proceeded to Moreton Bay at the end of March, the rest following three months later with Pastor Schmidt. The government had set aside a mission reserve of 650 acres (263ha) north of the penal settlement. Through it flowed a stream to which they gave the name Kedron Brook from the biblical name Kidron. They called their settlement Zion Hill, but it soon became popularly known as German Station. Today it is the suburb of Nundah, the name given in 1885 when the railway reached the district. The missionary party had been preceded by Pastor Johann Handt the year before. Like Pastor Eipper he had been trained at the Seminary for Missionaries at Basel in Switzerland, and had served as a missionary in Africa. He had been sent to Moreton Bay by the London Mission Society in 1837 to serve as chaplain to the convict settlement and as missionary to the indigenous people.

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