QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Bethanien

For many immigrants, the long voyage to Moreton Bay was not always their final sea journey, as Robin Kleinschmidt tells, since areas southeast of Brisbane could be reached only by boat or steamer. Those who arrived before the declaration of statehood in 1859 fell into two broad categories. A small number of professional men, mainly doctors, established themselves in the main towns of Brisbane and Ipswich. The names of Lauterer in Brisbane and von Lossberg in Ipswich were well-known. There was a small group of shopkeep ers and tradespeople and, a little later, innkeepers. Most of the new arrivals, however, were indentured labourers, shepherds and vinedressers brought to the colony specifically to meet the demand for workers in the pastoral and other rural industries. Most were young unmarried men. The steamers bringing migrants upriver to Brisbane town from the sailing ships in Moreton Bay were met at the depot (which until the mid- 1860s was near the South Brisbane wharves) by graziers and farmers, who secured two years of indentured labour by paying the worker’s fare. Two shiploads on the Aurora and the Marbs were brought by the agent Wilhelm Kirchner after an approach by pastoralists to provide large numbers of reliable station and farm workers. Almost 2,000 Germans reached the Moreton Bay settlement by the end of the 1850s, a significant proportion of the total population. The work was hard, as was life in general in the raw conditions of the colony, but most migrant workers were treated well, and some chose to stay with their employers for many years. However, the desire for land ownership was strong, and most served only the required two years before seeking other work. When the first Crown Lands Alienation Act of 1860 made land more readily available, they were among the first to buy or select. In the meantime they gravitated to the larger settlements. Most found work in or around Toowoomba and its precursor Drayton, but they also moved in to Ipswich, and to a lesser extent to Brisbane, especially German Station (today’s suburb of Nundah). The first example of German ‘cluster migration’ was the arrival of the Susanne Godeffroy in January 1864. Among the approximately 400 Germans on board was a group from the villages of Günterberg, Greiffenberg, Görlsdorf and Stegelitz in the Uckermark north of Berlin. Befriended and assisted by Pastor Haussmann of the German Lutheran Church of South Brisbane, located close to the immigration depot, this group formed the first almost purely German settlement in the colony. A few of them had family members already in Queensland since 1863, and these joined them, together with two families from other regions of Germany who had been fellow passengers.

A handsome profile of the Susanne Godeffroy, perhaps the best known of all the family’s fleet, wearing the yellow dove of the Godeffroy house flag on the foremast, the red-and-white ensign of Hamburg on the gaff, and a large pennant from the main bearing her name – a typical artistic device of the period. Below: This image of Pastor Haussmann is from the Lutheran Archives, via Kleinschmidt family collection

But the Bethania settlement comprised mainly families who had migrated together from the same area in the Uckermark. This cluster settlement was not to be as common a phenomenon in Queensland as in South Australia. (Another example was the Württemberger in the district around German Station in Brisbane: mainly Nudgee, Pinkenba and Myrtletown.) In February, 22 families boarded the paddle-wheel steamer Diamond and proceeded down Moreton Bay and into the Logan River. There were no proper roads into the area. The settlers had selected land in the Logan Agricultural Reserve on the advice of Pastor Haussmann. Five more prosperous families who had paid their own fares received land grants, and they and Pastor Haussmann purchased additional blocks of land which were divided among the other families, creating holdings of between 5-48 acres (2-19ha). Here they created a German settlement to which they gave the biblical name Bethanien , today’s Bethania.

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