QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

A tale of two Templins

Landkreis Uckermark Templin

The Boonah area, some 80km southwest of Brisbane, had been inhabited for thousands of years by the Yuggerabul Aboriginal tribe, and when the first selectors arrived in the late 1870s, they were still able to watch the Aborigines hunting there. In the late 1870s the wave of selectors reached the scrubland on the Teviot Range at the foot of Mount French. Nearby lay the small town of Engelsburg, named after August Engels who started the first shop there in 1876.

Hidden away in the forests north of Berlin, Templin is one of the larger centres of the Uckermark district of Brandenburg, with a history dating back to the 13th century. When farming practices changed in the 19th century many of the peasant farmers lost their jobs, so thousands left their homeland to seek a better life by emigrating to America or, after 1860, to Queensland, where the newly formed government was actively promoting German emigration via its agents.

Ostsee (Baltic)

Uckermark

Stettin

Altmark

Günterberg

Templin

Angermünde

Brandenburg

BERLIN

After 1860 anyone could select a piece of vacant Crown Land in Queensland and pay it off over a number of years, thus enabling poor families to buy their own farms. Many emigrants did not go onto a farm immediately, but instead worked for established farmers, on the railways, as timber-cutters, or as bullockies, and when they had saved enough money, they took up a selection.

The half-timbered houses of Templin’s quiet, cobblestoned streets today (above), not much changed over the centuries despite several wars and decades under Communist rule in the one-time East Germany, were a world left far behind by intrepid migrants like the Zerner family (below) seen here in 1880 on their farm in the ‘other’ Templin, with their prized belongings: five children, three horses and five head of cattle. Image (neg.38950) courtesy of State Library of Queensland

Apart from helping to populate rural Queensland, Templin’s other claim to fame is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who lived there from 1957. The heraldry of the town’s “Wappen” (coat-of-arms) is offered to underscore the contrast between the old world and the new – were such contrast needed. Background: the ‘Pioneer Bridge’ spans the Templin Canal.

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