QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

In this precis of John Moran’s “In the Grip of the Grape” Peter Ludlow sketches a little of the extent of the early immigrants’ efforts with the vine. Because of the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, Britain had restricted access to French wines, and so was keen to develop wine growing in its Australian colony (indeed, grape vines were sent out with the First Fleet in 1788). Edward Lord had arrived in Moreton Bay in 1841, but the Colony was not open to free settlers within a 50-mile (80km) radius for another year, and so he moved to Drayton, at the gateway to the Darling Downs, where he was involved in trading and wool classing. As Lord spoke fluent German, having been educated there, the New South Wales government had him select immigrants to come to the Darling Downs and Lockyer areas. So in November 1852, 75 Germans – mainly vine-dressers and shepherds – were transshipped from Sydney to Brisbane on the Reiherstieg for stations mainly on the Darling Downs. Over the next decade nearly 1,000 Germans settled in the Darling Downs but, by then, for most of their squatter employers, viniculture had lost its appeal. Indeed they had seen viniculture as something of an excuse to cheaply import labour. At a land sale in 1856, German immigrants Michael Epple and Johann Holl each bought land at Drayton’s Swamp (depicted on early German maps as ‘Tuwumba’ and now, of course, known as Toowoomba). It took Epple 10 years to master viniculture in his new environment but, by 1862, was said to be the first man on the Downs to produce a fine wine. A number of other Germans followed his lead and, in the 1860s and 1870s, German viniculture flourished there. Early viniculture

Many Germans favoured Toowoomba because the climate and soil were most similar to that with which they were familiar. Although high excise duties and licence fees, combined with a fall in quality, led to a progressive shift to grains and cropping, experiments elsewhere continued, with varying degrees of success. Roma: George Käseeker (born in Baden 1832, arrived in Moreton Bay district 1855, and went to Roma about ten years later); also Philip Röbig. St George: Ernest Seidel first planted vines there in 1862, also Harry Kuchler, and this area has become one of Queensland’s major table grape regions. Coominya: Commercial vineyards began in the fertile Brisbane and Lockyer Valleys in the 1870s. Jacob Banff was born in 1836 in Prussia, emigrated in 1863 on the Beausite , and moved to Fernvale eight years later. In 1880 he bought 160 acres (65ha) of land, which he called Clinton and, in 1872, married Julia Starck, who encouraged him to grow grapes and start winemaking, a practice that his family carried on into the 1950s as Banff Bros. At one stage they even employed the services of vine expert Hippolyte Serisier, who later purchased the Assmanshausen winery near Warwick. Wine production gave way to fruit in the 1930s but fruit and grape growing continued well into the 1990s.

Roma

Miles

Condamine

Kedron Brook

Dalby

Coominya

Drayton’s Swamp (Toowoomba)

Brisbane

Ipswich

Toongara

Warilla

St George

Warwick

0

20

40

60 miles

Goondiwindi

Stanthorpe

0 20 40 60 80 100 km

116