QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Hubinger of Cardwell Cardwell, 1,500km northwest of Brisbane, was the first port settled on the Queensland coast north of Port Denison (Bowen), and it was an enterprising German who became its greatest champion, as Peter Ludlow explains. The first non-indigenous people to settle at Rockingham Bay – 20 in all – arrived in January 1864. They came from Bowen on the schooner Policeman with the three-ton cutter Heather Bell in tow. Initially named Port Hinchinbrook, the settlement was renamed after Edward Cardwell, the first Viscount Cardwell. Johann Christian Hubinger was born around 1838 in Reitzenhain, located in the Rheinland, west of Frankfurt. It is thought that Johann’s parents were killed in a machinery accident and that he was raised as an orphan where he became apprenticed to a baker and confectioner. German records from an earlier date indicate that Hubinger may have been under the guardianship of relatives and spent time in the United States from 1852. An English census lists a Christian Hubinger working as a “baker journeyman” in London in 1861. In 1865, Johann joined the Montmorency as the ship’s baker, and sailed from London for Australia. He jumped ship at either Bowen or Townsville, presumably as an illegal immigrant. One of the passengers aboard the Montmorency had been Elizabeth Cunningham, who was visiting her sister at Port Denison. Something other than yeast must have arisen during the voyage, for Johann and Elizabeth were married in June 1866 in Townsville, where they operated a bakery and boarding house in Flinders Street. (This boarding house also housed Townsville’s first official ‘hospital patients’.) Elizabeth, whose father was a flour miller in Ireland had been born in County Down. Family legend is that she received her education in the English language in France. She had been at one period an assistant to a chemist and there received the knowledge of the dispensing of quinine, a very valuable tool to have in the malarial tropics.

In 1869 Johann selected a property on the north bank of Meunga Creek, 170km from of Townsville and just outside the settlement of Cardwell, itself barely five years old. His wife and their two eldest children, Abigail and John, joined him shortly after. Johann and his family were to play a key role in the establishment of Cardwell and the coastal district. After residing continuously on the property at an annual rent of £9/15/- Johann obtained the freehold title in December 1874, having met all conditions of his selection, including building a residence, stockyards and fencing, and cultivating five acres. The Hubingers named their property Mucki (Muck-i), taken from the Aboriginal name of a tree growing on the property. (The tree is also known as the Scrub Calophyllum of which the Noorbar tree is the young specimen. The bark of this tree was used by the Aborigines for making vessels in which water and honey were carried.) At Mucki , the Hubingers planted a citrus orchard and grazed cattle. By 1873, the family had moved into the growing township where Johann resumed his former occupation as a baker, although he retained the farm.

View from Cardwell’s beachfront southeast across the benign waters of the Hinchinbrook Channel towards the island of the same name which is the largest island National Park in Australia. Until the town’s jetty was constructed, arrivals and departures by sea had to manage a large tidal range and potentially extensive sand- and mud-flats.

berichard/wikimedia commons

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