QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Rocky road to Rocky Point

The Rocky Point sugar mill has been an iconic landmark for several generations of Germans and Queenslanders, servicing the close-knit farming communities working the thousands of hectares of canefields between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, as Peter Ludlow and Robin Kleinschmidt explain. After the closure of the German mission station at Zion Hill on Brisbane’s northside in 1848, most of the mission families stayed on as free settlers, but some continued in Christian ministry. Among these was J G Haussmann, who trained and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and served in that church before returning to his Lutheran roots. After serving congregations in Victoria and Brisbane he returned in 1866 to his main calling: ministry to the Aborigines. After appealing to the Gossner Mission Society in Berlin for assistants, he set up Bethesda , a sugar plantation and mill at Philadelphia (Eagleby) on the Albert River. He hoped to employ Aboriginal people and to convert them to Christianity through exposure to a Christian community while working on the plantation. However, the local Aborigines did not prove willing labourers and were reluctant to forego their nomadic existence to settle and have their souls saved. Once again his venture failed. It was Captain Louis Hope who, in 1862, first grew and crushed sugar cane in commercial quantities at his property Ormiston . When granted 2,560 acres (1,035ha) of land on the Coomera River (today called Hope Island) for growing cane, Captain Hope imported South Sea Islanders, or Kanakas, to supply the necessary labour. There were great hopes for establishing a cotton growing industry in Queensland when the Civil War in America interrupted global supply. When Robert Towns brought in South Sea Islanders to work on his cotton plantation on the Logan, he justified this import of cheap labour by arguing that the German immigrants (who predominated in the Logan region) had excessively large families, ate too much, and were reluctant to work for the wages being offered to the South Sea Islanders! Carl Heck, with his wife Johanna and six-year-old daughter Anna Louise arrived at Moreton Bay in 1866. They went by boat to the small settlement of Alberton on the bank of the Albert River, which had by then been largely selected by other German pioneers. Like all other settlers at that time, they had to construct their own housing from the bush: first a temporary ‘humpy’, then a more substantial slab hut. Here walls and floors were made from wide slabs split from ironbark trees, with roofs of bark or hardwood shingles.

The Hecks began farming straight away, initially maize, arrowroot, vegetables and grains. Carl was grist miller. Getting their crops to markets in Brisbane was a problem in the early days because there were only rough walking tracks to Alberton or Beenleigh and all transport had to be by boat. Even when roads were constructed, overloaded wagons were difficult to brake on hills. Transport problems eased in 1870 with the opening of the bridge over the Logan River and the introduction in the following year of a weekly Cobb and Co coach between Brisbane and Nerang Creek. When Carl Heck began growing sugar in 1866, there were also a number of other growers in the area, with as many as 40 farm-based mills then in operation to crush cane. These mills were crude by modern standards and consisted of vertical rollers of ironbark some 30in (76cm) in length and 18in (46cm) in diameter. Horses drove these rollers and the extracted juice was boiled in open pans and set aside to granulate. With the price of sugar dropping in the 1870s and the closure of some mills, there was a need to reduce costs. At a meeting of the Agricultural Society of Southern Queensland in 1871, it was voted to continue using Kanaka labour, on the grounds that it was quite impossible to carry on any sugar estate successfully without it. (Kanaka labour was utilised around the Pacific rim in the late 19th century, from Australia to Canada and Chile, so-called ‘blackbirding’ schooners running the gauntlet of naval patrols to deliver reluctant Melanesian workers to plantations. The practice ultimately caused social unrest and one of the first acts of the new Australian Parliament in 1901 was to end the trade and repatriate the islanders.) Carl Heck, for whatever reason, was not present at the meeting, and indeed never had employed, nor ever would employ, Kanaka labour. So he grew his subsistence crops, until in 1879 at Pimpama Island he established his own mill at Rocky Point, which produced one ton of sugar per hour. Rocky Point was a larger property with beautiful red volcanic soil, right at the mouth of the Logan River, but it had one key drawback – there was no road access across the salt marshes to the mainland. Eventually, he and his family constructed a ‘corduroy path’ with mangroves and mulch, but soon came to realise he had outgrown the small property. Carl decided to move to the current site in Mill Road, more central to the suppliers (a fact significant for its survival) in 1886, but retained the name. The ‘secrets’ to the mill’s survival were Carl’s persistence and hard work, the tight-knit German community in the area, the central site of the mill, and innovative approaches to transporting cane.

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