QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Dux’s legacy

Keith Farnsworth recounts the tale behind a German fmaily name well-known around the waters of Moreton Bay to this day. Johann Carl Gustav Dux – known simply as “Gus” – was born in West Prussia on 1 June 1852. Johann worked as a seaman, jumped ship in Cooktown in Far North Queensland, and then worked his way down the coast until he arrived at German Station At 20, Johann married Wilhemine Rose from Grunhage, West Prussia.

Gus eventually settled in what is now known as Dux Street, Caboolture. At the time, Dux Street ran right down to the Caboolture River, and it was from here that Gus made his fishing, crabbing and oystering forays. He culled oysters from the banks in Pumicestone Passage, where Matthew Flinders had ventured ashore in a small boat a century before. It was a long hard pull by rowboat from Caboolture down the Caboolture River and across Deception Bay to Bribie Island for Gus, so he would camp overnight when he worked his oyster banks. Much later, Dux Creek on Bribie Island was also named after Gus.

When she died four years later, he married 17 year-old Bertha Lange from Weinsdorf, also in West Prussia. Their first child, Friedrich Carl August, (“Augie”) was born on 2 August 1878.

Dux family home (about 1918) in Broad Street at Labrador. The house, made of saplings and bark with a hardwood floor, was demolished and replaced in 1929 with a more substantial residence. Timbers of the 1918 building were recycled in the hut on South Stradbroke Island. Image courtesy of Peter Ludlow collection

Below: Augie would surely be hard-pressed to recognise the Broadwater today, less than 90 years after he began working its oyster banks.

Main background: Sunset’s afterglow fades behind the Glass House Mountains, standing sentinel over Dux’s legacy beneath the still waters of Pumicestone Passage.

152