QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Militaristic imperatives and migrant incentives

He tapped the desire for migration and promoted the availability of land in Queensland together with assisted passages to the Fifth Continent. Those who paid their own fares would receive immediate land grants, while those who were hired as indentured labourers on arrival had their fares paid by their employers and had to serve two years before being eligible for a land grant or purchase. Travelling extensively within Germany, especially in the north and southwest, Heussler forged commercial links with the shipping firm of Godeffroy and Son, which was rapidly building a maritime trading empire in the South Pacific. He experienced great success in recruiting migrants for Queensland, producing a book and writing tracts to provide information on the new state, land ownership opportunities, agricultural methods and the climate. The work became almost self-perpetuating as early arrivals wrote back to family and friends extolling the opportunities of the new land, encouraging them to make the antipodean journey, and offering experience-based advice on what to bring with them. The most fertile sources of new settlers lay initially in Württemberg, Baden and the Rhineland. By the mid-1860s the net had been cast in Saxony, Hessen, the Uckermark in Brandenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Silesia and Pomerania. The 1860s and early ’70s were the heyday of German migration to Queensland, with a huge influx of new settlers. By the mid-1870s some of the ‘push factors’ had diminished, and the urgency to fill the open spaces of the new state had declined. Queensland adjusted its incentives, and the rush declined to a steady stream by 1880. A small but unusual contingent were the sailors who deserted from visiting German ships and disappeared into one of the many pockets of German settlement. Changing conditions in both Germany and Queensland further diminished the flow: in the next 10 years only another 2,000, with just a trickle of arrivals continuing until 1914.

The troubled social and economic times, growing poverty, threats of war, and the inevitability that the sons of every family would be called into military service led many to consider emigration as an escape to a safer and more prosperous life. (It was significant that the annual numbers of emigrants from Germany fell by half only two years after the cessation of war in 1871 and the establishment of the new nation in a peaceful Europe.) Some in Queensland of German lineage believe that their forebears left their homeland to escape religious persecution. While this was true of migration to South Australia in the 1830s and 1840s, that persecution ceased soon after the death of Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia in 1840. Only few of the Old Lutherans came to Queensland from a background in the confessional Lutheran Church which had resisted the imperial church reforms (the Free Churches of Breslau and Prussia), and these were motivated by the same economic and social concerns as their compatriots, not by religious concerns. All these factors resulted in a large movement out of the German states and later the German nation. An estimated 90% – almost five million between 1860 and 1880 – crossed the Atlantic to the United States of America, lesser numbers selected South America and South Africa, and some even moved east to sparsely populated areas of Russia. Little more than 1% came to Australia. The USA was popular because the journey was shorter and the fares therefore much cheaper. There were already large and well established German communities in the eastern states, especially in Pennsylvania. After 1865 there was also the attraction of free land in some of the frontier territories. Why then did so many of the relative few choose Queensland as their destination? When the state was proclaimed in 1859, the new government realised it needed to achieve a large growth in population to grow economically. There was a deliberate and urgent move to fill the large and empty tracts of land with settlers who would make it productive and build the prosperity of the state as well as their own. The government provided incentives intended to attract the sort of settlers they desired: steady, hardworking, thrifty and responsible families willing to open up new areas and to endure the hardships of pioneer life in the bush rather than adding to the population of the towns and villages. Earlier German settlers had already established a strong reputation, and the government wanted more of them. It appointed prominent German- born businessman Johann Christian Heussler as its Immigration Agent in Europe.

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