QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

J C Heussler

If one person out of thousands deserved singular mention, then it must surely be this man, as Robin Kleinschmidt explains. Visible signs of Heussler’s life in Queensland, more than 100 years after his death, are twofold. The first is a street in the Brisbane suburb of Milton which bears his name: Heussler Terrace. The other is the palatial home which he built in the heyday of his first prosperity on the then-distant outskirts of the fledgling town of Brisbane. He named it Fernberg (‘distant mountain’), which it retained in its vary ing fortunes after he was compelled to sell it, even surviving the replacement of all German names during World War I. Johann Christian Heussler was born in 1820 into a merchant family, in Bockenheim near Frankfurt. Business was a tradition which he was to continue, starting his career as a wine merchant. He migrated to Australia in 1852, establishing a wine merchant partnership in Melbourne. Although he enjoyed commercial success, particularly with trade in the new gold town of Ballarat, the Victorian climate was bad for his health, and he and his family moved to Brisbane in 1854. Once again he set up as wine merchant with premises in Queen Street. Heussler was a complex personality. He had the eye and the skill of an entrepreneur, and the ability to promote himself as well as his business concerns. Despite failures and criticisms, he was able to establish and maintain a significant public profile. By the early 1860s he had achieved a degree of prosperity which enabled him to purchase two large adjoining tracts of land with a prominent hilltop site on the fringe of the town. Here in 1864, using stone quarried on the site, he built the imposing Italianate villa to which he gave the name Fernberg . It was a mark of both his prosperity and his standing in the growing town. In 1863 he was appointed the Netherlands’ Consul and in 1866 nominated to sit as a member of the Legislative Council, the Queensland Parliament’s upper house. His business and commercial interests and official duties made demands on his time and took him interstate and overseas for long periods, resulting in his position on the Legisla tive Council being revoked. He was reappointed in 1870, and stayed in parliament a remarkable 38 years until his death in 1907. Although bankrupt in 1872, his reputation and social acceptance did not appear to suffer, for he restored his financial position, and received fresh honours.

In 1880 he was appointed Consul to Queensland for the German Empire and, in 1897, at the age of 76 he was appointed as Queensland Commissioner to Germany, with the role of promoting trade and migration. It had been as an immigration agent that he made the most lasting contribution to Queensland. In March 1861 he was appointed the Queensland Immigrant Agent to “the continent of Europe” but, despite this broad responsibility, he restricted his activities to the German states. In 1859 he had formed a partnership with Reinhold Francksen, who was the Consul for the Duchy of Oldenburg and thereby had useful contacts when they worked together on immigration issues. Francksen proved to be an able assistant until his death in 1863. Heussler travelled extensively within the German states, but also employed sub-agents. Although he recruited migrants from all parts of Germany, most came from the southwest, including Rheinland, Baden, Westfalen, Württemberg and Hesse, and the north, Brandenburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Pomerania. The Uckermark north of Berlin was a particularly successful recruiting ground. Heussler produced a booklet, Kurze Beschreibung der Kolonie Queensland (A Short Description of the Colony of Queensland) which painted a rosy picture of the new state. It lauded the climate, the stable government, the energetic political life, the educational opportunities and the religious freedom. It claimed that in the mild climate two or three crops a year could be planted and harvested. However the main attraction was the opportunity to acquire land, an impossible dream for most Germans of that time. The Crown Lands Alienation Act of 1860 and related regulations regarding immigration guaranteed to every migrant who paid his own fare a grant of land to the value of £18, with the same for all other adult family members and half for all children.

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