QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

New life for a post-war immigrant

An initial visit to Queensland in 1954 whetted her taste for ‘the Sunshine State’ taking in Toowoomba, Cairns and a formal encounter with a koala at Brisbane’s Lone Pine Sanctuary. Background: Ilse in Central Australia; (right) attending to the drawing board at the Department of Works, and (below) receiving a classic Australian welcome at Brisbane’s Lone Pine Sanctuary in August 1954. Images courtesy of family collection

In August 1955, Ilse became an Australian citizen, thereby forsaking her German citizenship. Within two years, her architectural interests had advanced her to becoming a draftswoman in the Department of Works drawing office (“doing the work of a Grade II architect” according to her supervisor’s reference), and she had worked on many municipal buildings, including Darwin’s leprosarium, a new school in Tennant Creek, and an infant welfare clinic in Alice Springs. But the restless spirit which had brought her to Australia now led her to look for a change, and in 1957, further exploration of her adoptive homeland led to a ‘trip south’ thence by train from Adelaide to Melbourne. Briefly revisiting the site of Bonegilla , she travelled via Albury, the Snowy Mountains, Canberra and Sydney, arriving in Brisbane, where her glowing Territorian references secured her a Public Works department job in Brisbane. Shortly thereafter she met a local architect, Colin Tesch, himself a third-generation descendant of German emigrants who had left Günterberg, a small town near Angermünde in the Uckermark region north of Berlin, in 1863.

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