QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

The Marbs and the Auror a, the first two immigrant ships to arrive at Moreton Bay direct from Hamburg, on 22 March, 1855, brought almost 1000 German settlers, mainly from the Tauber River valley in southern Germany. Some passengers went to jobs in the Ipswich area, some to the Maryborough area, and many to work in the Toowoomba district. The arrival of these first settlers was due to Edward Lord, a storekeeper from Drayton (to the south of Toowoomba) on the Darling Downs, who had visited Germany the year before to promote Moreton Bay. Lord was at a meeting of squatters and businessmen held on 21 July 1851 at the Bull’s Head Inn at Drayton, which pioneered the idea of encouraging German migration direct to Moreton Bay, rather than via Sydney’s Port Jackson. From October 1851 to July 1852 Lord, who had been educated in Germany, advertised in The Moreton Bay Courier , offering to landowners his services as an unofficial immigration agent. Wilhelm Kirchner, the Consul for Hamburg and for Prussia in Sydney, was not happy about Lord’s actions, as he was already the official German immigration agent for New South Wales (of which Moreton Bay remained a part). When Queensland was proclaimed separate from New South Wales in 1859 there were still relatively few Germans (around 2,000) living north of the Tweed River, most migrants having headed to the southern states, lured by gold rushes and other prospects. So, to attract more German migrants, the new Queensland Government set up a committee under Dr John Dunmore Lang (head of the Presbyterian Church in Australia), which sent Johann Christian Heussler, a successful German businessman in Brisbane, to Germany to recruit immigrants for Queensland. Überblick An overview This contemporary painting of Humboldt shows the replacement ship – also a Glasgow-build – for another Sloman ship of the same name which was lost in 1866.

Heussler did a good job, and Germans arrived in Queensland in large numbers over the next decade and more, mainly in family groups. His system was so successful that, by 1879, over 17,000 German speakers had settled in Queensland. Most of them were farmers and agricultural labourers from the poor regions of Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Württemberg, and the majority moved to rural areas of the colony. Large numbers settled in the Rosewood, Fassifern, Lockyer and Darling Downs regions, and later in Mackay, Bundaberg and Maryborough. The Germans settled in some districts where the terrain and vegetation had been rejected by British settlers as too difficult to work. Many German immigrants also found work on the construction of the Ipswich-Toowoomba rail line. Although Germans initially settled in the southeast corner of the colony, soon German immigrants headed north, with many involved in sugarcane growing in the Bundaberg area, Rockhampton, the Mackay region, and some gold-seekers going further north, to Charters Towers. Over 4,000 immigrants came direct from Hamburg through the port of Maryborough, the majority during the period 1865 to 1879, on the vessels Sophi e, Reichstag , Shakespeare , Herschel , Alardus , Humboldt , and Lammershagen . Others came up to the Maryborough district by coastal steamers after arriving first at Moreton Bay. Sophie was an elegant, three-masted 33m-long barque built in Hamburg in 1850 for Godeffroy. Before 1865 she made no less than 13 voyages to Australia but only one to Queensland, the location of this undated photo possibly the Mary River. Image (neg.18774) courtesy State Library of Queensland Dimensions: length 58.6m (192ft 2in), beam 10.2m (33ft 5in), depth of hold 6.5m (21ft 2in) Weight by cargo capacity: 395 CL or 913 GRT Built: Glasgow 1869, for Robert M Sloman Jr Lammershagen visited Brisbane or Queensland four times between 1872 and 1879, and was ultimately wrecked on the Welsh coast at Swansea on 18 November 1882. Image (neg.78845) courtesy State Library of Queensland

Dimensions: length 165ft (50.3m), beam 29ft 10in (9.1m), depth 18ft 6in (5.6m) Weight by cargo capacity: 309 CL or 719 tons Bielbrief (Certificate of Registration): 31 May 1867

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