QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Emma Holzapfel on the Fifth Continent

The Mount Cotton region, to the southeast of Brisbane, will be revisited in these pages, so here Peter Ludlow provides a story as an appetiser to an immigrant region already well documented – and one with a joyful twist to its end . Emma Elizabeth Schmidt was born in 1870 in the southwest German town of Rastatt, formerly one of the German Empire’s strongest fortresses, bordered by the Rhine and the Black Forest. She moved to nearby Karlsruhe when her father was appointed its stationmaster, and developed a habit of reading every piece of printed matter she could find. Her thirst for knowledge lasted all her life. Although by the 1880s, the first wave of migration had peaked, many Germans continued to accept immigration agents’ (in effect, the Queensland Government’s) offer of assisted passages and promises of access to land, and this led to the first sizeable non-English speaking migrant community at Mount Cotton. At age 16, Emma left Germany accompanying, as a governess, a family emigrating to Queensland. Her father gave her return fare to the father of the family she was assisting on the voyage. She was to proceed to New Guinea where her brother was working, and they were to return to Germany together. She did not receive the money, and so had to find a position to keep herself. Emma had no domestic skills, causing her relatives concern about how she would cope in Queensland. She worked first in Ipswich and then in Brisbane, finding employment at the German Bridge Hotel at Holland Park, built by a German settler in 1880. Emma met John Holzapfel here, where farmers from Mount Cotton often stayed on returning from their trips taking produce to the markets. Emma

and John married in December 1894 and moved to Mount Cotton, where she had to quickly learn how to cook, sew and manage a household. The earliest photograph of their home, taken in early 1895, shows Emma standing in the kitchen doorway with her bread oven outside. By 1906 she had six chil dren, and four more girls were born in the next six years. Emma cooked for 12 family members and four farm workers, and made the girls’ clothing as well as her own. The older girls did the washing, ironing, and housework. After World War I, many unemployed men passed through the district, and Emma fed them and gave them a place to sleep in the barn, in return for wood-chopping. In the wider community, Emma was involved in school and church committees. She kept in touch with her family in Germany and her two sisters, who went to America, and encouraged her daughters to stay in touch with the families in both countries. In April 1929 her husband sent her to visit her family in Germany, where there was a joyful reunion, and she returned in November. In spite of her first 16 years of life in Europe, apparently she had no trace of a German accent in later life in Queensland. Emma died at Mount Cotton on 27 March 1942. Her grand-daughter, Joyce Krause, lived on at Mount Cotton and, in 2000 with co-author Diane Moon, published a history of German immigration to the district – Deutsche Auswanderer - Hope and Reality – with the assistance of Redland Museum (the assistance of which is gratefully acknowledged here), Albert Benfer (mentioned later in these pages) and Pure Print (the printers of this book). Acknowledgements: Text and images supplied courtesy of Bettina Macaulay on behalf of the Redlands Museum

Emma Schmidt and John Holzapfel on their wedding day in 1894.

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