QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Professor Anna Haebich discusses some of the encounters and contacts between the early German immigrants and ‘the locals’ – who had about 40,000 years’ experience living on the Fifth Continent. Germans and Aboriginal people in Queensland have a long history of connections dating from 1838, prior to the establishment of the capital city of Brisbane, through to the present. A main point of contact has been between missionaries and Aboriginal people. There were also scientists and anthropologists who travelled through remote areas to search out Aboriginal culture. Then there were German immigrants who spread out across all the new frontiers. Today tourism and Aboriginal culture are forces bringing Germans and Aboriginal people together. German missionaries hold a special place in the history of Queensland missions. They were significant numerically (eight out of 14 missions in the 19th century had German staff) and in the role they played providing safe havens in areas of frontier conflict. They documented Aboriginal languages and folklore as tools for making converts but also out of a love of learning. Working as families they brought practical skills to develop mission lands. They were also strict and insisted that all must work for their keep. With a very different colonial experience to British missionaries, some were openly critical, causing unpopularity and tensions that escalated during the two world wars. The first German mission in 1838 set several milestones: its founders were the first German immigrants to settle in Australia, the first free settlers in Moreton Bay, Queensland’s first missionaries, and theirs was only the fourth Aboriginal mission in Australia. Happily they also had the practical skills to transform the mission land into a profitable market garden enterprise, the first in Brisbane town. The missionaries were less successful in converting the local Yaggera people (Jagera and Turrbal) to Christianity or to settled farming life. This was the experience of other missionaries at the time while Aboriginal societies remained strong. However mission activity picked up at Zion Hill from 1842 with the arrival of large numbers of free settlers, bringing prosperity for the farm enterprise but deteriorating conditions for the Yaggera people. From their profits the missionaries built a school for the children, began outreach into new areas and welcomed a batch of new pastors and workers. Indigenous encounters

This was cut short by the colony’s economic woes, the departure of Pastor Eipper in 1843 and worsening Aboriginal relations after the near fatal spearing of the missionary, Pastor Johann Gottfried Haussmann, two years later. Mission work virtually ceased in 1846. Meanwhile the community expanded its land holdings and farming enterprises. In the same year resident Carl Friedrich Gerler drew his vision of civilized mission life – Aboriginal children at school and adults diligently farming the land, surrounded by houses and crops – that was now a fading dream. Pastor Eipper’s journals show another side of the mission with his interest in the language and culture of the Turrbal people. Adopted as a ‘brother’ he travelled freely through the bush with the families dependent on their knowledge and friendship to survive. Eipper visited the vast bunya forests north of Brisbane, was taken to ceremonies and noted the abundant food, large dwellings and defined pathways they travelled along. Despite his experience Pastor Haussmann maintained a passion for mission work, seeing this as a ‘moral responsibility’ for Queensland Lutherans. In 1866 he opened Bethesda on the Albert River to the south of Brisbane as a mission for the spiritual and material needs of his congregation and the local Yugambeh people and as a commercial farming enterprise and sugar plantation worked mainly by Aboriginal labor. The mission closed in 1881 following financial difficulties. There were no Yugambeh conversions despite Haussmann’s misguided optimism that leader Bilin Bilin might become the ‘first fruit’ of his mission. From the late 1880s German mission activity expanded into Cape York in North Queensland where sufficient tracts of land were still available. The Lutheran mission, Cape Bedford (Hope Vale), set up in 1886 was the first and, guided by the dedicated missionaries Pastors Schwarz and Poland who served there for 55 and 35 years respectively, became the state’s longest surviving mission community.

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