QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Germans meeting the original Australians

At Cooktown biologist Richard Semon overcame his initial scruples and collected remains including crania for scientific purposes. Physical anthropologist Hermann Klaatsch, visiting north Queensland in the early 1900s, measured skulls of living Aborigines skulls and also collected remains, including a rare mummified body from a burial site. These practices and beliefs left their mark. Scientific theories of evolution influenced the harsh legislation passed in Queensland in the late nineteenth century. More recently aggrieved families have made impassioned pleas, for return of their descendants ‘as ancestors, not specimens’, and Aboriginal leaders, the Australian Embassy and German museum staff are negotiating this outcome. In the twentieth century German anthropologists, many from the Fröbinius Institute in Frankfurt, continue to work with Aboriginal Australians, albeit with more enlightened approaches to their research. German settler contacts with Aboriginal people were inevitable. Although the majority took up farms in the south east, the immigrants followed virtually every opportunity offered on the spreading frontiers. Little is known about these interactions, whether they were peaceable or violent, kindly or harsh. This knowledge has been lost or remains buried in family diaries, photograph albums and stories. For example, my great uncle, who was born in the 1890s near the Bunya Mountains, told us stories of how small groups on their way to the bunya harvests followed their old tracks across the family farm and how his mother gave them provisions at the back door. Aboriginal intellectual Mary Graham recalls that German settler families living south of Brisbane showed great kindness to her elders and that they could not believe the reports of German actions during the first and second world wars. Musician and oral historian Mark Schuster has collected stories and songs from shared music making in the past between German and Aboriginal people in the Toowoomba district. Today a principal connection is through German visitors to Queensland. Research shows Germany is the strongest European market for Aboriginal tourism, with more German tourists going ‘outback’ to enjoy Aboriginal cultural experiences. This interest has encouraged a reciprocal flow of Aboriginal creative artists exhibiting art, screening films and performing before large audiences at major cultural venues in Germany.

This was despite the tensions of two world wars when the mission became the ‘enemy and, in 1942, the forced removal of the Aboriginal community by the military at gun point to the distant government settlement of Woorabinda further south. The trauma, cold climate and poor living conditions there contributed to 66 deaths over the seven years of detention. Mapoon (1891-1919) was the first Moravian mission in Queensland, missionary Pastor Nikolaus Johann Hey serving there for over 27 years until war-time animosities forced his retirement in 1919 and he left the mission to the care of the Presbyterian Church. There are other traces of interactions with Aboriginal people in the historical records of Queensland. The explorer Ludwig Leichardt visited Zion Hill in 1843 and noted that in their treatment of the ‘savage children of the bush’ the missionaries had ‘shewn … the white fellow in his best colour. … They were always kind, perhaps too kind.’ In his expedition journals he recorded snatches of vocabulary and observations of the people. Events took a tragic turn on his expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington in 1844-1845 when Aborigines fatally speared a member of his party. German scientists and anthropologists had their own unique interactions with Aborigines as they, along with their British colleagues and rivals, scoured the colony for unique specimens to prove their grand theories of human evolution and classifications of the world’s races. Amalie Dietrich arrived from Hamburg in 1863 to collect specimens for ship owner J C Godeffroy, and over the next nine years sent thousands of plants, birds, spiders, snakes and marine animals back to the Godeffroy Museum. Dietrich has been criticised in Australia for also sending Aboriginal human remains that are now held in the Leipzig Museum of Ethnology.

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