QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

The Hirschfelds : Four generations serving UQ Otto Hirschfeld, Eugen’s son, was to continue the family’s involvement with UQ.

Peter Ludlow offers a brief monograph of a family which has maintained high- level connections with the University of Queensland for more than a century. Eugen Hirschfeld was born on 22 January 1866 at Militsch in Silesia (Prussia). He studied medicine at Würzburg, and graduated from Strasburg University in 1887. He graduated MD in 1889 for research on eye pigmentation. Eugen arrived in Brisbane in July 1890 and was naturalised in May 1893. He became a leader of the German community in Queensland and, still retaining his German citizenship, he was appointed Imperial German Consul in Brisbane in 1906. He was one of the University of Queensland’s founding Senators, from 1910 to 1914. However during World War I, because of his German citizenship, he was interned at Enoggera and transferred to Liverpool in NSW a week later. Because of ill health, he was released in 1917 but reinterned on the alleged grounds that he had falsified medical evidence. Eugen was deported to Germany in 1920 then went to the USA. In 1927 he was allowed back into Australia and, after a period as a practising doctor on Brisbane’s Wickham Terrace, he acquired properties at Inglewood and Yelarbon and began scientific investigations into pastures and grassland, presenting an account to the Queensland parliament in 1945, a year before his death.

Otto, too, was a medical practitioner and became a member of the Senate in 1950, Deputy-Chancellor in 1952 and Chancellor from 1953 until 1957, the year of his death. Keith Hirschfield, Eugen’s grandson, gained his UQ medical degree during the time his father Otto was chancellor. Keith went on to teach UQ students at Royal Brisbane and Princess Alexandra hospitals, and sat on the Medical Faculty’s board and curriculum committee. Kathy Hirschfeld, Eugen’s great-granddaughter, gained her chemical engineering degree from UQ in 1982 and has since worked around the world, including the last two decades with multinational oil company BP. In 2010 she was appointed to the UQ Senate.

Dr Eugen Hirschfeld, in an undated photograph. Image (digital ID 53584) courtesy State Library of Queensland

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