QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Wir haben Geheimnisse

My brother Mirko and I spent our early years in Stuttgart with our parents, Roland and Birgit Vogel. My father worked for Mercedes Benz and in 1988 was offered a three-year contract to come and work for the company in Melbourne.

but nobody cares

We all accompanied him, and at that time I was seven years of age and Mirko nine. For an impressionable seven year old, the stories I was teased with about Australia before we left Germany were alarming: Australia was down under on the other side of the world, so everything was upside down, and the people spoke backwards! Then there were the wild animals to contend with. It was a relief to find that these stories weren’t true, although we were alarmed at the grunting noise outside our window one night, which turned out to be a mating koala. I did a lot of horse riding, too, so soon became used to the sight of snakes.

Our family moved to Brisbane in 1994 where dad worked for different firms, before he returned to Melbourne to work. The rest of the family followed him except me, and I chose to remain in Brisbane. One of my interests is to play keyboards, and from 1998 I played with Sekiden, a Brisbane synth-pop trio. Later from 2007, I played full-time with rock band Regurgitator for a few years. I then thought it time that I got a regular job, and now I work for the Executive Director of Education Queensland International (EQI), which is part of the Queensland Government. EQI develops and promotes programs for international students who want to study at a Queensland Government School. Mirko is also involved in the popular music industry. He works as a sound engineer as well as a tour manager and has been able to use his background to manage a few German artists in Australia. My first solo album We Have Secrets But Nobody Cares was released in Australia in March 2010. It comprises songs that I have composed myself, and includes one German language song Wir Haben Geheimnisse . I will soon be recording my second album, for which I have received an Arts Queensland Grant, and I’ll include another German language song there as well. One day, perhaps, I shall record an entire album in German, in acknowledgement of my German roots.

Before we came to Australia, both my parents studied English. However, when we arrived in Australia we found that Australian English was another language again. Imagine the panic at home when the telephone rang! Dad needed a translator with him at his work meetings at first but mum soon picked up the local jargon at our school’s mothers’ group. Mirko and I first attended the Rudolf Steiner

School in Melbourne where students had the same homeroom teacher from Grades 1 to 8 and where the motto was to help their students develop their thought life, deepen and broaden their feelings and harness their energy for the good of the world. After we left the Steiner School we attended Wesley College. Dad’s three-year contract had been extended

to five years, and when that expired, he was faced with the choice of returning to Germany to continue working for Mercedes Benz or remaining in Australia and working for another firm. A move back to Germany would have disrupted our education, so he chose to stay in Australia and step aside from Mercedes Benz.

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