QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Sub-tropical Germans at Muscatels

Back on the highway, Peter Ludlow decided to take the Oxenford exit and headed up to the lush heights of Mount Tamborine to find “a little bit of Germany in a tropical setting” and meet the hosts of Muscatels, Marion and Stephan Bartholomae.

Stephan said, “she declined as she was reluctant to leave her own village. So they were divorced, and Karl Helmut ultimately remarried in Brisbane – interestingly, to a woman from North Germany! “Later, Karl Helmut joined the Royal Australian Air Force, retiring as a Colonel in the 1990s. He and his family were living in Sydney then, and we had just sold our family advertising business in Germany and wanted to start something new. We thought Australia could hold the key for our future so, before we applied for a business visa, we paid a visit to Australia for three weeks to see whether we could live here. We were not sight seeing as tourists, but as prospective inhabitants. It impressed us and we decided to come. There was an Australian information day in Germany and there was an official who organised visas, so we were lucky to get our business visas straight off. “We joined Karl Helmut and his family in 1998, but found Sydney to be too competitive and too hectic, and decided to look elsewhere. Marion likes the hospitality business, and we had some friends who lived on the Gold Coast, so we decided to move up here. The warmer climate was also an attraction. There were only the usual apartment blocks on the Coast but then we heard about this Bed and Breakfast place on Tamborine Mountain, which was available for private sale. The price was reasonable so we bought it in 2000. It was just after the Olympic Games. The first year we spent with renovating and additions, and we opened for business on New Year’s Eve in 2001. “Looking back, opening the B&B was one of the best decisions we ever made because, in Germany, the market for a family-owned outdoor-advertising business like ours had ceased to exist. These days it’s a handful of big companies ruling the market, so there wouldn’t be any money in it for us. We were lucky when we sold, because we got a good price for our business in a region where the big companies were not in there then. “It’s a much more relaxed lifestyle here on Mount Tamborine, and we go out of our way at Muscatels to provide our guests with the chance to ‘get away from it all’ for a few days’,” Stephan said. muscatels.com.au

Muscatels is a beautiful 4.5-star Bed & Breakfast at Eagle Heights on Tamborine Mountain, an hour’s drive from Brisbane – and it certainly lives up to its slogan. The spacious guest lounge with cosy central fireplace, robust furniture and European nicknacks on the mantlepiece would do justice to any such B&B in Germany itself. There are three guest rooms, each discreetly colour-co-ordinated and distinguished as the burgundy room, the green room, and the blue room. Each offers an extra large bedroom with a balcony overlooking the coast to Surfers Paradise and the ocean. The well appointed ensuite bathrooms include double spas with views. European buffet breakfasts with German-style sausages…Yum! So just how did this little piece of Germany come to find its way into Tamborine’s tropical setting? Stephan explains: “My wife’s grandfather came to Australia in 1950 as one of the first postwar migrants, because there was a great shortage of work in Germany. He came as a builder to Zillmere in Brisbane. His wife followed him a year later after he had become established. Unfortunately, he died in a motorcycle accident in 1959. Their son, Karl Helmut, came here in 1960 to help his widowed mother. He loved it here and decided to stay, so he asked his wife who was still in Germany to bring their children over to join him.

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