QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Erik Finger

Erik Finger was one of three senior Queensland public servants of German descent who in the 1980s and 1990s were responsible for the implementation of key government policies, writes Robin Kleinschmidt. Erik belongs to the fifth generation of the Finger family in Australia. Their Australian roots were put down in Victoria in 1850, when Christian Finger, a Silesian farmer, arrived in Port Phillip Bay with his family on the Pribislaw , the first Godeffroy ship to come to Victoria from Hamburg via Rio de Janiero. His son Carl Heinrich accompanied the family, and both father and son became small farmers in the Doncaster area, an enclave of German settlers around modern Hawthorn, Balwyn and Kew. Christian owned 13 acres (5ha) near the Yarra River, from which he supplied milk, butter, fruit and vegetables to Melbourne. Both father and son were active in the establishment of the Lutheran Church in Melbourne. Carl Heinrich had eight children, of whom Ernst Ferdinand became an orchardist and flower farmer at North Balwyn, and very active in the Lutheran Church and in local government, where he served as a local councillor. Franz Finger, the first of Ernst’s children, was intended for the church, and sent to Switzerland to study at the Basel Missionshaus . Caught up in the turmoil of World War I in Europe, he was unable to return to Australia immediately after his graduation. He married in Switzerland in May 1919 and, on returning to Melbourne, underwent a colloquium orthodoxiae and was ordained into the Lutheran ministry. The Queensland connection began when he was assigned to the Milbong parish in the Fassifern Valley and, although the centre of the parish moved to Kalbar, he served there for the whole of his more than 40-year ministry. Erik was born in 1938, the youngest of six. After education at the Engelsburg State School at Kalbar (interestingly, the school retained its German name even when the name of the town was changed in 1916) and St Peters Lutheran College at Indooroopilly, he graduated from the University of Queensland at the end of 1960 with a Bachelor of Engineering (Civil). In 1963 he added a Masters degree in Engineering Science (Traffic Technology) from the University of New South Wales. He joined Queensland’s Main Roads Department, where his first job was the on site supervision of the construction of the Julia Creek-Normanton beef-transport road. He then returned to Brisbane, where he spent most of his career on research, road planning and design and traffic. He became Chief Engineer in 1979 and Deputy Commissioner in 1980 with responsibility for construction and maintenance.

In 1982 he was promoted to Commissioner of Main Roads. The rural program included the incremental upgrading of the Bruce and Gold Coast highways and the Warrego highway as far as Toowoomba. Despite the constraints of an annual budget of under $1 billion, much work was done in more remote areas, including upgrading of the Warrego highway west of Toowoomba, and the Flinders, Landsborough and Capricorn highways.

He found great satisfaction in this work and in the productive relationship with local government authorities who performed work on behalf of the department. He led the department in a stronger emphasis on customer relations, including the modernisation and decentralisation of the motor vehicle registration system. He was a member of many national and international committees and standards organisations, including NASRA (National Association of State Road Authorities), ARRB (Australian Road Research Board), and REAAA (Road Engineering Association of Asia and Australasia). In December 1984, a plaque was unveiled to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the naming of the first 100km stretch of National Highway 1 north of Brisbane after the former Public Works Minister H A Bruce, noting that the Bruce Highway was now “sealed over its entire length” of 1,720km to Cairns. Erik Finger and Russ Hinze mla did the honours, attended by the recently-retired but always-dapper Sir James (‘Jim’) Killen kcmg.

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