QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Sir Leo Hielscher ac

“The Prussians had just fought the Danes and acquired Schleswig-Holstein. In 1870 the Franco-Prussian war began and the Danish boys of 15 were conscripted into the Prussian army. “Well, that didn’t quite suit the family who were thinking of emigrating so they went to Hamburg too. They boarded a sailing ship and got their son Peter Petersen aboard as luggage in a corn sack. Actually he would have been a deserter if the authorities had found him. “Later Peter married an English girl called Foster, so I have English, Scottish, Danish, and German in me, and when you talk about my German ancestry, I am actually only a quarter German. “I married a girl who is Celtic – Welsh and Irish – then my son married a girl

Peter Ludlow secured for us an interview with a very private man who has left a great public legacy of service to Queensland. “My grandfather, Carl Heinrich Hielscher, was eight years old when he left with his family from a village called Hansdorf in Silesia. (Silesia is now Polish and the village is now called Jugowice.) The Hielscher family left in response to an immigration program that the Queensland Government was running with the German Provinces of Silesia, Pomerania, and Saxony. “The Hielscher family left Silesia because the parents wanted their boys to have an opportunity in life which wasn’t there at the time in Silesia. The only options there were to go down the coalmines at age 12 or go in the army at age 12. So they were very brave to leave Hansdorf and travel across Germany to Hamburg – probably the furthest anyone in their family had travelled in generations – and board a sailing ship bound for Australia. “When they left Hamburg, they had four children – all boys – but on the journey out, a sister was born. For their mother, it was a brave act to leave one’s homeland while pregnant, knowing that she would never return. The family arrived in Maryborough in the 1870s. “They had arranged to buy land here – 160 acres – to farm. This was a large area in German terms [65ha], but small by Australian standards. The only catch was that they had to clear the thick scrub on their land with brush hooks first. They were then able to plant their small crops. “Later, in the 1880s Carl Hielscher was to marry a girl of Scottish descent by the name of McDonald, who had been the first non-indigenous female born in Gympie. The McDonalds had a farm in Gympie when Nash found gold there. After some time, they sold the farm and went to live in Teddington Road, Tinana, Maryborough. The Hielschers lived two hilltops down the track, and that’s how the two families joined. “My dad was born in 1893. On mum’s side her father was Peter Petersen from Schleswig- Holstein.

who is a white Russian whose family had left Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, so what does that make my grandkids? “But that’s Australia.”

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