QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

1 Part The Fifth

Continent

Overlooking the waters of the mouth of the Weser River at Bremerhaven stands the poignant Auswandererdenkmal – the Emigrant Memorial. A bronze family stands poised between the Old World and the New, above the Weserdeich from which many migrant ships sailed. The father is reaching out toward the New World with one hand, holding his son by the other. To their right, his wife is casting a final homeward glance even as she bends to pick up their daughter. More than 7.2 million Europeans departed from Bremerhaven’s docks in the century after 1830, most bound for North America, towards which the father figure permanently faces. But the memorial stands for all German emigrants. Reflect for a moment on the differences between the New World on the other side of the stormy, but familiar, Atlantic, and the strange expanses of the Fifth Continent on the opposite side of the planet – where the seasons were reversed and the wildlife could be as deadly as the weather. The settlers of the United States had fought and won their war of independence 12 years before Australia was first colonised by the outcasts of the British penal system. Fifty years on, when German missionaries were first allowed to take up land at Moreton Bay settlement, Charles Darwin had only just returned from his evolutionary circumnavigation aboard HMS Beagle , and Queen Victoria began her six decade-long oversight of not only the greatest empire of the modern world, but also most of the royal houses of Europe. Neither the nation of Germany nor the state of Queensland yet existed, when people from one set forth on long and hazardous sea voyages to the far side of the world to start new lives in the other.

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