QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Hilda Finger

A week later, Hilda was declared by the Home Secretary under the Leprosy Act 1892 to be suffering from leprosy and ordered to be removed and detained in the lazaret at Peel Island. The effect on Hilda’s family was disastrous, with her father Herman dismissed from his job at the foundry where he had worked for the past 20 years. Ostracism by the Mackay community was so severe that the family was forced to move from the district. Augusta left with her children, leaving Herman and a daughter, Louisa, to care for Hilda. Herman tried unsuccessfully to sell the family house, but so great was the fear of leprosy that no buyer would touch the ‘infected’ house. In desperation, Herman burnt the house and sold off the land on which it once stood. The firm of John Burke and Son was approved to transport Hilda down the coast to Moreton Bay for a fee of £50 – the firm to supply food and ‘appurtenances’, the Home Secretary’s Office to supply the housing accommodation. Porpoise was a small, iron coastal steamship built in Pyrmont in Sydney; her remains lie in the mangroves just upstream from Karumba in the Norman River, on Queensland’s Carpentaria coast. So on Monday 20 March 1911 Hilda was taken by the police to Flat Top Island anchorage off Mackay, where she was put aboard the little steamer Porpoise . Her sister Louisa accompanied her to the boat and was told that Hilda was not allowed a cabin below decks because ‘only men were below’. Instead she was housed in a wooden box-like structure on deck. Apart from what she was wearing, Hilda had not been allowed to take any clothing with her – this was to be sent to her a month later by her brother in-law. At noon that day Porpoise weighed anchor, and a week later hove to off Peel Island in Moreton Bay on 27 March. A dinghy first brought ashore Hilda and then the wooden box that had been her home for the previous week. The box was burned on the beach. Then a horse and dray took Hilda to the lazaret – the ‘leper colony’ – and to her oblivion. Dimensions: length 92ft 5in (28.1m), later 103ft 8in (31.6m); beam 18ft (5.5m), depth 7ft 6in (5.5m) Weight: 91 GRT (later 110 GRT) Lengthened: 1883 (building date unknown)

Hilda’s parents, Herman and Augusta, migrated separately from Germany. Herman Finger was born in Germany in 1859 and, when he was six, his parents migrated to Australia, arriving in 1866 aboard the Wandrahm, which was quarantined at Dunwich for approximately three months. The family later moved to Bowen, sent by the new state government to assist in building the town’s jetty. Some years later they moved to the new town of Mackay. Augusta Wendland was born in Germany in 1862 and migrated to Australia with her parents when she was 21. They arrived in February 1883 on the Duke of Buckingham and settled initially with the German community at Bethania, near Beenleigh. The Duke of Buckingham was a four-masted iron-hulled barque built in Barrow in England for the Eastern Steamship Company – as well as her full square rig of sail, she was fitted with a 270hp 2-cylinder engine.

The German communities were very closely knit in Queensland at that time, and many of the Duke of Buckingham passengers in fact moved north to Rockhampton and Mackay. Herman and Augusta were married in the Elkana Lutheran Church at Alberton near Beenleigh, south of Brisbane, in 1884, and settled in Mackay. They had ten children – three boys and seven girls, and Hilda was born on 23 April 1891. It appears that Hilda may have contracted leprosy in 1906 while she was a 15 year-old schoolgirl. She was treated for an intractable ulcer on her foot, described as a ‘running corn’ by her family doctor; however his successor suspected leprosy and sent a sample of Hilda’s blood to the government analyst. On 12 October 1910, microscopic examination of this sample of Hilda’s blood confirmed the presence of leprosy. She was then 19 years old and working as a tailoress in Mackay. Dimensions: length 384ft (117.0m), beam 38ft 6in (11.7m), depth 28ft 6in (8.7m) Weight: 2,000 GRT Built: 1880

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