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* You can search this page for a specific year or person by using the combination of the keys Ctrl F on your keyboard.
1850s
Gold
rushes!! The discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales led many
people from the German-speaking countries to try their luck in Australia. Some
moved on to goldfields in Queensland. Many stayed in Australia, though some
moved on to new goldfields in New Zealand. German farmers of South Australia
tended to stay where they were, with the reliable produce of their farming work.
Some families, however, sent one man from the family to the Victorian goldfields
to try his luck. For example, read about quick-thinking Dienegott
Jaeschke, who met a bushranger (outlaw) on the way home to SA.
More on Germans on the Victorian goldfields...
German speakers comprised the largest group from Europe with about 20,000 arriving
in Australia in this decade. The only European group to emigrate to Australia
in large numbers after 1850 were German speakers.
1850
On 19th March Pastor Matthias Göthe arrived on the Clifton and soon
started work in Sydney as Professor of Maths and Modern Languages at Dr John
Dunmore Lang's "Australian College" (Dr Lang, whom Göthe had
met in England, was supportive of German immigrants). He also preached to a
small German congregation in Sydney. He later did a lot for the Germans in the
Melbourne area.
More...
In
March a group of German and Wendish farmer settlers
from Mecklenburg, Sachsen and Schlesien established a close-knit farming community
just to the north of the city of Melbourne on land acquired on their behalf
by the prominent Melbourne merchant William Westgarth. Many of them had arrived
on the Pribislaw from Hamburg on the 2nd of February. Westgarth actively
promoted German immigration to Victoria. Over time the village was known by
various names: in 1850 Keelbundora (after the parish in which it was located);
~1851 Dry Creek; ~1855 New Mecklenburg; ~1860 Westgarthtown; ~1900 up to the
present Thomastown. Many of the first settlers were Wendish/Sorbian, reflected
in family names such as Wuchatsch, Ziebell, Zwar and Kupsch. The Westgarthtown
church is the oldest continuously operating Lutheran church in Australia, opened
on 17th November 1856. Today the farm buildings and church lie within the suburb
of Thomastown and are an example of an old German-style village, with one home
restored to its original condition as a heritage site.
Photos and more of Westgarthtown, including tours...
1851
The Silesian Catholic Franz Weikert and the Austrian Jesuit priest Alois Kranewitter bought a large piece of land at Sevenhill, about 6 km south of Clare in South Australia, and established a Jesuit seminary. Weikert had led a group of Silesian Catholics to South Australia in 1848, but had not been able to keep them together after arrival. The Sevenhill community was organised in the European style, with houses and farms grouped around a central church and a college/seminary. The seminary trained many priests, and at its peak in 1898 sixteen Fathers and eleven Brothers were working there. This close-knit German-speaking Catholic community was an exception; generally German-speaking Catholics blended into existing Anglo-Irish Catholic congregations. Alois Kranewitter later went to Melbourne and worked for the Catholic Church there.
1852
German-speaking Sorbs/Wends from the Barossa Valley
seeking better and more land moved into the Western District of Victoria, having
heard reports of good land available there for them. The first group of families
arrived at Portland on 26th May after an overland journey of about four weeks
on wagons. They had to wait and rent property for many months; the land they
were hoping to buy wasn't available, and land speculators and squatters forced
prices up. They moved north to the area around today's Hamilton and were finally
able to establish several German-speaking settlements such as Hochkirch (now
Tarrington) and Gnadental ("Valley of Grace"), near Penshurst (1853).
Among the early settler families were the Hufs, Petschels
and Mibus's (Hochkirch), and the Bürgers and Mirtschins (Gnadenthal).
On the 5th August Georg Balthasar von Neumayer, astronomer and geophysicist,
arrived in Sydney on the Reiherstieg at the age of 26. He carried out
geological and magnetic investigations during travels in Australia and became
a leading figure in Melbourne scientific circles.
More...
Johann Joseph Eugen von Guérard (known in Australia as Eugène), Australia's
most important romantic landscape painter of the third quarter of the 1800s,
arrived at Geelong on 28th December on the Windermere. He was born in
Vienna; his father, Bernhard, was a court painter to Emperor Franz I of Austria.
More...
1853
Ferdinand Jakob Heinrich von Müller was appointed Government Botanist in the
Colony of Victoria. He had arrived in Australia at Port Adelaide six years earlier
on 18th December 1847 on the Hermann von Beckerath, leaving Germany for
health reasons. From 1857-73 he was director of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens
and was a well-known personality. He travelled extensively in Australia collecting
specimens of animal and plant life and classifying them for the scientific world.
Several of his suggestions had practical benefits for agriculture in Australia.
More on the Baron...
Wilhelm Heinrich Ferdinand Kaiser arrived at Adelaide on the Steinwärder.
Born in 1833 at Clausthal (in a mining area of the Harz Mountains), he trained
there as an ore-sorter. Kaiser spent time on various Victorian goldfields and
in 1875 he was appointed manager of the Mount Bischoff Tin Mining Co. at Waratah
in northwest Tasmania. When it was found in 1871, the Mount Bischoff mine was
the world's largest tin mine, and by 1880 had paid £210,000 in dividends. In
1898 Wilhelm Kaiser was the first non-British person to be elected President
of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy.
Herrnhut, a religious utopian commune, was established about 24 km south-east
of Hamilton in Victoria's Western District by Johann Friedrich Krummnow, a religious
zealot who had originally arrived at Port Adelaide on the Catharina on
22nd January 1839, from the province of Posen in Prussia. Krummnow's followers
had to give him all their belongings to finance the commune. At its peak it
had about 15 buildings, including living quarters, church, hospital and school.
However, Krummnow's followers weren't impressed when they discovered that the
whole property was registered in his name, and skilled workers gradually started
wanting to earn wages outside the commune with their skills. The numbers declined
and the commune was finished when Krummnow died in 1880.
More about Krummnow and Herrnhut...
1854
In November the brilliant concert violinist Miska (Michael) Hauser arrived in
Sydney. He had been born in 1822 in Pressburg, a city on the border of Slovakia
and Austria. At that time the city had a large German-speaking population -
today it is called Bratislava and is the capital city of Slovakia. Hauser's
brother Sigmund worked in Vienna for the newspaper "Ost-Deutsche Post"
and published in that newspaper Miska's entertaining letters written in German
from Australia. Miska sent his letters from the colonial capital cities and
regional centres of NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland and South Australia.
He left Australia in June 1858.
Germans were among the rebel miners who took part in the Eureka Stockade rebellion
on the Ballarat goldfields on 3rd December, the closest Australia has come to
a civil revolution. Three Germans died there.
More on Germans at the Eureka rebellion...
The Victorian government mistakenly believed that Friedrich Wern (Vern) was
the leader of the uprising and offered £500 reward for his capture.
More about Vern... (including the Wanted poster).
1855
The first Swiss consulate was opened in Sydney. Then in 1856 Achille Bischoff
was appointed the first Swiss vice-consul in Melbourne. This official representation
was made necessary by the large increase in Victoria’s Swiss community caused
by the arrival of many gold-diggers. Bischoff was one of the few Swiss businessmen
living in Melbourne and was from an influential banking family in the city of
Basel.
A large influx of German settlers arrived in Tasmania this year aboard immigrant
ships from Hamburg (Lewe Van Nysenstein - 24th May; America -
23rd June [ex Liverpool]; Wilhelmsburg - 26th August; San Francisco
- 2nd November). 134 Germans also arrived on the Montmorency on 28th
May, who had travelled first to Liverpool in order to sail for Launceston on
that ship. Gottfried Wilhelm Beutenmüller (later Miller) and his wife Christina
Catharina, from the Montmorency, bought land at Upper Piper in 1862,
26 km north-east of Launceston.
More on German-speakers in Tassie...
29 year-old Friedrich Herbig from Grünberg in the Prussian province of Silesia
reached Adelaide on the Wilhelmine after an uncomfortable trip (bad food,
poor conditions on board) . He soon went to the Black Springs area, where he
worked on a dairy farm owned by George Angas. He lived in the hollow base of
the trunk of a huge 21 metre-high gnarled river redgum tree; the base was 6
metres across at the widest point! It was near a stream and near the road to
his workplace. Herbig married Anna Caroline Rattey in 1858, who had arrived
from the Prussian province of Posen in November 1856, and two of their sixteen
children were born in the tree-home, which they lived in until 1860. The tree
is Australia's most photographed tree, and is estimated to be 300-500 years
old.
More on the Herbig Tree, and the nearby Friedensberg
school...
In March the bushranging (outlaw) life of Victoria's Harry Power began, as a
result of an encounter with two German police troopers, who were drunk, according
to Power. He was riding his own horse in the Maryborough (central Victoria)
area when the German troopers stopped him and told him they didn't believe the
horse belonged to him, and asked for evidence that it was his. An argument developed,
during which Power thought he had to protect himself with his revolver. He injured
the troopers and rode off. He was soon captured and was sent to Pentridge Prison
for 14 years. A few months before the end of his prison term he escaped from
Pentridge. He then committed many robberies and hold-ups across many parts of
Victoria, before he was captured in 1870 through betrayal by Jack Lloyd. He
later said that his life would have been different if the incident with the
German police troopers had not happened. Photo: Power in prison.
The Marbs and the Aurora, the first two immigrant ships to arrive
at Moreton Bay (Brisbane) direct from Hamburg, brought almost 1000 German settlers,
mainly from the Tauber River Valley in southern Germany. Arriving on 22nd March,
they were more than a quarter of the year's total immigration into what is now
Queensland. There had been 47 deaths on the ships due to outbreaks of typhus,
cholera and measles. Some passengers went to jobs in the Ipswich area, some
to the Maryborough area, and many went to work in the Toowoomba district. The
arrival of these settlers was due to Edward Lord, a storekeeper from Drayton
on the Darling Downs, who pioneered the idea of encouraging German migration
direct to Moreton Bay, rather than through the port of Sydney. He had been at
a meeting of Darling Downs squatters and businessmen held on 21st July 1851
in the Bull's Head Inn at Drayton. This meeting decided to bring German workers
direct to the Moreton Bay (Brisbane), rather than through Sydney. From October
1851 to July 1852 Lord, who had been educated in Germany, advertised in the
Moreton Bay Courier, offering to landowners his services as an unofficial
immigration agent. Wilhelm Kirchner, the Consul for Hamburg and for Prussia
in Sydney, was not happy about Lord's actions, as he was already the official
German immigration agent for NSW (which still included Moreton Bay). Edward
Lord's 1854 trip to Germany promoting Queensland was a major factor in the emigration
of the passengers of the Marbs and the Aurora.
1856
The Langmeil-Light's Pass Synod of the Lutheran Church in Australia, meeting at Langmeil (part of today's Tanunda), passed a resolution that strictly forbad going to dances, balls and theatres.
1858
In January the South Australian parliament passed into law the "Real Property
Act". The Hamburg-born lawyer Dr Ulrich Hübbe had a key role in the development
of this legislation, commonly known as the Torrens Title System, a system for
the registration and transfer of land titles when property is bought and sold.
It replaced the cumbersome and complicated English Deeds System. The Torrens
System was adopted by the other Australian colonies, New Zealand, some US states
and other countries.
More...
Bernhardt Holtermann (>>),
politician, businessman and goldminer, arrived in Melbourne on 7th August on
the Salem and travelled straight to Sydney. He was born in Hamburg and
had emigrated at the age of 20 to avoid military service in the Prussian army.
At first he had trouble finding work because of his lack of English. In 1861
he and Ludwig Hugo Louis Beyers went to the Hill End area to look for gold.
During the next 10 years at Hill End, as well as digging for gold Holtermann
ran a hotel. In 1872 he found the world's largest specimen of reef gold, making
him wealthy. He had a huge collection of photographic plates which he'd commissioned,
depicting Sydney and Australian mining towns. He used these photos on his travels
around the world to promote migration to Australia. The photos won several awards
at exhibitions in the USA and in Paris.
The Adelaide Liedertafel, Australia's oldest male voice choir, was established
(still in action today).
The frigate S.M. Novara of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy
arrived in Sydney Harbour on November 5th, as part of its two-year voyage around
the world. At that time it was considered to be the largest warship to have
sailed in the southern hemisphere. The voyage was partly a public relations
exercise for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, promoting diplomatic and trade relations,
but the Novara also carried a large number of Austrian scientists, who
investigated various aspects of the area around Sydney before the ship left
on December 18th. The Novara's visit was a big social event for Sydney
too, and dances and balls were organised by Sydney's German-speaking and non-German
speaking population, and on the ship itself. The Novara's scientists
met government ministers and academics from Sydney University. During the short
visit Georg Ritter von Frauenfeld, a zoologist, did and saw a lot. He thought
it a pity that many museums in New South Wales did not give a high profile to
native Australian flora and fauna. Dr Karl Scherzer described many aspects of
life and culture in Sydney, including the high level of alcoholism in the colony
(he was not the only German/Austrian to be shocked at this: Ludwig Becker, Count
Reinhold of Anrep-Elmpt and others were also surprised). After the Novara's
return home, books, lectures and exhibitions increased Austro-Hungarian citizens'
knowledge about Australia. The Novara was the most famous of many Austro-Hungarian
naval ships that visited Australian ports in the second half of the 19th century.
1859
The Ebenezer mission station (Ebenezer meaning "stones of peace")
was established on the Wimmera River 4 km west of Antwerp, Victoria (1859-1904).
German missionary activities elsewhere included: German Station at Moreton Bay,
Queensland (from 1838); Ramahyuck at Lake Wellington in Gippsland, Victoria
(from 1862); Encounter Bay and Port Lincoln, South Australia (from 1840); Bloomfield
and Mari Yamba, Queensland; Koonibba, west of Ceduna in South Australia (from
1901); Lake Boga, Victoria; Beagle Bay, in the north of Western Australia (begun
in 1890 by French Trappist monks, handed over to German Pallotine Brothers in
1901; around 1980 the Aboriginal community there became self-governing, though
the Pallotine priests still serve as chaplains to the community).
More on Ebenezer...
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