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Names

Australian Placenames of German Background

Introduction | NT & WA | NSW | QLD | SA | TAS | VIC

(In these pages the names of Indigenous Countries are based on the AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia.)

Introduction

The British First Fleet which arrived in Sydney / Gadigal Country in January 1788 and the free settlers who arrived later gave English names to many of the places that they occupied. “(Settlers) dotted (the map) with names that captured their hopes and fears in the new land or summoned up memories of the old.”[1] In some places British settlers used an Anglicised form of the local Indigenous place name, e.g. Parramatta (NSW), Maribyrnong (VIC), Willunga (S.A.).

When the British colonial authorities sold land to German immigrants the German-speakers usually gave German names to the land that they settled on. The name Bundaberg is a rare example of an Australian placename that is a blend of an Indigenous element and a German part.

The place names that we today associate with First Nations peoples are usually white settlers’ versions of Indigenous words. The British settlers were not familiar with the complex sound systems of the Indigenous languages that they were hearing, and what they wrote down was an English approximation of the place name they thought they were hearing.[2] Something similar happened in the reverse direction with the German surname Theile in the 20th century.

Tyler Pass is near Mount Zeil (another landscape feature with a German name), about 150km west of Alice Springs. The pass is the highest pass in the Northern Territory and was named after the Trig Station that was established by surveyor Vern O’Brien in 1960. Mr O’Brien and his surveying team were listening to the Rome Olympics on a short-wave radio with poor signal quality and he thought that an Australian swimmer named Tyler had won a gold medal. Mr O’Brien named the Trig Station after this swimmer – he assumed the name was Tyler. The champion swimmer was the Queenslander David Theile, whose father was of German descent, and who won the gold medal in the 100 metre backstroke at both the Melbourne Olympics (1956) and the Rome Olympics (1960). At the time of his swimming career, Theile's name was pronounced in the original German form, sounding like ‘Tyler’. Theile later adopted an anglicised pronunciation, rhyming with ‘meal’.[3]

Occasionally German settlers in Australia created a German place name that was obviously patriotic in nature, such as Bismarck (named after the famous German politician and statesman of the second half of the nineteenth century). Otto von Bismarck played an important diplomatic role in the unification of the German states in 1870, and in the years after German unification four places in Australia were named after him, in Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia. It was generally rare for German settlers to name their settlement in Australia after a person. The most obvious exceptions are Hahndorf in South Australia and the settlements named Bismarck.

Other place names that German settlers created were not overtly patriotic – they were simply a reminder of the place in Germany that some settlers had come from (e.g. Prenzlau in QLD, Hochkirch in VIC), or they were religious (e.g. Lobethal, ‘valley of praise’, in S.A.), or they expressed optimism for the future (e.g. Hoffnungsthal, ‘valley of hope’, in S.A.). Some names simply have a poetic quality or have pleasant connotations, e.g. Rosenthal, ‘valley of roses’, in S.A. and Blumberg, ‘hill of flowers’, in S.A.

Some German place names in Australia were not bestowed by Germans but by the English in Australia. Some examples are names that honour an admired or famous German figure, such as the explorer Leichhardt (the well-known suburb of Sydney), and Coburg (in Melbourne), a name chosen by English settlers to honour a son of Queen Victoria and the German royal house that he was a member of. Another place name chosen by English settlers was Heidelberg (in Victoria and in Tasmania), which was probably popular because of the romantic reputation of the famous German university town, and because English settlers liked the sound of the name. And of course English settlers named some places Germantown because of the number of Germans living there (for example in Victoria near Geelong and also near Bright in the High Country, and in Tasmania and South Australia).

In the anti-German atmosphere of the First World War many German place names in Australia were changed, particularly in South Australia, where the government even passed legislation to change all names of “enemy origin” that a committee had been able to identify. Strangely, the government did not change the name of the state’s capital city Adelaide, which is of German origin. You can read more about the place names of German origin in South Australia in this article.

In other states and territories some German place names were changed during the First World War and some were not. Dr Bruce Baskerville noted in 2014: “Not every German place name was changed in Australia.  Notable examples include Adelaide (SA), Coburg and Brunswick (Victoria), Pyrmont and Leichhardt (NSW) and Hermannsburg (NT).” However, according to Dr Baskerville, Australia seemed more determined to remove German place names than other allied countries.[4]

A few instances of name changing occurred in Canada (e.g. Berlin to Kitchener, Ontario 1916), but none in New Zealand. A bill was introduced in the US Congress in 1918 to change all US towns named Berlin or Germany to Liberty or Victory, but it was never enacted. Changing German place names seems to have been predominantly an Australian phenomenon in the English-language world during the Great War.

Dr Bruce Baskerville

Not all former German place names were changed during the First World War. A small number of them were changed (or fell out of use) before the war (for example Heidelberg in Tasmania) or a few years after the war (e.g. Tanck’s Corner in Victoria).

In some Australian communities whose German place name was changed many years ago, community groups or businesses have acknowledged or paid homage to the earlier German name of the place when they established a new business in the area. Examples of this include:

Blumberg Hotel, Birdwood (SA)

The name Blumberg Hotel acknowledges the earlier German name of the village.

Photograph source: Steve Hudson. The German Influence. Courtesy of WeekendNotes / On Topic Media.

Hochkirch Wines, Tarrington (VIC)

Grünthal microbrewery, Verdun (Adelaide Hills, SA)

Grünthal, the German earlier name of the village of Verdun, on a sign at a business in Verdun that resurrected the German name.

Photo appears here by kind permission of Grünthal Brew, Verdun, Adelaide Hills.

Tanck's Corner, a cafe/restaurant named after the former German name of the village Yarambat (VIC)

The name of the cafe honours the earlier German name of the village.

In some places the former German name of the place lives on in the name of a public facility there, for example Engelsburg Memorial Park in Kalbar, Queensland, or Germanton Park in Holbrook NSW, or in a street name, for example Bismarck Street in Maclagan (a rural town and locality in the Toowoomba Region of Queensland), and Bismarck Court in Collinsvale, Tasmania.

Place names consisting of German elements are a very small proportion of Australia’s place names, however they are the third-largest group of place names in Australia after the names derived from Indigenous languages and the names of English-language origin.[5]

Pseudo-German place names

And then there are the cases of the place names that look German but are not! Krambach is a village in the Mid-North-Coast region of New South Wales. Krambach is an English spelling of the Indigenous name Gurambak (meaning a species of gum tree)[6], but this anglicised spelling makes it look very much like a plausible German name, as 'Kram' and 'Bach' are both German words. Coincidentally, a road two km south-east of Krambach is called Germany Lane. A very similar place name, Krumbach, is moreover the name of a village in the Austrian state of Lower Austria. Presumably the local people of Krambach, New South Wales, always knew that the placename Krambach was of Indigenous origin and so its German appearance was not a problem during the First World War.

See also the Indigenous placenames Karte and Kunden in South Australia, which were formally instituted when the South Australian government aimed to replace all German placenames during the First World War.

Names of German scientists in the landscape of Central Australia

During the 19th century quite a large number of scientists from the German-speaking countries were active in Australia. Some mountains in Central Australia are named after German scientists, for example: Mt Liebig, Mt Zeil, Mt Sonder, Mt Winnecke, Mt Leichhardt, Mt Heuglin, Von Treuer Tableland, Mt Feldtmann, Sachse Bluff, Haast's Bluff, Mt Von Mueller, Mt Mueller, Ferdinand Hills. The botanist and researcher Ferdinand von Mueller asked the explorer Ernest Giles to name a group of mountains near Uluru after the Queen of Württemberg. For a long time they had the name The Olgas (Queen Olga). Today they have the Aboriginal name Kata Tjuta. You can read more about places and landscape features named after Ferdinand von Mueller in this article.

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