Names
Australian Placenames of German Background
Heckenberg, NSW
A notice board at a school in Heckenberg, a suburb of Sydney
Heckenberg is a suburb 36 km south-west of Sydney that was created as part of a housing settlement project in the 1960s. It was named after a family who settled on land in the area before 1840. Captain Casper Theodore Heckenberg brought his family to Australia from England in 1834.
Captain Heckenberg was born in England. According to the 1916 obituary of his daughter-in-law, Mrs Virginia Heckenberg, in the Sydney Morning Herald, Captain Heckenberg was born in Yorkshire. The German surname indicates that an ancestor of his moved from Germany to England in the distant past. There is a locality in south-western Germany called Heckenberg and there is a hill named Heckenberg south-west of Augsburg in southern Germany. Virginia Heckenberg died in 1916, when the First World War caused strong anti-German feelings in Australia, and the obituary for Mrs Heckenberg aimed to minimise any connection between the family and Germany.[1]
Although bearing a German name, there is no trace of German blood in the family, according to records covering a period of nearly 200 years. Captain Heckenberg's father was a native of Falmouth.
The Sydney Morning Herald, June 1916
◀ Placenames in New South Wales...
♦ Notes:
1. DEATH OF MRS. HECKENBERG. SEN. (1916, June 9). The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), p. 7. Retrieved February 12, 2023, from <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article28781672>
♦ References:
Pollon, Frances. & Healy, Gerald. (1988). The Book of Sydney suburbs. North Ryde (NSW): Angus & Robertson. p.122