German Australia

• Home

• Introduction

• Chronology
  • Up to 1840
  • 1840-49
  • 1850-59
  • 1860-69
  • 1870-89
  • 1890-1939
  • 1940-59
  • 1960-99
  • 2000 to now
• close

• Issues

• Students

• Primary Sources

• Bibliography

• Site Index

• Search

• About us

• auf Deutsch

Names

Australian Placenames of German Background

Poeppel Corner, Northern Territory / Queensland / South Australia

Poeppel Corner is one of Australia’s state and territory border trijunctions in the interior of the continent. At Poeppel Corner the borders of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland meet. ‘It is one of the best known of the State corners and certainly the remotest.’[1] The nearest town is Birdsville, about 174 kilometres east of Poeppel Corner.

Poeppel Corner is located in the heart of the Simpson Desert and is accessible only by four-wheel drive vehicles. The visitors book shows that about 2000 tourists make the journey each year.

Alan Middleton, surveyor, 2003

New Year's Eve occurs three times at Poeppel Corner because it is at the intersection of three time zones.

Map of Australia showing Poeppel Corner and other state/territory corners

Source: Wikimedia Commons / User:Yarl & User:Papayoung & User:Summerdrought

Poeppel Corner is very remote. Why is it necessary to have exact borders in such a remote location? In his book about the ownership of land, Simon Winchester wrote in 2021 that the dimensions of a piece of land have to be agreed. "Especially its edges, where one piece of surface abuts onto another. In other words, the piece of land has to have boundaries. It needs agreed-upon borders. (…) A sheep baron in Queensland or a bison farmer in Wyoming will know the exact extent of his station."[2] Pastoralists in the Cooper region of Central Australia began lobbying in the 1870s for the borders there to be surveyed because of uncertainty about their exact location. “In 1877 James McLeod, the new owner of Cullamurra run, applied to the South Australian Commissioner of Crown Lands to have the colony's border surveyed urgently, after finding himself in dispute with his eastern neighbour John Conrick of Nappa Merrie over their station boundaries.” The collection of customs duties at the state borders was another factor that made it important to know where the exact borders were.[3]

Bronze plaque on the concrete pillar at Poeppel Corner.

Photo courtesy of Alan Middleton

Who was Poeppel?

Augustus Poeppel, approx. 1880

Photo source: State Library of South Australia [B 57288]

Augustus Poeppel was a surveyor who established the point where the borders of the NT, SA and QLD meet. He was born on 16 April 1839 in Hamburg, Germany, and died on 4 July 1891 in Melbourne. He was the son of Friedrich Poeppel, builder, and Friederike Dorothea, nee Haase. He left Germany with his family at the age of 10 and the family settled in South Australia.[4] Later he moved to Victoria to become a mining surveyor and architect. At the age of 28 he married Mary Kelly in Beaufort. In 1878 Poeppel joined the South Australian Lands Department and was soon appointed to the border surveys. In 1880 he and his survey team travelled westward along the 26th parallel (the border between SA and QLD) until they reached the corner with the Northern Territory. They marked the corner with a timber post, which is now in a museum in Adelaide. This surveying feat was achieved under very difficult physical conditions in the salt lakes and sand hills of the Simpson Desert. Augustus Poeppel and his team returned to Central Australia later to continue the Queensland-Northern Territory border survey, but in the desert conditions Poeppel developed trachoma (an eye disease) and lost 13 kg in weight, which forced him to withdraw from the project in July 1885. He later lost sight in one eye. Poeppel retired to Melbourne and died in 1891.[5]

Today a concrete pillar with a bronze plaque set in the top has replaced the original marker post at Poeppel Corner. The pillar stands 1.8 metres high on a sand dune just above Lake Poeppel. The plaque on top of the pillar shows the names of the states and territory and the name ‘Poeppel Corner’.

The location coordinates of Poeppel Corner are: -25.99682679, 137.99908573[6]

Poeppel Gardens is a street in the suburb of Gillen, in Alice Springs, and named after Augustus Poeppel.[7]

◀ Placenames in the Northern Territory & Western Australia...

Top | »GermanAustralia.com« - Home | Copyright © 2001- D Nutting