How would you like to spend the beginning of your new life in a new country by living in a hollow tree, joined in this adventure by your husband or wife? Well, this is exactly what a couple by the name of ‘Scholz’ did after their emigration from Saxony to the Barossa Valley in the middle of the 19th century. Before claiming a plot of land on which to build their own little homestead and until they had finished building, Herr and Frau Scholz placed their kitchen, living room and bedroom inside the smooth, protective bark of a eucalypt tree. Presumably a ‘River Redgum‘ (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), a tree that may grow to a height of up to 40 metres with trunks measuring around three metres in diameter at their base. Lightning or bush fires may cause burning of the tree, sometimes hollowing out the trunk, yet not necessarily killing the tree. In fact, eucalypts have an amazing capacity to survive bush fires. Whatever about bush fires, surely the idea of lightning would not have provided much of a sense of home, sweet home’ and presumably the Scholz-couple abandoned their initial dwelling as soon as a more solid roof had been constructed. Unfortunately the tree is not standing any more. Only a small plaque by the wayside in ‘Light Pass’, a settlement about 12 km northeast of Tanunda reminds today’s passers-by that a house is a relatively new invention in Australia.
The nearest neighbour to the Scholz-couple would have been J.H. Luhr, who built his cottage only half mile down the road. Every morning the Scholz-children, their satchels on their backs, chatting away in German, will have walked that half a mile of flat, straight road to J.H.Luhr, who happened to be the first schoolmaster at Light Pass. Today, Luhr’s cottage, built with mud and straw on a wooden frame of River Redgum, illustrates the simple living conditions of the early settlers. A building behind his cottage has been transformed into an old German schoolroom. Here I experienced the drawback of travelling in mid-winter, when hardly anybody is touring: invariably, the day or the hour you visit an interesting place, its museum is closed or the person with the key is away on other duties. Nevertheless, just peeping through the windows, investigating J.H. Luhr’s curriculum, I was instantly swished back in time and place.
Decorating the classroom were the teaching aids of the day: a picture of the delegates at the Vienna Congress and a map of the continent of Europe that these delegates had carved out after Napoleon’s defeat, pictures of a Silesian spinning mill, Silesian villages and names of small Silesian hamlets like ‘Neukirch’. There were sums as well as the individual letters of the old German script, all displayed on big cardboard tables on the walls. Close to one window stood one of the hard ones: a collection of words where the appropriate * (i.e. ‘s’ or ‘ss’ or ‘ß’) had to be filled in. There were pupil’s slates on which they were to practice all these. From my outside observation point I could not spot one English word, let alone an English book. Behind me on the road there could have been a Road Train (semi-trailer-trailer) thundering past any minute, carrying heavy wine-bottles or compressed wool to Port Adelaide or over to Sydney, yet in front of me was displayed a preserved l9th century Prussia, part of which seems to linger on in the Barossa Valley.
Shortly before potato blight and famine were to hit Ireland, Prussians and Silesians started emigrating at a large scale, fleeing poor living conditions and religious persecution. According to German statistics, the population in Prussia increased from 10.4 million in 1819 to 17.2 million in 1855, while the population of Saxony nearly doubled during the same time from 1.2 million to 2.3 million. The first Silesian’s arrived in the Barossa Valley in the early 1840′s and thus just escaping a typhus-epidemic in Upper Silesia in 1847 which hit about 80.000 people and left 16.000 dead.
While health and their poor living conditions will have been the reason for emigration for many, the first group of German settlers in South-Australia had been driven out of Silesia by the Prussian version of penal-laws: King Frederick William III’s moves to unite all Protestants in his kingdom, which initially were not at all successful, finally resulted in draconian laws. The introduction of a united ‘Union Church’ with a common, official liturgy in 1817 was ignored by many congregations who simply continued to use the old Lutheran liturgy until 1830, when, by order of Frederick William, the new one was made compulsory. Non-conforming resulted in prison and confiscation of goods for the pastors of the parish.
“Parishioners who followed the old liturgy found it impossible to hold services or have their children baptised and confirmed….. Seeing no end to the religious persecution, he (Pastor August Kavel from Klemzig, now Klepsk, Poland) decided to emigrate with his congregation… Kavel went … to England, where … he met George Five Angas, a director of the South Australian Company. Through Angas, Kavel was able to arrange for finance to pay the fares of his congregation to Australia. Angas, himself a Baptist and Dissenter, was … willing to assist those who, like himself, had difficulties with the established church. However, Angas also had a keen eye for business and saw that a sizable number of German peasants in the new colony would both contain the prize of food and form a ready supply of farm labourers, enabling the cost of hired help to be stabilised. He was to be proved right on both counts. “
Jupp, J. “The Australian People” Angus and Robertson, 1988, p. 478
This deal between Kavel and Angas, negotiated around 1836, the foundation year of the new colony of South Australia, which had been carved out of the previously bigger New South Wales, resulted in a first group of 4 ships with 517 people on board to land in South-Australia towards the end of 1938.
Being Lutherans, the new settlers built beautiful small churches at their growing settlements, of which the first one was Klemzig, now a suburb of Adelaide. Not all of the new arrivals were young people, as gravestones and plaques in many places reveal. ‘Andreas Doecke’ ‘ for instance, born on 2nd July in 1811 in ‘Nechern’, Saxony, endured the long journey to a new land together with his family in 1851, at the age of 40. A lucky man, we may assume, since he was fortunate enough to live the slightly larger part of his life in the new land: he died in 1893, aged 82 and was buried in the churchyard of the fabulous St. John’s church at Ebenezer near Nuriootpa. Whether the Germans came for reasons of religious persecution at home, like most people who arrived in the 1840′s, or fleeing from disastrous living conditions, like those during the 1850′s, for instance Andreas Doecke, the very young colony of South-Australia both grew and gained: The mixture of professions ensured the formation and stability of living communities, mixed farming where wheat was the main source of income but not the only one, prevented German farmer’s from severe set-backs, and protected the German farming community from having to sell their farms (something, the monoculturing British farmers suffered from). Furthermore, during the time of the gold rushes, German farmers allowed only one family member to go to the gold fields, thus keeping valuable work force at home in the young state and when finally a pest called ‘phylloxera’ did a lot of damage to the vineyards in the eastern colonies, the German subsistence farmers, who had grown grapes for their own consumption so far, grabbed the golden-grape opportunity and ventured into commercial wine-production.
Sticking to their own ways, their own language, and generally sticking together enabled the closely-knit communities to build up and grow for about 70 years, until they became an easy target in the wider context of world-politics after 1914. The suspicion of those days, which partly led to internment, has, in the course of time, vanished. What has survived, however, as I had found out on previous visits to Australia, is the one-time-truth and present-day-myth of the hard-working German.
” Although perhaps given to excess in festive times, their general record of liability, thoroughness and thrill ensured that they were sought after as workers wherever they went throughout the colony. “
Jupp, J. “The Australians”, p 482
Today in the Barossa Valley, along a stretch of approximately 70 km by 15 km, most place names leave no doubt about the origin of their first white settlers. We find ‘Hoffnungsthal’, ‘Krondorf’, ‘Siegersdorf’, ‘Neukirch’, and ‘Gnadenberg’, for example. Other names have become anglicised, like ‘Bethany’ or ‘North-Rhine’ or have been changed totally for political reasons around the beginning of the century. So, the previous ‘Gnadenfrei’ today calls itself ‘Maranga’ which more than likely is the old Aboriginal name for the place. Again for political reasons the English language took over as a means of communication around the same time. Today, economical practicality – the Barossa Valley produces about one quarter of all Australian wines – means that everybody speaks English, although German is used widely alongside with English. In a few shops and bars I felt as if I were sitting in a ‘German kind of a Gaeltacht’ where the customers were talked to in English, but the staff conversed in German among themselves. The difference for me was that this time, as opposed to he Irish Gaeltacht, I actually could understand the gossip going on behind the counter.
All morning I had zigzagged across the Barossa Valley, following the footsteps of Prussians and Silesians that had come to the infant state of South Australia (founded in 1836) and who, after a few years of farming, had taken up the smart idea of growing grapes and making wine. Adventurous and eccentric characters must have been among them as some evidence exhibits in Nuriootpa. Outside the Nuriootpa tourist-information can be found one of the first, if not the first camper van ever to be built in Australia. It is literally a one-roomed house on wheels with a lot of care having gone into detail. This mobile home was fitted with stained glass sash-windows, miniature replicas of the real thing, its steeple end, i.e. above the driver’s cab, was decorated with the family’s coat of arms, its tenants were protected against the weather by a look-alike red slate roof, fully fitted with gutters and crowned by a chimney. Its “walls” were made of look-alike stone work and if one took away the wheels one might as well put it straight into Disneyland as a German house. In this contraption, Herr and Frau Kaesler, on the occasion of their silver wedding anniversary had travelled from Nuriootpa to Broken Hill and further east at a time when there were no established roads in most of the areas they were travelling through. Equipped with a two-way-radio, sufficient water and fuel supplies, an altitude meter and a compass, the Kaesler-couple had steered this solid “stone-house” into the outback, into regions of unexplored bush, happily celebrating 25 years of a – apparently – successful marriage.
Most places along their route would have never seen a house, let alone heard a rattling, clanking and clonking vehicle. Many a kangaroo will have shook its head in amazement, knocking its joey out of a cozy pouch so that it may have a closer look at one of the mysteries of technology. Sticking their heads out of the sash-windows, gazing back at the joeys were, no doubt, the three school aged children of the Kaesler-couple who accompanied their parents on their wedding-anniversary-cum-adventure-trip. One wonders: Did anybody of the family write a diary? Is there any record left of this trip?
Unable to obtain a map disclosing the actual track of the Kaesler-mobile-home, I eventually steered my handlebars towards Kapunda, vaguely on the route to Broken Hill, one of the Kaesler destinations. Kapunda is an old mining town, in fact the first copper mining town in South Australia. The discovery of copper in 1842 quickly turned it into one of the biggest country towns in South Australia, housing a population of 10.000. Kapunda’s history is a textbook showcase of foundation and development of a town.
While the initial copper find provided a starting point, it had a dramatic impact on the foundation of other industries. At first, mining tools and mining machinery were needed and some of them were produced locally at Kapunda. With increasing wealth, the local foundry could successfully sell “luxuries”, like cast-iron decorations for verandahs, the so-called “Kapunda-Lace”. The improving infrastructure of roadways and communications between Adelaide and Kapunda increasingly attracted farming and when the Kapunda mine ceased production shortly before the turn of the century, the foundry had long branched out into the production of farming machinery which of course was high in demand and remained to be so. The products of ‘Hawks’s Foundry’ of Kapunda were well known and held in high regard all over the country. Kapunda’s Historical Museum with old mining relics, machinery, maps and photographs in abundance, is a clear witness to the importance of the town. One will not fail to realise that one has clearly left the wine-growing area of German settlers and, only 15 miles from the Barossa Valley, one has now entered the former domain of Cornish, Welsh and Scottish miners.
At this point I have to apologise to the town of Kapunda, for I did not stay long enough to explore more of its fascinating history.
View Larger Map
