Reverend Carl Wilhelm Schmidt (died 1864 [1] ), also known as Karl Schmidt, was a German missionary, and an ordained minister of the Prussian United Church. [2] Schmidt's missionary work took him to Queensland and Samoa, where he founded a number of Lutheran institutions and settlements. [3]
Schmidt was born in Stargard, Pomerania (now Poland). He studied at the Universities of Halle and Berlin, before becoming the first theological student of Johannes Gossner, a minister of the Bethlehem Bohemian Church in Berlin. Gossner was the founder of the Evangelical Union for the Spread of Christianity among the Heathen, and he recommended Schmidt to lead a party of nine missionaries trained for work with a British society. [1]
In 1837, Schmidt came to the notice of Rev John Dunmore Lang in Australia, via Samuel Johnson, a friend of Gossner's in London. After being joined by fellow missionary Christopher Eipper in Greenock, Scotland, Schmidt and his party set sail for Australia on the Minerva. Conditions aboard the ship were harsh, with Moritz Schneider, a surgeon employed by Lang, dying of typhoid en route. Schmidt arrived in Sydney in January 1838.
Upon arrival in Australia, Schmidt was admitted as a member of Lang's Presbyterian Synod of New South Wales [1] on 15 March 1838. He founded the New South Wales Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, whose mission involved supporting a mission in connection with government funding. Schmidt ministered to a German congregation in Sydney for some months while a party scouted in the Moreton Bay area for a suitable site. Upon arrival in Brisbane in June 1838, Schmidt found that his scouting party had selected a location north of the settlement that they called Zion's Hill.
He was the leader of the first European settlement in what is now the area of Nundah, Queensland, when he helped found the "Zion Hill" mission, located near to the modern-day "Walkers Way". [4] Although joined by fellow German missionary Reverend Christopher Eipper, Schmidt did not have much success in bringing Christianity to the Aboriginal people in the area, and his mission was dismantled at the behest of the colonial government in 1846. [5]
Schmidt was also notable for being involved in leaking the details of a deliberate mass poisoning of Aboriginal people at Kilcoy in Queensland to the Sydney press. Schmidt had recorded in his travel diary the details of the incident, in which as many as sixty Aboriginal people were given flour and other rations laced with strychnine by white settlers. Not wanting to upset the delicate situation and cause any reprisal attacks, the authorities attempted to hush up the affair. Fellow minister and evangelical reformer John Dunmore Lang published the details from Schmidt's travel diary in the Colonial Observer, causing a major scandal in Sydney, the colonial capital. [6]
Following the failure of the Zion's Hill mission, Schmidt returned to England in 1846. He briefly ministered to a Lutheran congregation in London before being accepted by the London Missionary Society. From 1848 to 1857, he served as a missionary in Samoa. On May 25, 1855, his wife died, and in 1857 he resigned from the society and started a free school for the children of foreign residents of the city of Apia in Samoa. Around this time he also married Salaneta, a Samoan woman, with whom he had one son. He died in Apia in early 1864. [1]
The Samoan Islands were first settled some 3,500 years ago as part of the Austronesian expansion. Both Samoa's early history and its more recent history are strongly connected to the histories of Tonga and Fiji, nearby islands with which Samoa has long had genealogical links as well as shared cultural traditions.
German New Guinea consisted of the northeastern part of the island of New Guinea and several nearby island groups and was the first part of the German colonial empire. The mainland part of the territory, called Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, became a German protectorate in 1884. Other island groups were added subsequently. New Pomerania, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the northern Solomon Islands were declared a German protectorate in 1885; the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Mariana Islands were bought from Spain in 1899; the protectorate of the Marshall Islands was bought from Spain in 1885 for $4.5 million by the 1885 Hispano-German Protocol of Rome; and Nauru was annexed to the Marshall Islands protectorate in 1888.
John Dunmore Lang was a Scottish-born Australian Presbyterian minister, writer, historian, politician and activist. He was the first prominent advocate of an independent Australian nation and of Australian republicanism.
The Myall Creek massacre involved the killing of at least twenty-eight unarmed Indigenous Australians by twelve colonists on 10 June 1838 at the Myall Creek near the Gwydir River, in northern New South Wales. After two trials, seven of the twelve colonists were found guilty of murder and hanged. One—the leader and free settler John Fleming—evaded arrest and was never tried. Four were never retried following the not guilty verdict of the first trial.
Nundah is an inner suburb in the City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. In the 2016 census, Nundah had a population of 12,141 people.
Wujal Wujal is a rural town and locality in the Wujal Wujal Aboriginal Shire, Queensland, Australia. In the 2016 census, Wujal Wujal had a population of 282 people. It is an Aboriginal community.
German settlement in Australia began in large numbers in 1838, with the arrival of immigrants from Prussia to Adelaide, in the then colony of South Australia. German immigrants became prominent in settling South Australia and the Queensland. From 1850 until World War I, German settlers and their descendants comprised the largest non-British or Irish group of Europeans in Australia.
German Australians are Australian citizens of ethnic German ancestry. The German community constitutes one of the largest ethnic groups in Australia, numbering 982,266 or 3.8 percent of respondents in the 2016 Census. It is the fifth most identified European ancestry in Australia behind English, Irish, Scottish and Italian.
The presence of Christianity in Australia began with the foundation of a British colony at New South Wales in 1788. Christianity remains the largest religion in Australia, though declining religiosity and diversifying immigration intakes of recent decades have seen the percentage of the population identifying as Christian in the national census decline from 96.1% at the time of the Federation of Australia in the 1901 census, to 52.1% in the 2016 census.
The Reverend Lancelot Edward Threlkeld was an English missionary, primarily based in Australia. He was married twice and survived by sons and daughters from both marriages. His work in Australia did much to increase knowledge of Aboriginal languages, but he had little success with converting Aborigines to Christianity.
Christoph Eipper was a pioneering missionary and Presbyterian minister in Australia.
The Turrbal are an Aboriginal Australian people from the region of present-day Brisbane, Queensland. The name primarily referred to the dialect they spoke, the tribe itself being alternatively called Mianjin/Meanjin. Mianjin was the Turrbal word for the central Brisbane area. The traditional homelands of the Turrbal stretch from the North Pine River, south to the Logan River, and inland as far as Moggill, a range which includes the city of Brisbane.
Nundah Cemetery is a heritage-listed cemetery at 88 Hedley Avenue, Nundah, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1840s to 1963. It is also known as German Station Cemetery. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.
Johann Leopold Zillmann (1813–1892) was a German missionary to Australia. Born in Neu-Ulm, and a blacksmith by trade, he joined Carl Wilhelm Schmidt and Christopher Eipper at the Zion Hill Mission in what is now the Brisbane suburb of Nundah in Queensland. After the mission closed, Zillmann stayed in the area and turned to farming.
The Zion Hill Mission was a Christian mission founded in the area now known as Nundah, Queensland by German Lutheran missionaries. The mission is notable as being the first free European settlement in what is now the state of Queensland. Despite limited success at converting the local Aboriginal Australians to Christianity, many of the missionaries later became pioneers and farmers in the district, shaping the social fabric of the North Brisbane area for decades to come.
Johann Christian Simon Handt was a German-born Australian minister and missionary of Lutheran faith. Known for being Queensland's first missionary or one of the first, Handt is also said to have brought in the first pineapples in Queensland.
First Free Settlers Monument is a heritage-listed memorial at Sandgate Road, Nundah, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was built in 1938. It is also known as First Free Settlers of Queensland Memorial Cairn. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 26 June 1998.
The Undanbi were an indigenous Australian tribe of southern Queensland.
The War of Southern Queensland was a conflict fought between a coalition of Aboriginal tribes in South East Queensland, the "United Tribes", and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, from around 1843 to 1855. Following the Kilcoy massacre in 1842, a great meeting was held in the Bunya Scrub of tribes from across South East Queensland north to the Wide Bay-Burnett and Bundaberg regions, fuelled by decades of mistrust and misunderstanding with the British, they united into a loose confederation and issued a ‘declaration’ to destroy the settlements on their lands.
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