The Hahndorf Folk-Calendar 1993Compiled by Reg Butler (Hahndorf Historian) when he was Education Officer for Hahndorf and the Adelaide Hills and extracted from his computer files. |
|
From the early 1880s until 1918, the Lutheran Publishing Co, of Hochkirck, Victoria, published an annual Christlicher Volks-Kalender für Australien in German, containing a Christian calendar and stories; the book had no commercial advertising. G Auricht’s of Tanunda, South Australia, produced a similar volume, entitled Christlicher Volks-Kalender für Australien and das Schaftjahr, which did feature many secular advertisements as well. The publishers Basedow, Eimer & Co, of Grenfell Street, Adelaide, produced yet another almanac, entitled Australischer Volks-Kalender, full of practical advice on matters to do with home and business, as well as astrology and snippets of history. From 1918, in the wake of the cultural upheaval caused for German-Australians during World War 1, these German language publications were discontinued. Auricht’s put out an annual Book Almanac for Australia, in English, which combined many of the features of the former religious and secular volumes produced in German. A careful study of any of these volumes gives the reader an excellent idea of the vigour and variety of interests in Australian German-speaking areas. |
Introduction
Hahndorf is Australia’s oldest non-British settlement. Through the medium of a calendar for 1993, we hope to intrigue readers with facts about the Hahndorf of years past. Incidents relating to South Australia, Britain and Germany have also been included to show some of the forces which have influenced Hahndorf’s progress. Events connected with religious matters are based on the lectionaries of the Anglican and Lutheran Churches, the two denominations which have had most connection with the town over the years. Calendar entries are provided in both English and German to give interested readers a feel for the mixed cultural background which has made the village unique. I am grateful to Peter Ganssmann for advice in matters of translation. [Please note that the German translated information is not included]
Hahndorf Official Information 1893
The Sovereign: Her Majesty Queen Victoria.
Governor: Rt Hon the Earl of Kintore.
Premier: Hon Sir Frederick Holder.
German Consul in SA: HCE Mücke.
House of Assembly members: AH Landseer esq & Hon JA Cockburn, for the electorate of Mount Barker.
Local Government Chairman: FW Paech, for the Echunga District Council.
District Council Clerk: Alfred von Doussa.
Population: 740.
Houses: 140.
Postmistress: Miss Clara Windscheid.
Resident Justices: FW Wittwer, FH Sonnemann.
Places of worship:
St Michael’s Lutheran: Rev CFA Strempel.
St Paul’s Lutheran: Rev CF Braun.
St Paul’s Church of England: Rev J Lumsdon.
Banks - Bank of Australasia: HP Moore, Mt Barker, Manager.
Schools:
Public School: Wilhelm Strempel, Headmaster.
Lutheran School: Wilhelm Ey, Headmaster.
Hahndorf College: Douglas Byard, Headmaster.
Hotels:
German Arms: Thomas Broad.
Union: Thomas Ide.
District Newspaper: Mount Barker Courier.
Metropolitan newspapers: The Advertiser, The Register.
Communication with Adelaide: coach to Ambleside Station (Gustav Martin, coach driver), a 2 mile journey; then by daily train to Adelaide Railway Station.
The Hahndorf Folk-Calendar for the Year 1993
Now the New Year reviving old Desires, || The thoughtful Soul to solitude retires ... (E Fitzgerald 1809-1883)
- January -
1 - New Year’s Day.
2 - The Zebra anchored at Pt Misery 1839.
SA Constitution Act 1856.
3 - Sunday after New Year
4
5
6 - The Epiphany.
7
8 - Foundation stone laid of the second St Paul’s Lutheran Church, Hahndorf 1890.
9
10 - 1st Sunday after Epiphany
Hahndorf’s original name changed to Ambleside 1918.
11
12 - Gotthilf Janetzki, the last surviving Zebra passenger, died 1928.
13
14
15
16
17 - 2nd Sunday after Epiphany
18 - Prussia became a Kingdom 1701.
Wilhelm I declared German Kaiser 1871.
19
20
21 - A bushfire burnt out the windmill on Windmill Hill, near Hahndorf 1912
22 - The Catharina arrived Holdfast Bay 1839.
Queen Victoria died 1901.
23
24 - 3d Sunday after Epiphany.
25 - St Paul’s Day.
The Hahndorf establishment agreement 1839.
Hahndorf’s new cemetery near Pine Ave opened 1883.
26 - First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove 1788.
27 - Kaiser Wilhelm II born 1859.
28 - Captain Dirk Hahn born 1804.
Hahndorf named 1839.
Hahndorf College maternity hospital founded 1919.
Opening of the Hahndorf Pioneer Memorial Gardens 1939.
29
30 - Great bushfire near Hahndorf 1878.
31 - 4th Sunday after Epiphany.
- February -
1 - Australia Day - SA, Tas, Vic.
2 - Candlemas.
St Paul’s Anglican Church Hahndorf opened 1886.
3
4
5
6 - Great bushfires in South Australia 1859.
7 - Septuagesima
8
9
10 - Queen Victoria’s marriage 1840.
Re-opening of the Hahndorf Lutheran day school 1946.
11
12 - Pastor Kavel died 1860.
13 - German Arms Hahndorf badly damaged by fire 1861.
14 - Sexagesima
Captain Hahn left SA, in the Zebra , for Europe 1839.
15
16
17
18 - Martin Luther died 1546.
19 - Von Doussa’s Hahndorf general store burnt down 1869.
20
21 - Quinquagesima
22
23 - Shrove Tuesday.
24 - Ash Wednesday.
25
26 - Napoleon’s escape from Elba 1815.
27
28 - 1st Sunday in Lent
- March -
1
2 - Labour Day (WA). 8-Hour Day (Tas).
3 - 1st Day of Repentance.
4
5
6
7 - 2nd Sunday in Lent
8 - Labour Day -
9 - Kaiser Wilhelm I died 1888.
Labour Day (Vic). Canberra Day (ACT).
10
11
12
13
14 - 3d Sunday in Lent.
15 - Canberra Day - ACT only.
16 - First St Paul’s Lutheran Church, Hahndorf, foundation stone laid 1858.
17 - St Patrick’s Day.
18
19
20
21 - 4th Sunday in Lent
22 - Emperor Wilhelm I born 1797.
23 - Officers from the German cruiser Köln visited Hahndorf 1933.
24
25 - Lady Day.
26
27
28 - Passion Sunday
29
30
31
- April -
1 - Bismarck born 1815.
April Fool’s Day.
2
3
4 - Palm Sunday
5
6
7
8 - Maunday Thursday.
9 - Good Friday.
10 - Easter Eve.
Hahndorf Institute foundation stone laid 1893.
11 - Easter Day
12 - Second Easter Day.
13
14
15
16
17
18 - 1st Sunday after Easter
19
20
21
22
23 - St George’s Day.
24
25 - 2nd Sunday after Easter.
Anzac Day.
26 - Anzac Day public holiday.
27 - St Paul’s Anglican Church, Hahndorf, foundation stone laid 1885.
28 - Pastor Kavel married Miss Anne Pennyfeather at Klemzig 1840.
29
30 - Walpurgis Eve.
- May -
1 - Walpurgis.
2 - 3rd Sunday after Easter.
Douglas Byard died at Gallipoli 1915 - first Hahndorf World War 1 casualty
3 - Labour Day (Qld)
4 - Lobethal founded 1842. Labour Day (Qld).
5 - 2nd Day of Repentance.
Napoleon Bonaparte died 1821.
6
7
8
9 - 4th Sunday after Easter
10
11
12
13
14
15 - GF Angas died 1879.
16 - 5th Sunday after Easter - - Rogation Sunday.
Hahndorf Landpurchase Trustee Erdmann Jaensch died 1908.
17 - Adelaide Cup Day.
18
19 - Friedrich Paech, founder of Friedrichstadt, died 1870.
20 - Ascension Day.
21
22
23 - Sunday after the Ascension.
1st Australian Lutheran Synod held at Glen Osmond 1839.
24 - Queen Victoria born 1819.
SA Germans swore Oath of Allegiance to the Queen 1839.
25 - Congress of Vienna 1815.
26
27
28
29
30 - Whitsunday.
Hahndorf included in one District Council area 1889.
31 - Second Whitsunday.
- June -
1 - Third Whitsunday. Foundation Day (WA).
2
3 - Duke of York born 1865 (later King George V).
4
5
6 - Trinity Sunday
7 - King Friedrich Wilhelm III died 1840.
8 - Lutheran Emigration Day 1838.
9
10
11
12 - Australian Arms Hotel licensed 1854 - Forerunner of the Hahndorf Inn
13 - 1st Sunday after Trinity
14 - Queen’s Birthday public holiday - all states, except WA.
15 - Kaiser Friedrich III died 1888.
16
17 - Lutheran emigrants arrived in Berlin 1838.
18 - Battle of Waterloo 1815.
19
20 - 2nd Sunday after Trinity.
Queen Victoria’s Accession 1837.
21
22
23
24 - St John Baptist Day.
25
26
27 - 3d Sunday after Trinity. The Siebenschläfer.
28 - Queen Victoria’s Coronation 1838.
29
30 - Hahndorf’s Lutheran school closed down 1917.
- July -
1
2 - Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
3 - St Michael’s Lutheran Church, Hahndorf, opened 1859.
4 - 4th Sunday after Trinity
5
6
7
8 - The Prince George left Hamburg for SA 1838.
9 - Peace of Tilsit 1807.
The Bengalee left Hamburg for SA 1838.
10 - New Zealand gold rush began 1861.
Alfred von Doussa sen from Hahndorf became a miner there.
11 - 5th Sunday after Trinity.
12
13
14
15 - Opening of the Franco-Prussian War 1870.
16
17
18 - 6th Sunday after Trinity
19 - Queen Luise of Prussia died 1810.
20 - Pastor Fritzsche born 1797.
Heavy rain in SA 1872.
21 - Adelaide Exhibition 1881.
22
23
24
25 - 7th Sunday after Trinity.
The first planting of pines along Pine Avenue 1891.
26
27 - 1st British colonists arrived in SA 1836.
28
29
30 - Count Otto von Bismarck died 1898.
31 - Great hailstorm in SA 1862.
- August -
1 - 8th Sunday after Trinity.
2 - Bank Holiday - NSW only.
3 - King Friedrich Wilhelm III born 1770.
4 - Captain DM Hahn died 1860.
5
6 - Feast of the Transfiguration.
Lutheran teacher’s college opened in Hahndorf 1877.
7
8 - 9th Sunday after Trinity
9
10
11
12 - The Zebra left Altona for SA 1838.
13 - John Finnis died 1872.
14
15 - 10th Sunday after Trinity
16
17 - Frederick the Great died 1786.
18 - Lutheran Church division at Bethany 1846.
19 - Planting of Hahndorf’s main street avenue trees 1885.
20
21
22 - 11th Sunday after Trinity
23
24
25
26 - Theodor Körner died 1813. Prince Albert born 1819.
27
28
29 - 12th Sunday after Trinity
30
31
- September -
1 - Battle of Sedan 1870.
2
3 - Hahndorf Cricket Club formed 1887.
4
5 - 13th Sunday after Trinity.
Ballarat goldrush began 1851.
6
7
8 - 3d Day of Repentance.
9
10
11
12 - 14th Sunday after Trinity.
Blücher died 1819.
13
14 - Humboldt festival held in Hahndorf 1869.
15
16
17
18 - Duke of Wellington died 1852.
19 - 15th Sunday after Trinity.
20
21 - The Catharina left Hamburg 1838.
22
23 - Melbourne Show Day - metropolitan Melbourne only.
24
25
26 - 16th Sunday after Trinity.
Mission Festival.
27
28
29 - Michaelmas Day.
Foundation stone of St Michael’s Lutheran Church laid 1858.
30
31
- October -
1 - 1st edition of the Mt Barker Courier printed 1880.
2
3 - 17th Sunday after Trinity
4 - Labour Day - NSW, SA.
Queen’s Birthday - WA.
5 - Gottfried Lubasch, Hahndorf’s first publican, died 1856.
6
7
8 - Hahndorf artist Sir Hans Heysen’s 90th birthday 1967.
9
10 - 18th Sunday after Trinity.
11 - Christian Jaensch jun, the last surviving Zebra passenger living in Hahndorf, died 1917.
12
13 - Pastor Auricht married Elisabeth Paech at Hahndorf 1858.
14
15
16
17 - 19th Sunday after Trinity
18 - Emperor Friedrich III born 1831.
Wilhelm Boehm, Hahndorf Academy’s founder, born 1836.
19 - Napoleon’s retreat from Russia 1812.
20
21
22
23
24 - 20th Sunday after Trinity.
25
26 - Pastor Fritzsche died at Lobethal 1863.
27 - The Skjold with Pastor Fritzsche arrived in SA 1841.
28
29
30 - Prince Alfred landed in SA 1867.
31 - 21st Sunday after Trinity.
Reformation Day.
- November -
1 - All Saints Day.
2 - All Souls Day. Melbourne Cup Day - metropolitan Melbourne only.
3
4 - Hahndorf Institute opened 1893.
5
6
7 - 22nd Sunday after Trinity
8
9 - Prince of Wales born 1841 (later King Edward VII).
10 - Martin Luther born 1483.
11 - St Martin’s Day.
Martin Luther baptised 1483.
12
13
14 - 23d Sunday after Trinity
15
16 - King Friedrich Wilhelm III ascended the Prussian throne 1797.
The Bengalee arrived Holdfast Bay 1838.
Prince Alfred visited Hahndorf 1867.
17
18 - The Prince George arrived Holdfast Bay 1838.
19
20
21 - Sunday next before Advent.
Pastor Kavel landed in SA 1838.
22
23
24 - 4th Day of Repentance.
25 - Emigration Arrival Thanksgiving Day - Pastor Kavel 1838.
26
27
28 - 1st Sunday in Advent.
Hahndorf Landpurchase Trustee Erdmann Jaensch born 1813.
29 - Wilhelm Wittwer, Hahndorf’s first flour miller, died 1864.
30 - St Andrew’s Day.
- December -
1
2 - Battle of Austerlitz 1805.
3 - John Finnis born 1802.
4
5 - 2nd Sunday in Advent
6
7
8
9
10
11
12 - 3d Sunday in Advent
German Arms Hotel licensed 1839.
Hahndorf’s original name restored 1935.
13
14 - Prince Albert died 1861.
15
16
17
18
19 - 4th Sunday in Advent
20
21
22
23
24 - Christmas Eve.
25 - Christmas Day.
26 - 1st Sunday after Christmas.
Second Christmas Day. Boxing Day.
27 - Third Christmas Day. Boxing Day holiday - not NT, Tas, WA.
28 - SA Proclamation Day 1836.
Zebra arrived Holdfast Bay 1838.
29
30
31
29
30 - Hahndorfer Lutherische Gemeindeschule geschlossen 1917.
Background Notes to Calendar Events
- January -
1 - Hahndorf traditionally celebrated New Year’s Day with enthusiasm. On the Eve, young men particularly vied to think of the most original pranks to test the patience of townsfolk. Door knockers sprang to life with black cotton pulled back from the footpath. Cows lowing contentedly in one of the town’s many farm strips found themselves hauled off to an unfamiliar one. In the 1880s, the Hahndorf Town Band used to play on the Hahndorf College tower on New Year’s Eve.
2 - Harbour master Lipson’s pilot met the Zebra on the ocean side of the sand bar at the entrance to the Port River on 31 December 1838. Unfortunately, the water was too low, and the boat had to wait until 1 January 1839 before proceeding into the harbour, where it anchored the following day. Captain Hahn remarked in his reminiscences: On the Zebra, we were flying the first foreign flag on the shore of this new colony, which drew the pleased attention of many educated English colonists.
2 - Queen Victoria assented to the SA Constitution Act 1856, which introduced responsible government in South Australia. Its implementation in the colony’s German districts was tricky. Hahndorf men gathered in the assembly rooms of one of the town’s two hotels at election time to hear parliamentary candidates speak. An interpreter, usually the town’s schoolteacher, was chosen to translate the speeches, and comments during the following question time. Misunderstanding occurred frequently in the heat of the moment. Hahndorf’s women could not vote until 1894, along with the rest of their sex in the colony, and kept away from these political gatherings.
6 - The Epiphany. This festival commemorates the visit of the three Kings to the new-born Christ child at Bethlehem. It was a popular time for service in Hahndorf’s English and German churches, but no particular ceremony seems to have marked the occasion. In Europe, people baked a cake (called the twelth-cake) with a bean inside. During Epiphany Eve, the revellers ate a piece each: the person who scored the bean was King (or Queen) of the coming Epiphany festivities.
8 - The second St Paul’s Lutheran Church is the present stately church building at the eastern end of Hahndorf’s main street. The builder, Diedrich Both, married Emma Wittwer, daughter of Hahndorf’s miller, Wilhelm Wittwer, who was also one of the church’s benefactors.
10 - Within a month of the declaration of war in August 1914, certain people began agitating for the abolition of all German place names in South Australia. Between August-October 1916, a Nomenclature Committee wrote a report which included suggestions of new place names to replace those abolished. Hahndorf was to become Yantaringa, the Aboriginal name for the hill which sloped down to the township between Pine Avenue and the Pioneer Memorial Gardens. When Governor Galway assented to the changes on 10 January 1918, Hahndorf’s new name had become Ambleside, recalling a town in the English Lake District.
12 - The Janetzki family left Hahndorf for nearby Grünthal (Verdun) and then Victoria. Gotthilf Janetzki died at Preston, a Melbourne suburb.
18 - Hahndorf’s founders came from Brandenburg, one of the Prussian provinces. Through complicated changes of government by Margraves and Electors, the head of the Prussian state at last obtained the right to call himself a King. Elector Friedrich of Hohenzollern travelled to Königsberg, where he crowned himself Friedrich 1 on 18 January 1701. His great-great-great-grandson, Wilhelm I, became the first modern Emperor of Germany on the same date in 1871, through a declaration in the Palace of Versailles near Paris.
21 - Numbers of bushfires had swept without harm around Windmill Hill over the years. However, this one set the mill alight, resulting in much subsequent necessary restoration down to the present. FR Nixon, who supervised the survey of the broadacres on which Hahndorf is built, had the mill erected in 1842.
22 - The Catharina was the last of the four vessels bringing the first large-scale emigration of Lutherans to South Australia during 1838-1839. Several of the families aboard - Jaeschkes and Langes - settled in Hahndorf. Queen Victoria ended her record-breaking reign on the same date in 1901; she had not been on the throne two years when the Catharina arrived in SA.
25 - On St Paul’s Day 1839, Captain DM Hahn negotiated the purchase of the Hahndorf site from its three stockholder owners - Dutton, Finnis and McFarlane. Hahndorf’s Anglican and one of the two Lutheran Churches is dedicated to the Apostle.
25 - On 28 June 1882, a Central Board of Health meeting in Adelaide ordered investigations of a new site for Hahndorf’s cemetery, after three out of twenty-three recent cases of typhoid fever in the township had proved fatal. The Board put down the outbreaks to the nearness of the existing two cemeteries to the creek. The Government gazetted the new cemetery on Pine Avenue nearly seven months later. The first burial in the new cemetery, that of a female still-born child of Gottlieb Kuchel and Louise, nee Liebelt, occurred without ceremony on 11 April 1883.
26 - Captain Arthur Phillip led the first contingent of white settlers to arrive permanently in Australia. South Australia was the last of the subsequent colonies to be founded.
27 - The future Kaiser Wilhelm II was born in his parents’ palace on Unter den Linden, in Berlin. Both he and his mother, Queen Victoria’s eldest child, took a long time to regain strength. A month later, the proud new mother wrote to the Queen: He scratches his face and tears his caps and makes every sort of extraordinary little noise. Forty-two god parents invoked God’s blessing on the new-born infant a few days afterwards.
28 - Captain Hahn was born at Westerland, Sylt, then part of Denmark. He came from a long line of seafarers. The house of his birth still exists. 114 years later, Nurse Schmidtke gained permission to open a maternity hospital in the former Hahndorf College premises. She was very proud of the 1,000 babies born there under her care.
28 - George Jaensch witnessed the opening of the Hahndorf Pioneer Memorial Gardens in 1939, to mark Hahndorf’s centenary. He was a grand-nephew of Christian Jaensch, who had first bought the allotment in 1853 to begin a butcher shop; George gave this site to the town.
30 - Emperor Wilhelm II was the eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. It was widely believed that his withered arm, caused through careless medical attention during birth, helped to make him difficult, with the First World War one of the worst examples of this trait. Many Hahndorf people kept a coloured lithograph of the Kaiser above the mantelpiece in their home; naturally, these disappeared during the war. On the future Kaiser’s 19th birthday in 1878, bushfire raged between Hahndorf and Echunga. Hahndorf residents were hard-pressed to keep flying cinders from setting fire to the many thatched roofs in the village.
- February -
1 - This year, Hahndorf and the rest of SA, Victoria and Tasmania keep the national Australia Day holiday on this date, instead of on 26 January.
2 - One of the Mary Days, Candlemas was celebrated in both Hahndorf’s English and German Churches. It commemorates the visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the Temple in Jerusalem to present her son Jesus to the authorities for a blessing after childbirth. Bishop Kennion visited Hahndorf at Candlemas, in 1886, to open St Paul’s Anglican Church, the first church of that denomination to operate in one of South Australia’s German villages.
7 - Septuagesima - the first of three Sundays before Lent and the ecclesiastical 70th day before Easter Day.
10 - Queen Victoria married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, in the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, London. He became Prince Consort in 1857. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, together with the Bishop of London, performed the ceremony, when the choir, as usual, sang schockingly.
10 - Hahndorf’s Lutheran day school re-opened with an enrolment of 24 pupils under the charge of Teacher OB Lange. It was built on the site of the childhood home of the previous school’s fifth head teacher, TW Boehm.
12 - Pastor Kavel died at his Tanunda home, after nearly 22 years of service as Australia’s pioneer Lutheran minister. The Register of 16 February 1860 remarked: Never before had Tanunda witnessed such a large concourse of persons present as on this occasion...estimated at about 2,000 ... The body was interred shortly before sunset.
13 - The first German Arms on the site of Hahndorf’s general store suffered several times from fire. After the 1862 conflagration, the hotel shifted over the road to its present position.
14 - Sexagesima - the ecclesiastical 60th day before Easter Day.
14 - Captain Hahn spent well over a month in South Australia, looking to the well-being of his Prussian passengers, before returning to Europe via the Dutch East Indies. He never saw his Hahndorfians again, although scraps from their letters to him survive in various sources.
18 - Luther led a most adventurous life - he made the first translation of the Bible into German and began the Protestant Reformation. All of Hahndorf’s foundation settlers belonged to his faith.
19 - Von Doussa’s general store stood on the site of the present Chinese Restaurant at No 65 Main Street. In the early 1850s, Gottfried Riebe had built a general store, which became Hahndorf’s first commercial bakery in 1855. Baker Leopold Fleck moved to Lobethal to establish the Rising Sun Hotel; FH Sonnemann took over the baking until 1860, when he moved to the Balhannah Road corner premises opposite, on the other side of the main street, and the von Doussas opened their general store on the vacated site.
21 - Quinquagesima - the ecclesiastical 50th day before Easter Day, it marks the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent.
23 - Shrove Tuesday, a very ancient Christian festival when people confessed their sins (hence shriven = forgiven) and then made merry before the beginning of Lent on the next day, Ash Wednesday. No meat was permitted at table from Shrove Tuesday - because pancakes became a popular substitute, the day is often called Pancake Day as a result. Hahndorf’s citizens noted the day, but rarely made public ceremony from it.
24 - Ash Wednesday has always been celebrated with great solemnity in all of Hahndorf’s churches. Occasionally, the congregations practise the imposition of ashes on the forehead, a sign of repentance and humiliation taken from Jewish tradition. Ash Wednesday marks the start of the 40 days of Lent, commemorating the time Christ spent apart in the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil.
26 - Emperor Napoleon of France had swept with his armies through the Hahndorf founders’ Brandenburg homeland during the Napoleonic Wars. Some of these people had to serve in the General’s forces or supply food and/or horses for French troops. Following his escape from Elba, Napoleon met his end against a combined European force near Waterloo, in Belgium.
28 - Invocavit Sunday (Lent 1) so called from the opening words of the Latin Introit, Psalm 91: 15 Invocavit me He shall call upon me. The Lutheran Church names the Sundays in Lent after the Roman Catholic tradition.
- March -
3 - The four Lutheran Days of Repentance, Bußtage, approximated to the English Ember Days. Observed at different times in the various German states, Australian Lutherans devised yet another routine. Hahndorf’s Britishers sometimes confused the intent, because Buß tended to become Booze to unpractised Anglo-Saxon ears. These particular Days of Repentance are practically defunct in the modern Australian Lutheran Church.
7 - Reminiscere Sunday (Lent 2), from the opening words of the Latin Introit, Psalm 25: 6 Reminiscere Remember not....
9 - The first modern German Emperor, Wilhelm 1, died in the centenary year of the first white settlement of Australia. He had reached the great age of nearly 91.
14 - Oculi Sunday (Lent 3), for Hahndorf’s Lutherans, from the opening words of the Latin Introit, Psalm 25: 15 Oculi My eyes are ever towards the Lord.
16 - Pastor Kavel’s followers began to erect a new church after a Supreme Court judgement prevented them from using Hahndorf’s Lutheran manse, where formerly they held services. From 1851, the Pastor had been unable to use the church. The first Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church, in Windsor Avenue, still exists as a storeroom .
17 - Hahndorf’s handful of Roman Catholics in colonial times celebrated St Patrick’s Day in fine style, by wearing a shamrock and feasting rather rowdily. Although usually separated by a wide gulf in politics and religion, Germans and Irish often got on famously, as both groups were outside of the mainstream of national life, particularly during World Wars 1 and 2.
21 - Lätare Sunday (Lent 4), from the words of the Latin Introit Laetare Rejoice. In all Hahndorf’s churches, it is a time of less severe solemnity than has hitherto been the case during Lent. To Hahndorf’s Anglicans, the day is known therefore as Refreshment Sunday; also Mothering Sunday, the Church’s Mother’s Day, when Simnel Cake is distributed to the congregation.
22 - Born at Berlin, Emperor Wilhelm I was the second son of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, the ruler who persecuted Hahndorf’s original settlers for their Lutheran faith during the 1830s.
23 - The German naval cruiser Köln berthed at Port Adelaide, during a goodwill world tour shortly after Hitler had come to power in Germany. South Australians greatly admired the modern equipment aboard the vessel. Miss Martha Jaensch entertained those of the crew who called at Hahndorf to afternoon tea in her father’s former butcher shop in the main street.
25 - Another of the Mary Days, Lady Day commemorates the visit of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary, informing her of her coming role as Christ’s mother. As one of the English quarter day set aside for the settlement of debts, Hahndorf’s Anglicans finished their financial year at this time, in preparation for the Easter Vestry which approved the next budget. Lutherans observed the day as a church festival only.
28 - Judica Sunday (Lent 5) in Hahndorf’s Lutheran congregations, from the opening words of the Latin Introit, Psalm 43: 1 Judica me, Deus Judge me, O God. The English Church refers to the day as Passion Sunday, and the week following as Passion Week.
- April -
1 - Bismarck, Germany’s famed Iron Chancellor, was born on April Fool’s Day 1815. In Hahndorf, the day has remained a time of harmless practical jokes, especially amongst school children, who must cease tricking at mid-day. In England and Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, the Church remembered Christ’s pointless journey from Herod to Pilate and back to Herod, during his trial leading to crucifixion.
4 - Palmarum or Palm Sunday (Lent 6), commemorates Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. As he rode on a small donkey, people lined the streets and waved palm fronds. All of Hahndorf’s churches mark this day by decorating their buildings with palm branches and distributing palm crosses to the congregation. The days leading to Easter are known as Holy Week.
8 - Maundy Thursday commemorates Christ’s institution of the Holy Communion. In Europe, the rulers used to wash the feet of poor people as a sign of humility. Only the Pope still does this. Instead, British monarchs distribute Maundy Money to the needy. Hahndorf Christians hold service and then strip their altars of ornament completely in preparation for Good Friday. The English Church veils the cross behind the altar as well.
9 - Good Friday, the most solemn day in the year for Hahndorf’s churches. They remember the death of Christ upon the cross. Bells are tolled instead of rung. It used to be the custom to dress completely in black. Lutherans always celebrate Holy Communion; Anglicans do not. Both faiths occasionally use the three-hour penitential service; readings are long and congregations spend more time than usual on their knees or standing.
10 - Easter Eve, the time of the New Fire, marked by the lighting of the Paschal Candle in Hahndorf’s Anglican Church. Church services are held in remembrance of Christ’s resting in the tomb. Amongst early Christians, this day was known as Sabbatum Magnum, the great or high Sabbath, partly out of respect for Jewish tradition attached to this day of the week, and partly because of the memory of Christ’s lying in death. This was the only Sabbath Day which the majority of Christians eventually continued to recognise with particular rituals.
10 - A Hahndorf Institute Committee formed at a meeting at the Australian Arms in October 1861 established a library in a large room of miller Wilhelm Wittwer’s new two-storeyed main street home. Various complications prevented the building of permanent premises on the present Institute site until 1893.
11 - Easter Day. The greatest of festivals for Hahndorf’s churches and celebrated with enthusiasm to mark Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Both the English Easter and German Oster derive from the name Eostre, a Teutonic goddess of spring, reflecting the season when nature springs into life again. The exchange of eggs, forbidden during Lent, is a sign of this new energy. In old Hahndorf, families painted hen eggs to place in hay nests ready for Easter morning. German children watched for the Easter hare, der Oster hase, to make deliveries; the English had the rabbit.
12 & 13 - Second & Third Easter Day. Hahndorf’s pioneer Lutherans held church services for three successive days to mark the great Christian Festivals of Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. The Third Day fell into disuse after early this century in Hahndorf; however, fluent German-speaking pastors held German service on the Second Day until recent times for those members of the congregation who still valued their ancestral tongue.
18 - Easter 1, known as Quasimodogeniti Sunday to Lutherans from the opening words of the Latin Introit from 1 Peter 2:2 Quasi modo geniti infantes As new born babes .... In the English Church, people call it Low Sunday, a great contrast to the extreme joy of Easter Day.
23 - St George’s Day went unnoticed amongst Hahndorf’s Germans, but was remembered by the British. St George became England’s patron saint in 1222, after Holy Land Crusaders returning to Europe brought back stories of his extraordinary deeds. Modern scholarship mentions several sources of explanation for St George’s identity. Mr Byard, the Headmaster of Hahndorf College, used to fly St George’s flag from the school tower on days of special significance to the British.
25 - Misericordias Domini Sunday (Easter 2) for Hahndorf’s Lutherans, inspired by the opening words of the Latin Introit for the day, Psalm 51: 1 Miserere mei, Domini Have mercy upon me, O God. To the town’s Anglicans, it is known as Good Shepherd Sunday, from the Gospel for the day, St John 10:11.
26 - Transferred in 1993 from 25 April, Anzac Day commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli Bay, on the Turkish Mediterranean coast in 1915. Hahndorf’s first two volunteers for World War 1, Doug Byard and Archie Stevenson, both lost their lives during the Gallipoli campaign.
27 - Before St Paul’s Anglican Church was opened, Hahndorf’s British population held service in the Hahndorf College. The Rev WR Bussell of Strathalbyn came to officiate; he later ran Christian mission to Murray River settlers, using the paddle-steamer Etona as his base. Eton College schoolboys had raised the money to purchase the boat.
28 - Pastor Kavel arrived in SA during 1838 as a forty-year old bachelor. During 1840, his English fiancee arrived by the City of London. Kavel had met Anne Pennyfeather, a friend of the Angas family, during his mission work in London’s dockland. Pastor Teichelmann, one of the two German missionaries to the Aborigines, married the couple at Klemzig, Hahndorf’s sister settlement on the banks of the Torrens River east of Adelaide. No doubt, the British Frau Pastor travelled to Hahndorf during her husband’s regular pastoral visits there. Unfortunately, the new Mrs Kavel died of childbirth on Christmas Day 1841. How different might British-German relations, not to mention amongst Lutherans themselves, have been in the colony had she survived?
30 - St Walpurga’s Eve. In German legend, the witches used to gather with the devil on the Brocken, or Blocksberg, the highest peak of the Harz mountains in central Germany, to revel and also plan their moves for the next day - St Walpurga's Day. Snow covers the bare summit from November to June and in certain atmospheric conditions, visitors may see a gigantic figure of themselves reflected on the clouds the spectre of the Brocken. Superstitious humans used to burn straw on this night to confuse the witches and lessen the effects of their unhelpful intentions.
- May -
1 - English-born Walpurga accompanied her uncle, St Boniface, when he began his great work of converting the various German tribes to Christianity during the eighth century AD. In time, she established a convent at Heidenheim, south-east of Stuttgart, from where to continue her missionary and charitable work. In traditional Germany, farmers made new contracts and began to prepare the land for the coming growing season on 1 May, St Walpurga’s Day. Inspired by their annual convocation the day before, the devil and witches did their best to cause havoc amongst the bargainers.
It is doubtful whether this tradition continued amongst South Australia’s Germans, due to the difference in the seasons in the Southern Hemisphere. However, Hahndorf’s Harz families - amongst them the Eys, Habichs, Lauches, Maetzes and Roderts - would have been well aware of the superstitions.
2 - Jubilate Sunday (Easter 3), for Hahndorf’s Lutherans, taken from the opening words of the Latin Introit, Psalm 66: 1 Jubilate Deo O be joyful in God.
2 - Douglas Byard was the second son of the Hahndorf College Headmaster, DJ Byard. After his College education, Byard Jun went farming in Queensland and then enlisted in the AIF 16th Infantry Battalion. He was killed in a campaign on Pope’s Hill. A memorial to Hahndorf’s first World War One casualty is on the wall of St Paul’s Anglican Church , where his father was layreader.
4 - Portion of Pastor Fritzsche’s congregation aboard the Skjold settled in Hahndorf for a time. One of their number, Ferdinand Mueller, found work as a shepherd for the South Australian Company. He pointed out the suitability of a site in the Onkaparinga River watershed for a new settlement. The Skjold passengers moved there in the 1842 autumn, when Pastor Fritzsche made his momentous Lobethal announcement in a sermon to mark the beginnings of the town. In time, some of Hahndorf’s foundation families shifted to Lobethal too - amongst them the Behrends, Brättigs, Kalleskes, Langes, Pfeiffers and Steickes.
5 - 2nd Day of Repentance - see Note for 3 March.
5 - Napoleon Bonaparte, the bane of so many of Hahndorf’s foundation settlers during their youth in Brandenburg, at last died in exile on St Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean.
9 - Cantate Sunday (Easter 4), for Hahndorf’s Lutherans, from the opening words of the Latin Introit for the day, Psalm 96: 1 Cantate Domino O come, let us sing unto the Lord.
15 - Born in Newcastle, in Co Northumberland, England, GF Angas prospered mightily as a coach manufacturer and from other interests. A sincere Baptist Nonconformist, he warmed to Pastor Kavel’s plea for help for his persecuted Prussian Lutherans. Angas lent the foundation Hahndorf settlers the money to pay for their voyage to South Australia. GF Angas eventually moved to SA himself and died at his home, Lindsay Park, near Angaston, at the great age of 91.
16 - Rogation Sunday (Easter 5), observed both in the English and German Churches at Hahndorf. From the Latin word rogare to ask, the congregations seek divine blessing upon crops and other worldly affairs. This day has never attained quite the same significance in Hahndorf as in the European homeland, because harvest has already taken place here. In the English Church, the three weekdays following are known as Rogation Days.
16 - One of the Prince George passengers, Erdmann Jaensch was only 26 years old when he became one of the two trustees responsible for the community repayment of the money borrowed to buy the Hahndorf land in 1840. Jaensch lived a life saddened by the deaths of his eldest son on the voyage out to South Australia, and two wives later in the colony; not to mention the quarrelling over the Hahndorf & Barossa Valley land and Hahndorf Lutheran Church matters, in which he became involved automatically through his no doubt honorary charge as trustee.
17 - Although an Adelaide Cup horserace has existed in SA since 1864, it only became a public holiday in the 1980s. Hahndorf’s citizens have taken far more interest in the nearby Oakbank picnic races held over the Easter holiday weekend since 1876. Annually, a party of Hahndorf race-goers commonly used to hire a waggon or, later, a charabanc from such worthies as the Faehrmanns, Lünerts and the Liebelts to spend a day at Oakbank. The Onkaparinga Racing Club Secretary, Alfred von Doussa, used to contract a bevy of Hahndorf boys to act as rouse-a-bouts on race days. Between 1934-1942, stay-at-home horse racing enthusiasts utilised the facilities of the old Hahndorf College betting shop to join in the jollity.
19 - Friedrich Paech, one of the Zebra foundation Hahndorf settlers, had a clear head for business and prospered greatly in SA. In 1846, he negotiated the purchase of nearly 1,200 acres from the bankrupt estate of JB Hack, between Hahndorf and Echunga, on the Three Brothers Special Survey. Some 240 acres Paech kept for himself; the rest went to other Hahndorf settlers to establish broadacre farms. The area became known as Friedrichstadt, in honour of the man who made development possible.
20 - Ascension Day, or Holy Thursday, another of the great church festivals common to both English and German traditions in Hahndorf. Christians celebrate the ascension of Christ into Heaven, forty days after Easter Day.
23 - Exaudi Sunday, from the Introit for the day, Psalm 27: 8 Hearken unto my voice...
23 - The Hahndorf foundation settlers sent delegates to the first Australian Lutheran Synod, held at Glen Osmond, where they had rested on their way to the hills earlier that year. In England, some parishes still ceremoniously beat the bounds on this day ie mark the boundaries of that particular parish. At St Clement Danes in London, choir boys in procession whip the surviving twentuy-five markers inscribed with St Clement’s anchor and end up with a bumper feast called a Box Supper.
24 - Queen Victoria was born at Kensington Palace, London, the only child of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg. On the good Queen’s twentieth birthday in 1839, Hahndorf’s adult males took the Oath of Allegiance to her, before Governor Gawler at Government House, Adelaide. Later, Hahndorf’s citizens expected groups of tribal Murray River Aborigines to pass through the town on this day each year, en route to Adelaide to receive their free issue of blankets, tea and sugar to mark the natal return of the great white Queen.
25 - The peace agreements at the Congress of Vienna stabilised Europe politically until 1848, ten years after Hahndorf’s founders had left their homeland. It is known that their King persecuted Lutherans partly because he feared that other dissident groups would persuade them to become political agitators - rather suspect people in totalitarian Prussia.
30 - From 1853, after District Councils were established in SA, Hahndorf was divided down the main street between the Echunga and Onkaparinga District Councils. The boundary followed the Hundred line between Onkaparinga and Kuitpo. Hahndorf townsfolk conducted a long, noisy campaign to unite the township within the Echunga Local District.
30 - Whitsunday in the Anglican Church; Pentecost in the Lutheran Church - the last of the dominical high festivals of the church’s year, this one remembering the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s Apostles in Jerusalem. This occurred on the Jewish feast of Pentecost - the 50th day after the Passover, which had co-incided with the first Easter Day. In England, people newly-baptised on Whitsun Eve came to church the next day wearing white robes - hence White- or Whitsunday. Hahndorf’s church altars are decked in red at Whitsuntide, to remind congregations of the tongues of fire which appeared on the Apostles’ heads.
- June -
3 - Alexandra, Princess of Wales, gave birth to her second son, George, the Duke of York, at Malborough House, London. Known familiarly in youth to his family as Georgie, he succeeded his father, Edward VII, to the throne in 1910, as King George V.
6 - Trinity Sunday, celebrated by all of Hahndorf’s churches, reminds their congregations of the three aspects of God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Altars are decked in white, the sign of rejoicing. Quite in contrast, in the English Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, doctors of divinity wear red robes, instead of the usual black; hence the festival is familiarly known as one of the Universities’ scarlet days.
7 - One of the King’s biographers remarked: The news spread like wildfire that the King was ill. an attack of fever accompanied by nausea seemed to point towards a long illness. The King got weaker and weaker; he seemed to waste away, and became suddenly a decrepid, senile invalid ...The King died at 4.30 in the afternoon, surrounded by all the members of his family... After the death of King Friedrich Wilhelm III, the Lutheran persecution in Prussia gradually ceased under his son, Friedrich Wilhelm IV.
8 - On a sunny summer day in 1838, the first two barges loaded with emigrating Brandenburg Old Lutherans, left Tschicherzig for the fortnight-long river journey to Hamburg and the open ocean. Many of Hahndorf’s foundation settlers were amongst this group. In South Australia, it became the habit of Pastor Kavel’s spiritual descendants to mark this day with special services to commemorate the long-awaited departure.
12 - Carpenter Gottlieb Schütze emigrated with his family from Saxony, aboard the Wilhemine Maria in 1849. At Hahndorf, he practised his trade for a while and then, as Gottfried Lubasch had done in 1839, he turned part of his home into the Australian Arms, a neat note of loyal opposition to the German Arms. Both hotels eventually crossed the road. Today, the Australian Arms is known as the Hahndorf Inn.
13 - In Hahndorf’s churches, for the long season of Sundays after Trinity, the altars are draped in green, the symbol of growth, for a term of sound, quiet teaching mostly undistracted by high festivals.
14 - Queen Elizabeth II was born on 21 April 1927, at 17 Bruton Street, London, the home of her maternal grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore. Hahndorf’s citizens, along with other South Australians, celebrate the Queen’s official birthday in June.
15 - Witty Berliners dubbed Kaiser Friedrich III, Friedrich der Britte, because of his fancied British sympathies as the son-in-law of Queen Victoria. Time-servers abandoned his Court in advance of his rapidly lethal throat cancer to cultivate his erratic son, Wilhelm II, the last German Kaiser. How sad and so cruel that the best should always be taken, wrote the Queen to her newly-widowed daughter. By the time of Friedrich’s short reign, the great emigrations from Germany to South Australia were well and truly over.
17 - The second Sunday of our voyage, we spent at Berlin, where we arrived on the Saturday. Ferdinand Kavel, in a letter dated 27 January 1839, to friends in Klemzig, Brandenburg, regarding the voyage to SA. Promenading crowds listening to brass band music beside the tea tents stopped either to comment kindly or to jeer at the sight of hymn-singing barge-loads of refugees moored on the nearby Spree.
18 - The European alliance defeated its bogy, Napoleon, once and for all on the plains of Waterloo, near Brussels. Gottfried Lubasch, Hahndorf’s first publican, blew the bugle for the advance of Blücher’s Prussian troops against the French Emperor. In far-off South Australia, the voluble Lubasch was never loathe to argue in either English or German over the oft-debated point of whether the Prussians had arrived late for the fray.
20 - Generations of Hahndorf school children were brought up on the story of how the young Victoria had been awakened from early morning sleep at Kensington Palace to be told she had become Queen. Across the Channel, her future South Australian subjects from Brandenburg were suffering rather more discomfort. The Prussian King had refused to let them emigrate in 1836 and now they had few assets left to tide them over until he at last freed the group in 1838.
24 - For both Hahndorf’s English and German Christian traditions, the celebration of the feast of St John Baptist had special significance in pioneer times. As Christ’s kinsman and forerunner in faith, John had also suffered an ignominious death - execution by sword, because he censured King Herod for his illegal marriage.
In Britain and Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, the day was Midsummer Day in the secular world. St John’s Eve, Midsummer’s Eve, became the sign for great rejoicings - the lack of control put down to the effects of the Midsummer Moon. People decorated their doors with greenery branches and leapt through lighted bonfires. Unattached ladies placed a meal by their open street door at midnight - their future husband was supposed to step over the threshhold and salute them. Hahndorf’s cold winters effectively stopped the southward transfer over the Equator of any Northern Hemisphere ‘Mid’ madness in June.
27 - Greatly beloved of Hahndorf’s German population until recent times, Siebenschläfer or Seven Sleepers day caused many anxious eyes to peer westward for signs of storm clouds - not hard in winter-bound Hahndorf. If rain fell on 27 June, more would appear every day for the next seven weeks. This belief died hard amongst South Australia’s pioneer German population, mostly bound to the soil.
German legend had it that a pagan Roman Emperor sentenced seven brothers to perpetual entombment in a cave near Ephesus, in Asia Minor, because the men were Christians. Nearly 200 years later, a shepherd discovered the cave and the early morning sun roused the slumberers. Naturally, shopkeepers were suspicious when one of the brothers went to buy food - his money was no longer current. The men appeared in the town to testify to their resurrection, but later returned to their cave to sleep without awakening. A church was built on the site.
28 - During Queen Victoria’s coronation, celebrated with much pomp in Westminster Abbey in 1838, Hahndorf’s founding fathers waited patiently in their river barges at Hamburg, while victuallers provisioned nearby sea-going vessels for the next stage of the journey to South Australia.
30 - After an often noisy and abusive campaign, anti-Germans in South Australia at last persuaded the government to close Hahndorf’s Lutheran school, along with all others in the state. This sad day dawned appropriately grey and wet. Alfred Nitschke, a great-grandson of one the town’s founding families, photographed the children, their pastor and teachers. Christian Jaensch, the last surviving member of the 1838 founders living in Hahndorf, joined the group. Something over three months later, Mr Jaensch died, this precious link with Hahndorf’s beginnings now broken.
- July -
2 - The Visitation, a Mary Day kept by the Anglican and Lutheran Churches after the Reformation, was an important church festival in pioneering times. It commemorates the visit which Christ’s mother paid to her cousin Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. The women rejoiced at each other’s good fortune in their coming motherhood.
3 - Pastor Strempel’s Lutheran congregation built their new church on the site of the original one erected in 1840, shortly after Hahndorf was established. Pastor Meyer, Pastor Strempel’s father-in-law, preached the opening sermon.
8 - Ferdinand Kavel, one of the passengers, later wrote of this occasion: On 7 July, we prepared to set sail; and at two o’clock on Sunday morning, got underway ... We were towed down the river by a steamer.
9 - Queen Luise of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm III’s intelligent and sensitive wife, induced her husband to make peace with the Emperor Napoleon at Tilsit, an East Prussian garrison city near the Russian border. This temporary lull in the Napoleonic Wars proved an important breathing space for Prussia.
10 - Many Australians made their way across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand’s Otago province, the most southerly in the country, to search for alluvial gold in the district’s rapid melted ice-fed rivers. Leaving his wife in charge of the town’s grocery store, Alfred von Doussa was perhaps alone amongst Hahndorf’s population who went; his son, Alfred Jun, encouraged numbers of Hahndorf’s young men to mine in Western Australia during the 1890s, where von Doussa had interests in a diggings near Boulder.
15 - Alfred von Doussa Sen happened to be in his homeland on a visit when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. This delayed his return to safe Hahndorf for some years, as he enlisted to defeat the French. Many times as she re-stocked her grocery shelves, Dorothea von Doussa had cause to wonder in which part of the world her husband was in many years of repeated wanderings.
19 - Three years later, almost to the day, after the Peace of Tilsit, Friedrich Wilhelm IIIs popular consort, Queen Luise, lay dead from fever and lung congestion. Her grave in the grounds of the Charlottenburg Palace, in Berlin, long remained a pilgrimage place for sorrowing subjects. One wonders whether Hahndorf would have been founded if this wise woman had lived!
20 - Hahndorf’s second Lutheran pastor, Daniel Fritzsche, was born in rural Liebenwerda, in the Kingdom of Saxony. He remained for some years with his persecuted congregations in Silesia and Posen, suffering many privations from always being on the move secretly. At last, he and his people emigrated in 1841. These people divided into two groups to found Lobethal and Bethany. Some of them lived in Hahndorf while the site of their future homes was decided.
21 - A recent emigrant storekeeper, Richard Twopenny, went into partnership with a long-resident Melbourne businessman, French-born Jules Joubert, who had formerly lived in Adelaide. In five weeks, without any Government help, the two men put the Exhibition together, which Governor Jervois opened. Some 17,254 people streamed through the turnstiles on the first day to hear the massed choir and admire the enormous bullock, Tichborne. Local press reports feasted on the rumour that a considerable posse of Melbourne pickpockets had travelled over to take advantage of innocent Adelaide crowds. No doubt protected by his alert entourage, the Governor then adjourned to the Torrens River, where, after enjoying a haul in a rowing boat, he declared the Torrens Lake officially formed.
25 - Very fond of plants and trees, it is not surprising that Hahndorf’s pioneers planted avenues along the main access roads through their town. The 1891 pine planting occurred on the first Arbor Day organised for the whole of South Australia.
27 - One of GF Angas’s own vessels, the 200 ton Duke of York arrived in Nepean Bay, off Kangaroo Island, with the whole of the passengers and crew intended as South Australia’s first white settlers. The ship became a whaler in the Southern Ocean, but was wrecked the following year off the New South Wales coast.
30 - After a ruthless career in uniting his nation through blood and iron, Chancellor Bismarck retired in as undignified a manner as he had often treated others. Emperor Wilhelm II dropped the pilot in 1890. Germany’s architect of national unity died peacefully at his country estate, Friedrichsruh, where he had lived quietly in retirement. Many of Hahndorf’s Germans admired Bismarck without qualification. Hahndorf Academy students received a holiday to mourn when Headmaster TW Boehm read of the great man’s death some time prior to the mid-1880s; another day off came their way when Boehm discovered the news was a false alarm.
31 - Fortunately for Hahndorf, this particular hail fell during winter. Quickly a centre for expansive orchards of apples, grapes, pears, German plums and quinces, the town waited anxiously at flowering and fruit setting time to find how much of the crop had been ruined if heavy hail dropped then.
- August -
3 - The future persecutor of Hahndorf’s foundation settlers was slightly older than the oldest of those who eventually emigrated to found the town. Most heads of these families were born in the 1790s and 1800s.
4 - Born a Dane, Captain Hahn was just lucky enough to die one. In 1864, Chancellor Bismarck engineered the Schleswig-Holstein war which forced Hahn’s homeland into Prussian rule. As with Hahndorf, hostilities forced a name change - these territories had been known as Slesvig-Holstein, under Danish control.
6 - Several of Christ’s apostles watched their master, bathed in brilliant divine glory, hold a night meeting with the Patriarchs Moses and Elijah. This occurred on top of Mount Tabor, a peak in Galilee. Hahndorf’s Christians have placed increasing importance to the remembrance of this event - the Transfiguration. Some South Australian Lutheran Churches have taken the dedication of Tabor; a valley near Lobethal also holds the name.
6 - In 1877, the late Pastor Fritzsche’s Synod re-opened the Hahndorf Academy as a training school for Lutheran teachers and a preliminary training place for pastors. Pastor Strempel preached an occasional sermon in front of the foundation staff and students on the Festival of the Transfiguration.
12 - In describing the departure, Captain Hahn said: A steam launch towed us away from the city at six o’clock on Sunday morning, 12 August 1838. Numbers of people were standing there to watch us leave. And so we began this difficult voyage.
13 - John Finnis was one of the three original proprietors of Hahndorf’s site. His stockyards and shepherd’s hut probably stood somewhere near the German Arms. Finnis was father-in-law to WH Dutton, the moving force behind the First Special Survey and the subsequent settling of the Germans on this land.
17 - Like beloved Queen Luise, Frederick the Great, Old Fritz, became part of the stuff of German legend. Hahndorf’s founders had particular affection for him, as he had wrested their German homeland district from Austrian rule in 1741. This action saved Protestants from ill-treatment under the Roman Catholic Habsburgs. Old Fritz continued to tolerate all faiths until the end of his reign in 1786. His brother and nephew who succeeded him in turn held no such scruples - the nephew was none other than Frederick William III, whom the obedient Hahndorfers continued to pray for, even when his persecution had forced them to abandon Prussian rule.
18 - It was a Sunday when various matters forced an irreconcilable division between Pastors Fritzsche and Kavel and their respective followers at the 1846 Lutheran Synod at Bethany.
19 - Robert Barr Smith gave a selection of trees for planting along Hahndorf’s main street. This became the first street avenue in the Adelaide Hills and fairly soon had imitators at Mount Barker, Stirling and Woodside, amongst others.
26 - Theodor Körner was one of the founding Hahndorf fathers’ heroes. Born in 1791 into a prosperous middle-class Leipzig family, he revelled in his able lawyer father’s friendships with some of the greatest German minds of the day - von Kleist, Schiller, the Humboldt brothers, Göthe. Even the Austrian musician Mozart had stayed with the Körners - unfortunately, he died only weeks after Theodor’s birth. At first thinking of doing something in the mining industry, Körner eventually became an author, dramatist and poet. He inspired Prussians with all manner of patriotic, yet sensitive works, which kept up spirits when Napoleon’s troops occupied the country. In 1813, Körner joined the legendary Lützower Freicorps, which specialised in lightning ambushes of the French. Five months later, to the great grief of the nation, he fell in a minor skirmish near Gadebusch, in Mecklenburg. Hahndorf’s Liedertafel never failed to rouse audiences with spirited performances of Lützows wilde werwegene Jagd, one of Körner’s best-loved patriotic poems set to music.
26 - Luise, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld gave birth to her younger son, Prince Albert, at the Rosenau, the mountain meadow summer retreat of her husband, the reigning Duke Ernest I of Saxe-Coburg. Despite many a war and revolution since, Coburg city survives almost intact and with a special feeling for its British connection. Albert’s upbringing in this unspoilt place has something of a modern flavour - his parents separated when he was five years old and he was left to a succession of guardians and tutors under the care of his emotionally distant father.
- September -
1 - Our Fritz, the German Crown Prince, led German forces to overwhelming victory against a French army stationed in the fortress city of Sedan near the Belgian border. Besides 50 generals, 5,000 other officers and 84, 000 infantry, Germany managed to capture Emperor Napoleon III as well. Increasingly demoralised and disorganised, the French nation surrendered in February 1871. Wilhelm Pfeiffer, one of the Zebra’s youthful passengers in 1838, laid out the township of Sedan on South Australia’s Murray Flats in 1875, no doubt in a fit of loyal fervour for the fatherland he had not seen since childhood.
3 - Cricket had made an appearance in Hahndorf at least by the late 1870s, through the British teachers and students at Hahndorf College. DJ Byard, the school’s cricket-mad new Headmaster in 1886, soon organised a town team from a meeting held in the German Arms the following year. For some time, the Hahndorf Eleven depended on the College for much of its inspiration. In England, Mr Byard had played with the cricket great, WG Grace.
5 - Many of Hahndorf’s young men travelled overland to the Victorian goldrush. With their profits, they bought much-coveted farmland near Hahndorf and beyond. At least two of Hahndorf’s wives never saw their husbands again - they disappeared without trace. Descendants of one of these men later heard that apparently he had been speared in an Aboriginal ambush by a crossing place in the Ovens River.
8 - Third Day of Repentance - see Note for 3 March.
12 - Prussia’s Field-Marshal died peacefully at his Silesian estate which a grateful King Friedrich Wilhelm III had presented to him for success against arch-foe Napoleon. Blücher had little skill as a tactician; he earned the nickname of Marshal Forwards for his propensity to dash bravely but wildly into enemy ranks. Gottfried Lubasch, Hahndorf’s first publican, blew the bugle for Blücher’s last successful mad sally at Waterloo.
14 - TW Boehm, the Hahndorf Academy’s headmaster, organised a festive display to mark the centenary of the birth of Prussia’s Alexander von Humboldt. The Baron had made exceptional contributions to mankind’s knowledge of the world with his scientific and botanical experiments, as well as his extensive travels through Asia and Central America. His brother, Wilhelm, established the University of Berlin, at which a youthful pre-ordination Pastor Kavel was one of its earliest pupils.
18 - After the glories of Waterloo, Wellington, the Iron Duke, became a member of parliament and an intimate of the British Royal Family. Blacksmiths constructed a huge, fearsome-looking military funeral hearse to carry the Duke’s remains through London’s streets, prior to burial in St Paul’s Cathedral.
21 - Sometimes nicknamed the Posener Schiff , because most of its passengers came from Province Posen, the Catharina brought the last of the four boatloads of Lutheran refugees to South Australia in 1838. Several passenger families - the Jaeschkes, Kalleskes and Langes - became foundation settlers of Hahndorf.
26 - It became the tradition in St Michael’s Lutheran Church, Hahndorf, to hold a mission festival on the Sunday nearest St Michael’s Day. Events lasted throughout the day and included an address from a missionary on furlough. Sometimes, a choir of Aborigines from the Koonibba Mission on the West Coast sang during the services. The congregation held a picnic lunch in the church grounds.
29 - Michaelmas commemorates the Archangel Michael’s leadership of angels against Old Nick. Pastor Frizsche laid the foundation stone of St Michael’s Lutheran Church, Hahndorf, at Michaelmastide. One of the English Quarter Days, Michaelmas was therefore the time for the settlement of rents. Some mediaeval tenants apparently tried to placate landlords with the gift of a plump goose; thus leading to the tradition of eating a goose on 29 September. Queen Elizabeth rose from a meal of goose to hear the news of her navy’s victories against the Spanish Armada.
- October -
1 - Son of the cultivated Latin scholar Victor Dumas, Charles Dumas bought the Jolly brothers’ Mt Barker job printery in 1872 and issued the first copy of the Mt Barker Courier eight years later. Hitherto, Hahndorf had fared only infrequently well in South Australia’s English-language press, although doing better since Strathalbyn’s Southern Argus first appeared in the 1870s. As one of the largest towns within the circulation district, Hahndorf has regularly supplied many Courier headlines. One of its first was the great typhoid debate, which ended in the closure of the town’s three cemeteries in January 1883.
4 - Celebrated fitfully in Hahndorf as Eight Hours Day from the late nineteenth century, this public holiday is now called Labour Day. SA had an official forty hour working week by 1948. Local rumour had it that the National Clothing Co Ltd operated in Hahndorf between the 1910s- 1930s, because trade union ideas were slow in coming into fashion in the township.
5 - Gottfried Lubasch died as interestingly as he had lived: He was taken ill on a Tuesday ... On the Friday .... the deceased was lying on a sofa in the living room ... bled by the tailor in the foot ... Strempel, the Lutheran clergyman ... arrived at his house a little before 10pm ... in order to draw up the testator’s will ... The making of the will to the time of its completion and signature occupied about an hour and a half...Lubasch put his cross to it ... he Pastor said he would take it to the schoolmaster and have it translated into English ... Dr Chalmers sent for on the Saturday ... G Lubasch died at some stage on Sunday ... leaving an interest in the German Arms public house, and £200 out at interest .. The Register 23 June 1857
8 - On his venerable 90th birthday, Sir Hans Heysen attended the opening of the restored Hahndorf Academy and then enjoyed a private family afternoon tea in one of the upstairs rooms. The revered artist slipped quietly from this world some months later - on 2 July 1968.
11 - In 1911, Pastor Brauer took the aged Christian Jaensch to the Proclamation Day ceremony at Glenelg:
Father Jaensch was immediately invited as the representative of the pioneer Germans to take his seat on the grandstand erected for the pioneers ... The grandstand instantly appeared to become suddenly interested and animated as word was passed along that a survivor of the German pioneers of 1838 had appeared in their midst for the first time ... All eyes turned in the one direction, and soon some of the pioneers rose and made their way to his side to offer him a hearty handshake - a manifestation of comradeship born of their early colonial experiences and trials. - Australian Lutheran Almanac 1928.
13 - The eldest daughter of George Paech’s second marriage, Elisabeth was four when she came as a foundation settler to Hahndorf. Her husband, Christian Auricht, undertook leadership of the late Pastor Kavel’s Lutherans from 1860 and spent the whole of his ministry at Langmeil Church, Tanunda.
18 - Born at Potsdam, the future Kaiser Friedrich III inherited all of his rather plain mother’s (Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar) and legendary beauteous grandmother’s (Königin Luise) liberal tendencies in culture and politics. Augusta even dared to correspond with agitators, while her husband, Kaiser Wilhelm I, was safely on visit in England. Inspired with such example, Friedrich and his loyal wife, Britain’s Princess Royal, tried, but failed to democratise German institutions. I disappear with him ... We had a mission, we felt and we knew it - we were Papa’s and your children!, she confessed to her mother, the Widow of Windsor.
18 - TW Boehm, Hahndorf’s well-known Academy founder, shared a birthday with Kaiser Friedrich III. Of much the same liberal interest, they both often found themselves misunderstood and at the centre of controversy. Boehm’s family supported their brilliant member - his elder brothers and sisters put aside some of their own wages to provide him with funds for a sound education.
22 - Hahndorf foundation settler Gottfried Lubasch was amongst the horde of 500,000 impressed troops from nations under Napoleon’s control which advanced upon Moscow in September-October 1812. The Russians fired the city and it burnt to the ground, except for the Kremlin and a handful of other significant buildings. Already decimated by disease to 120,000 men, Napoleon had to retreat into the face of an early bitter winter. Lubasch was amongst 25,000 soldiers who returned home.
26 - Pastor Fritzsche died in the evening after a particularly harrowing last illness. Because the Lobethal manse was so small, the Pastor’s funeral left from outside the church school, instead of the home as German funerals customarily did. His name remained a household word in the town for a considerable time after his death.
27 - Pastor Fritzsche and his people arrived in SA after a mysterious plague aboard the Skjold had claimed many lives.
30 - Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, landed in SA to begin his Australian tour, the first by any member of the British Royal Family. Shortly before he left Australia, he became the unsuccessful object of an assassination attempt in the Sydney Domain.
31 - Reformation Day commemorates Luther’s nailing of the 95 Theses on the Castle Church door at Wittenburg in Prussian Saxony, an action which symbolically began the Reformation.
- November -
1 - All Saints Day began in 835AD to give Christians a formal chance to remember all holy people, both known and unknown. It replaced the last of the four great yearly festivals of the heathen nations of the north. All Saints Eve (31 October) is popularly known as Hallowe’en, traditionally the time to crack nuts, duck for apples in a tub of water and perform other harmless revelries. In Old English, All Saints was known as All-Hallows; hence All Hallows Even.
2 - All Souls Day, when Christians according to their various traditions remember the faithful departed. In the west of England, it used to be the custom to exchange soul cakes, One for Peter, One for Paul, Three for Them who made us all during a street walk called souling.
4 - It took a long time for Hahndorf to gain a permanent Institute building, due to the fact that two district councils shared the town until 1889. Robert Barr Smith gave £100 towards the new Institute costing £368 5s 1d and erected by voluntary labour.
9 - Feeling low, depressed and wretched, Queen Victoria gave birth to her eldest son, Albert Edward, at Buckingham Palace. He grew to manhood to earn the titles of Edward the peacemaker and the Uncle of Europe. To his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King Edward was that old peacock - not quite so complimentary a tribute.
10 - The son of a miner, Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, in Prussian Saxony. Copper and silver mines abound in the nearby hills. Fire badly damaged Luther’s birthplace in 1689.
11 - Following an active life in the Imperial Roman legions, St Martin eventually became a Christian and rose to be Bishop of Tours, in France. Great crowds came to consult him. He was the first of the early saints to earn the title without martyrdom. As geese are at their prime in Europe at this time, Martinmas was often marked with a goose in the old calendars. In Germany, geese eaten on this day are known as Martinsgänse. Baptised at St Martinstide, the day after his birth, Martin Luther took the name of of this brave saint.
16 - King Friedrich Wilhelm III, the fifth Hohenzollern monarch of Prussia, ascended the throne in 1797. His reign, marked by such admirable features as the defence of the realm against Napoleon and the organisation of the North German Zollverein, also became known for the long persecution of the Old Lutherans.
16 - Built at Dumbarton, a Clyde-side ship-building town, the Bengalee brought out some 180 Old Lutheran refugees to SA, for whom there was no room to voyage aboard the Prince George. Harbourmaster Lipson happened to be bringing the Bengalee in to Port Misery when Governor Gawler ordered him to take the Rapid to rescue Mrs Boucher, a sick passenger aboard the Parsee wrecked on the Troubridge Shoal. We reached the wreck ... only to hear that ... Mrs Boucher was no more. She had survived a week ... but ... her spirit disembodied itself and took its flight to another world about 12 o’clock on Sunday night. The Register 1 December 1838.
16 - Great festivity accompanied Prince Alfred’s arrival at German Town. From one extreme to the other, the township was all flags, and there were no less than four triumphal arches ... At the conclusion of the address, the large concourse of spectators loudly cheered the Prince, who drove on amid continued hurrahing. The Advertiser 28 November 1867.
18 - GF Angas hired the Prince George, built in his home town of Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1828, to bring some 200 of the Old Lutheran refugees to SA. The ship had already brought convicts to Australia the previous year. Over the years, sometimes this vessel has been confused with the slightly bigger Prince George which arrived at Port Misery in December 1838.
21 - Pastor Kavel and his flock came ashore at Port Misery to erect, under the supervision of August Fiedler, another line of tents along Starve-dog Lane. Other emigrants already encamped there soon valued these newly-arrived Prussians for carting casks of water on sledges made out of sheaoak branches and taking on washing chores for whoever cared to pay for these services.
24 - Fourth Day of Repentance - see Note for 3 March.
25 - Four days after the newly-arrived immigrants had settled in, Pastor Kavel held the first Australian Lutheran Sunday service at Port Adelaide. Some British Christians had given the Lutherans the free use of a nearby weatherboard church every Wednesday and Sunday for as long as the new arrivals required it.
28 - Erdmann Jaensch scarcely could have imagined his future in far-off Australia: Through all the changes and reverses of his years of colonial experience, he clung tenaciously to the beliefs and ideals of his early manhood. A strict Lutheran of the old school, he more than once sacrificed his worldly advantages to the claims of conscience ... During more than 90 years, no spiritous liquor passed his lips. His favourite beverage was strong tea. he was equally averse to tobacco .. Jaensch Family History p138.
29 - Wilhelm Wittwer died peacefully in his Windmill Hill home, in a sheltered gully a little below the windmill itself. His son, Wilhelm Wittwer jun, had established himself as a steam flour miller in Hahndorf a decade previously.
28 - Advent begins on the Sunday nearest St Andrew’s Day. It resembles Lent in being a solemn season of preparation - in this case, for Christmas. All church altars are draped in purple; in addition, the Lutheran Church uses the symbol of the Advent Candle - another candle is lit for each of the four Sundays during this time.
30 - Christ called Andrew the fisherman as the first of His apostles. The saint became the patron of Russia and Scotland. Tradition ascribes him martyrdom upon a distinctive X shaped cross while on missionary work in Asia Minor. Of old, the English Church at Hahndorf kept St Andrewstide as its special time of yearly missionary observance.
- December -
2 - This conflict in Austrian Moravia took place near a partially frozen lake, over which the victorious Napoleon drove the defeated forces of Imperial Austria and Russia; hence the nickname of the Battle of the Three Emperors. The allies lost some 27,000 troops through slaughter and drowning, as opposed to France’s 8,000. Austerlitz marked the threshhold of a period of complete French ascendancy over Europe. Hahndorf’s foundation middle-aged adults were children at this time.
3 - Born in the English Channel port of Dover, John Finnis became apprenticed as a mariner at the age of twelve. By 1830, he was in Sydney and in partnership conducted a whaling company with operations in the South Seas. In 1835, Finnis turned his attention to pastoral pursuits; land on one of his stations became the site of Hahndorf.
12 - Gottfried Lubasch obtained a liquor licence for his Hahndorf coffee shop in 1839. The newly-licensed premises became known as the German Arms. Early colonist Edward Holthouse remarked, It was a primitive and rustic little hostelry, celebrated in its day for home-made bread, sweet fresh butter and delicious bacon.
12 - Amid great local rejoicing, Hahndorf re-gained its original name after much lobbying by interested parties. The Mount Barker Courier of 7 November 1935 observed: A very largely attended public meeting in social form was held in the Hahndorf Hall on Saturday night [2 November], in order to express to the Government the gratitude of the residents for the restoration of the original name to their town.
14 - Already wracked by personal and national troubles, the Prince Consort’s sensitive constitution offered no resistance to typhoid germs from Windsor Castle’s drains: The dying man’s face grew serenely soft and reposeful, as his breathing became feebler and feebler. At last, he strove hard to take a long, deep breath. In this effort, he passed away to his last, long rest, as the great clock of the Castle struck the third quarter after the tenth hour of the night. - Wilson, R The life and times of Queen Victoria Vol 3 p 96.
24 - Christmas Eve church service holds a special place in Hahndorf’s Lutheran Churches. Children’s faces glow purely in the candlelight from the enormous Christmas Tree, or Tannenbaum, erected in front of the congregation. Hahndorf people living in the main street used to leave their front doors open so that passers-by could see a brightly decorated tree edged with burning candles standing in the passage. Some Hahndorfians have the good fortune to possess a wooden frame tree to be decorated with greenery and the usual ornaments; rising candle heat makes the tree revolve from a vane at the top. In German families, it was also the tradition to have the festive meal and exchange presents on Christmas Eve.
25 - Christmas Day still resounds to the chime of church bells and the singing of carols in Hahndorf. On certain days beforehand, Lutheran young people go carolling as a group to cheer the sick and elderly. Another seasonal custom with Germanic origins far beyond Hahndorf’s borders is the sending of Christmas cards, a ritual usually completed by Christmas Day. Many Christmas traditions stem from the heathen German Yule festival, anciently held at this time to celebrate the winter solstice.
26 - Boxing Day, a peculiarly English ritual whereby people gave Christmas boxes, or petty presents, to apprentices, domestic servants and tradesmen. Remonstrative Government circulars from 1836 onwards broke the worst excesses of the practice. Boxing Day is not a public holiday in Hahndorf.
28 - Some 200 recently-arrived British colonists gathered near the tent of Governor Hindmarsh’s Private Secretary, Robert Gouger, to hear him read the proclamation of the colony of South Australian under a convenient bent gum at Holdfast Bay. Mrs Robert Thomas, wife of the colony’s first newspaper proprietor, remarked, A party of marines from the Buffalo fired a feu de joie and loud hurrahs succeeded. A cold collation followed in the open air, of which we partook.
Two years later to the day, Captain Hahn’s Zebra dropped anchor in Holdfast Bay after a four- month long voyage from Europe. Hahndorf’s founders had arrived on a ship flying the first foreign flag on the shore of this new colony, which drew the pleased attention of many educated English colonists.
But all sorts of things and weather || Must be taken in together, || To make up a year And a sphere. - Emerson 1803-1882
