Overview: German History In South Australia (2/4)

'They Did More Than Give us Cakes and Carts'

In this article on the early Germans Adelaide historian, Dr Ian Harmstorf, states his case for correcting the neglect of South Australia's founding settlers.

Dr Harmstorf says the bitterness of two world wars has been allowed to obscure the major contributions the Germans made to the State. Following his explosion last week of the myth that SA's German settlers were all fleeing from religious persecution in their homeland, Dr Harmstorf goes on to expose the unwarranted persecution of World War I.

A Dark Chapter in South Australia's History

Atrocities during wartime are always committed by the 'other side', or so we are led to believe. But in World War I, Torrens Island, in the Port River, was the site of a concentration camp which earned a notorious reputation for brutality. The story of that camp has been suppressed by the authorities for many years. Now the chance discovery by Adelaide historian Dr Ian Harmstorf of documents in the Barr-Smith Library has revealed the shocking truth about Torrens Island. Much of the detail for this article comes from papers left to the library by the former principal of Adelaide Teachers College, Dr. A. B. Schulz, who died in the 1950s.

List of 69 Placenames of German Origin changed by the Nomenclature Act of 1917
(South Australian Government Gazette: 10 January 1918)

The experience of South Australia's Germans during World War II, although un­pleasant, was in most cases not as traumatic as during the Great War of 1914—1918. The reason for this was twofold. First, those of German descent, and these constitute the vast majority in the catch-all phrase 'South Australia's Germans', were another generation removed from the land of their forefathers. This together with the disruption suffered to South Australian German cultural and linguistic traditions during the First World War had severely weakened ties to the old homeland. Perhaps the immediate threat to the British-Australians also appeared less. German-born in South Australia had dropped from 2% of the population in 1911 to 0.4% in 1933. Numerically from almost 5,000 to just over 2,000 and one can safely assume, given the lack of German migration between the wars, considerably aged. The number of Lutherans had remained virtually constant at 26,000—27,000, but as a percentage of the total South Australian population had dropped from 6.8% in 1911 to 4.5% in 1933, although it is improbable that the actual number of German descendants, as opposed to Lutherans, would have shown such a dramatic decline as the Lutheran figures suggest.