Media: BOOK - paperback, 472 pages
Author: P. Monteath
Year: 2011
ISBN: 9781862549111
Other: b&w photos, map, tables, index
Publisher: Wakefield Press

From Beehive Corner and Bert Flugelman's polished balls in Rundle Mall to the vineyards, churches and cemeteries of the Barossa Valley, tangible signs of South Australia's Germans are everywhere to be seen. Too often, however, 'the Germans' are regarded as a single group in the state's history. The truth is more complex and intriguing.

Those who came during the colony's first decades mostly spoke a common language, but were divided by differences of country, culture and class. They were farmers from Silesia and Brandenburg, missionaries from Dresden, liberals from Berlin, merchants from Hamburg, miners from the Harz mountains or erudite graduates from some of the best universities in the world. They brought an astonishing variety of knowledge and talents, and were destined to make a difference in many fields.

No less varied have been the experiences of their descendants and more recent arrivals. Germans have been praised as model citizens, even as over-achievers. But at times they have also been accused of divided loyalties or barefaced treachery.

The essays gathered here explore the multiple origins, experiences and contributions of Germans in South Australia over some 175 years. Part celebration and part sober assessment, this book helps make sense of South Australia today.

Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Herman Koeler's observations on South Australia in 1837 and 1838
A vision frustrated: Lutheran missionaries to the Aborigines of South Australia 1838-1853
The Moravian Church in South Australia
Nothing pleasing to impart? H.A.E. Meyer at Encounter Bay 1840-1848
The Grand Duke, the Town Council and the Butzow Butchers' Guild: The tradesman's plight and Mecklenburg migration to South Australia
The hospital that never was
Richard Schomburgk: Explorer, natural scierntist and Botanic Garden director
'Essentially South Austrlian': The artist Alexander Schramm
The man of the law: Ulrich Hubbe
Erhard Eylmann: Ethnographer and explorer
Colonial Wissenschaft: German naturalists and museums in nineteenth-century South Australia
Wine, women and so on: Female labour in the Barossa
A region, its recipes and their meaning: The birth of The Barossa Cookery Book
National Socialism in South Australia
South Australia's Lutheran churches and regfugees from Hitler's Germany
Penguins that flew: Paul Pfeiffer and Modernism in war and peace
No man's land: A tale of love and longing during wartime
The educator: Karl Mutzelfeldt
Hermann Sasse's way: Scholar, churchman, immigrant
Nora Heysen: Art and war for a German-Australian family
Joining the club: German immigrants to South Australia after 1945
Notes on contributors
Index