About Us | German Missionaries in Australia

This project was funded by the Australian Research Council through a Future Fellowship (FT 100100364) hosted at Griffith University in GCCR (Griffith Centre for Cultural Research) established to promote innovative research in the arts and humanities that engage with issues of public interest and concern. Inquiries and comments may be directed to Regina Ganter at r.ganter@griffith.edu.au

We suggest the following form of citation

for example:

Amanda Barry, 'Ernst Eugen Kramer (1889-1958)', in Regina Ganter, German Missionaries in Australia - a web-directory of intercultural encounters, 2009-2018, www.griffith.edu.au/missionaries, accessed [insert date]

The Research Team

The authors

Regina Ganter is Professor of Australian history in the School of Humanities at Griffith. She specializes on interactions between indigenous, Asian and European peoples in northern Australia. Her books include The Pearl-Shellers of Torres Strait (1994) based on award-winning research, and Mixed Relations (2006) which received the NSW Premier’s History Book Award and the Ernest Scott Prize in Australian History in 2007. She has published widely in the field of cross cultural encounters and contributed to a number of broadcasts, museum exhibitions and curriculum materials. She commenced research on German missionaries in 2006 with fieldwork in German missionary archives funded by a Griffith University Research Grant, and developed this project as an ARC Future Fellow (2011-2015).

Laurie Allen completed his Honours degree in Germanic Studies at Sydney University in 2011 with a thesis on Anglo-German tensions at the Wellington Valley Mission. He then received an MPhil in Modern British and European History from the University of Oxford in 2014 after writing a dissertation on the Cape Bedford Mission in Far North Queensland. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales.

Robert Amery is the Head of Linguistics at University of Adelaide. His interest is in the maintenance and revival of endangered languages. As a health care worker he spent periods in Balgo, Kintore, Papunya, Alice Springs, the Western Desert and in Arnhem Land. For more than 25 years he has been engaged with the reclamation of the Kaurna language of the Adelaide Plains. For more on the revival of Kaurna, Warraparna Kaurna! Reclaiming an Australian Language is available for free download https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/titles/kaurna/.

See also the film Buckskin (http://buckskinfilm.com/about-the-film/).

Amanda Barry is Research Coordinator at the Australian Studies Centre, Peking University. Amanda Barry received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2008 for her thesis ‘Broken Promises: Aboriginal Education in South-Eastern Australia 1837-1937’, which won the prize for the University’s best Australian history thesis in 2008. Amanda has published numerous articles and book chapters relating to her research and has presented at academic conferences in Australia and internationally, as well as undertaking tutoring, lecturing and research work at University of Melbourne and Australian Catholic University.

Jillian Beard was an undergraduate student at Griffith University at the time of writing. Later her PhD thesis examined the intellectual history and practices of conciliation in the governance of Indigenous peoples in the British Empire (1750 - 1815). She held a Centre for the History of European Discourses Summer Scholarship at the University of Queensland (2009/10). She has presented at conferences and contributed to edited collections, Aboriginal Australians and other 'Others' and 'Marges et périphéries dans le pays de langue anglaise', both published in France, (2014). Jillian has taught at Griffith University and Open Universities Australia.

Zoe Dyason was an undergraduate student at the time of writing. She completed a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in History and Sociology, at Griffith University in 2008. She worked as a Research Assistant at Griffith University before completing a Master of Information Management (Library Studies) through Curtin University in 2012. Later Zoe became an Assistant Library Campus Coordinator at Griffith University.

Susanne Froehlich née Pilhofer is lecturer in ancient history at Giessen University. She obtained a combined PhD in 2011 from Freiburg University in Germany and Strasbourg University in France. Alongside her professional research on the globalisation of Roman culture in the ancient world she has also been researching and publishing on the Lutheran missionary women in Australia and Papua New Guinea in her family, including Elise Pilhofer née Flierl, Babette Schuster and Luise Flierl.

Felicity Jensz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany and an Associate of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published widely upon the Moravian missionaries and Indigenous peoples in the British colonial world as well as on the politics and polemics of missionary periodicals. Her current research project examines Protestant missionary schooling provided to Indigenous and non-Europeans in British colonies in the ninetieth century.

Anna Kenny is an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University and a consultant anthropologist based in Alice Springs. She has conducted anthropological field research with Indigenous people in the Northern Territory since 1991 as well as in Queensland and Western Australia. She has written a number Connection Reports for Native Title claims and a book called The Aranda’s Pepa. An Introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1907-1920). Currently she is working on a book about T.G.H. Strehlow and Arandic Ethnography, a number of Native Title claims and the translation of Carl Strehlow’s unpublished Aranda-German-Loritja dictionary with Central Australian Aboriginal people.

Karen Laughton was an undergraduate student at the time of writing. Her PhD project was a comparative study of child institutional practices in Britain and colonial Australia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with specific focus on their impact upon the social formation of each location. Karen took up a position in the Higher Degree Research Office at Macquarie University.

Dr Christine Lockwood’s interest in the work of missionaries was heightened by 17 years spent in Papua New Guinea where she worked for a time as a high school teacher. She has had a long-time interest in Aboriginal issues and completed a PhD thesis on the work of Dresden Lutheran missionaries in South Australia in 2014. She has given presentations, and contributed to a number of publications on topics related to her thesis.

The students participating in this research

Australian Map Interface:

The interactive map of mission locations on the homepage is the creation Kevin Bauer, Tim Grillmeier, Marissa Grayson and Zach Hilhorst, students in the course 3202 ICT Industry Project supervised by Andrew Lewis at Griffith in 2015.

This website commenced as a Q150 project funded by the Queensland government for the 2009 sesquicentenary of Queensland. Professor Regina Ganter collaborated with her third year History students to respond to the national emphasis on computer literacy that renders electronic resources increasingly important for teaching Australian history in an international context. Professor Anna Haebich was community consultant for that phase.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the staunch web-entry support of former Griffith student Marie Gehde, and to Christa Loos, Franz Müll and Elizabeth Hahn for assistance with reading the German scripts, and to Catherine Clautour for facilitation and help with translations from French. Also to the staff and friends who have made the Lutheran Archives Australia such a welcoming research site, Lyall Kupke, Rachel Kuchel and Louis Zweck, the archivists Br. Georg Adam in Limburg, Dr. Roberta Cowan in Rossmoyne, Dr. Guy Thomas in Basel, Dr. Hartwig Harms in Hermannsburg, and Rüdiger Kröger in Herrnhut. A special thank you to Pastor Ivan and Olga Roennfeldt née Reuther for historical advice on the Lutheran missions in Queensland and for the use of their extensive historical library.

Graphic design by Yannick Vaughan, website design by Sarah Vardy (2009) and Stuart Bond (2014) at Griffith University, web-entry by Elizabeth Nosworthy (2009) and Marie Gehde (2014).