German Missionaries in Australia

Johannes Adolf Hieronymus Hartmann was the son of Moravian missionaries in Suriname. At age 5 he was sent to the Kleinwelka school in Germany and never saw his parents again. His father died in 1844 and his mother continued her missionary work, later as a teacher at the Moravian mission schools in England and Germany.

At age 31 he was called to missionary service in Australia and was ordained as Diakonus (10 December 1863). He married 25-year old Mary (known as Polly) Hines from Nottinghamshire (born 1838).

In January 1864 they travelled from Gravesend to Melbourne and arrived at Ebenezer mission on 7 May that year¹ where Hartmann became assistant missionary to Wilhelm Spieseke. The Hagenauers had already left for Gippsland, and Br. Francis Job was forced to leave Ebenezer mission because of his unauthorized marriage.

Both mission couples shared the mission house, which also accommodated Phillip and Rebecca Pepper.² The population of unbaptized mission residents at Ebenezer was subject to strong fluctuations. Within a couple of weeks of the arrival of the Hartmanns the Spiesekes took the opportunity of an almost deserted mission to undertake a lengthy tour around the district. The newly arrived couple found themselves immersed in unsusual work. Hartmann had to milk the cows, fetch water and tend the sheep. The Hartmanns also kept conducting some semblance of a school with between four and eight women and four males.³ By October 1864 her husband was able to report that Polly was holding sewing classes so that the mission women were now making their own clothes.⁴ Later that year a visiting bible vendor gave Polly Hartmann the idea that she, too, could sell bible tracts to the transient white workers in the region.⁵

In 1866 Carl Kramer spent some time at Ebenezer, which allowed Adolf and Polly Hartmann to tour the surrounding stations during the shearing season. They travelled as far as the South Australian border, to McLeod's station, about 100 kilometers west of Antwerp, to preach and to recruit children and adults for the Ebenezer mission and also to gather language material at nearby Lake Hindmarsh.⁶

The region experienced a long drought that broke in February 1867. Hartmann installed a windmill to irrigate the orchards and some mission residents purchased their own pumps to irrigate their garden patches.⁷ The drought increased the number of mission residents, so school attendance rose to an average of 21 in 1867. Br. Hartmann taught the boys in the morning and Sister Hartmann taught the girls in the afternoon, including sewing and knitting.⁸ Felicity Jensz has explored Polly Hartmann’s life at Ebenezer on the basis of her letters and other correspondence.⁹

The Hartmanns remained at the mission for seven years until they were allowed to withdraw due to Polly’s ‘nervous weakness’ (as she described it). Polly spent a period of recuperation at Ramahyuck in late 1870, and soon afterwards both returned to Europe.¹⁰ They were replaced by Heinrich and Marie Stähle in May 1872.

The Hartmanns returned to Europe for a period before they were called into the Delaware mission among the Lenape of Ontario. They arrived at New Fairfield, Canada, in April 1873 and remained there until 1896.