The Charles Dickens
It is mid-July 1877. Henriette Krause is at least seven months pregnant when the Charles Dickens, the three-masted steamer that left Hamburg on April 5 arrives near Brisbane. The ship's 510 passengers have now been traveling for three and a half months. They should be rejoicing upon nearing Australia's shores were it not that many are ill, plagued by typhus and measles. The stench is unbearable.
Henriette is near tears. The stoic endurance that has carried her through the last months is almost exhausted. She longs for space and fresh air, away from the cramped conditions of the ship. She is tired of having to sleep in a 1,8m by 45 cm space alongside hundreds. Her husband, Gustav, is as ignorant as she is about why they cannot disembark. Surely they have not come all the way from their homeland in East Prussia to be barred from setting foot on Australian soil?
What is taking so long?
Soon the rumours circulate. The captain addresses them. They will be sheltered on nearby Peel Island. The health officer has inspected the ship. He has ordered them to be quarantined.
Soon the rumours circulate. The captain addresses them. They will be sheltered on nearby Peel Island. The health officer has inspected the ship. He has ordered them to be quarantined.
It will be seven more weeks until Henriette disembarks in Brisbane. Finally. She is now almost due to give birth. Her bones strain under the weight of her swollen belly. Everything is surreal, here, at the Ipswich Depot where her husband enlists for work. The last five and a half months suddenly overwhelm Henriette and she reaches for her belly, gripping onto Gustav. It all comes back to her. What they have just lived. The unrelenting nausea. The monotony mingled with anxiety. She recalls those long stormy days and nights when the ship moaned dreadfully, while her and her companions were cramped in the damp darkness below deck. Their unwashed clothing, long imbued with sweat, dirt and salt, clung to their bodies giving off an inescapable odor that she would always remember; an odor that invited vermin and illness. Some of their clothes had to be burned at Peel Island because they posed a contamination risk.
But then, a ray of light, a dash of hope. Gustav is smiling at her. She hasn't seen him smile for months. He tells her that he has found an employment already. How efficient it all is now that they are finally arrived, here, in Brisbane. He is to go west of Toowoomba with his family where he will work as a labourer. The pay is low but he will be given some land to start anew. Their own land.
Their own land. It is a dream.
Their own land. It is a dream.
Henriette is relieved. It is just as well, she sighs.
Only a week later, she will give birth to the child that has journeyed with her all the way from Hamburg to Australia. It is a healthy boy.
Only a week later, she will give birth to the child that has journeyed with her all the way from Hamburg to Australia. It is a healthy boy.
Why would anyone go through this? Why?
It is the question I asked myself. I am both relieved and horrified at this amazing feat. The human capacity to endure astounds me.
Krause family tree
Henriette had several children. The Krause seemed to have kept in touch with the German and Polish immigrant community in Queensland. One of Henriette's sons, Hermann Edward Krause, married Maria Martha Tewes who was herself born of German immigrants.
In turn their son, Allan Krause - my husband's grandfather - would marry a Polish immigrant. When he died at 65, Allan was a true Aussie. He had enlisted to fight for Australia in WWII and was made a prisoner of the Japanese toward the end of the war. He would be marked by that experience.
In turn their son, Allan Krause - my husband's grandfather - would marry a Polish immigrant. When he died at 65, Allan was a true Aussie. He had enlisted to fight for Australia in WWII and was made a prisoner of the Japanese toward the end of the war. He would be marked by that experience.
My husband's father, Peter Krause, is effectively a mix of German and Polish. Like his ancestors, he is not averse to hard labor, honoring land and its produce, much like generations before him have done. His Australian wife is a tough cookie with an amazing open spirit and an endless curiosity. As a child, daughter of a long-distance drover, she rode to school on her large horse every day. Decades later, she has since travelled to China.
In Tara, in the year my husband was born, the townsfolk are not afraid to confront the tyrannical cops. Even if that means a fighting match. On the night of 19 August 1969, Peter's wife feels the first pangs of labour. But Peter is not home. He has gone off to fight a cop. They send for him urgently; they come running to the ring and tell him to bloody hurry and that his son is being born. He has to get a friend to replace him in the boxing ring. And that's the climate into which Shane Krause makes his first appearance, some time before midnight.
Peter doesn't know it yet, but that little boy who interrupted his fighting match will grow up to be a screenwriter.
In Tara, in the year my husband was born, the townsfolk are not afraid to confront the tyrannical cops. Even if that means a fighting match. On the night of 19 August 1969, Peter's wife feels the first pangs of labour. But Peter is not home. He has gone off to fight a cop. They send for him urgently; they come running to the ring and tell him to bloody hurry and that his son is being born. He has to get a friend to replace him in the boxing ring. And that's the climate into which Shane Krause makes his first appearance, some time before midnight.
Peter doesn't know it yet, but that little boy who interrupted his fighting match will grow up to be a screenwriter.
In the early years of our relationship, Shane Krause would tell me that his last name was Prussian. By Prussian, he meant 'from the German-Prussian Empire' because Krause is a German name after all and one needs to distinguish the German-ruled Prussian Empire from authentic Old Prussia.
Old Prussia and its tribal regions
The region of Pomesania (left) is where the Krause family lived.
At the time they emigrated, it was part of the German-Prussian Empire.
Today it lies in Poland.
The Old Prussians were an ancient Baltic people. Fierce pagan tribes, they were likely extinguished by the evangelising medieval Teutonic Knights and, in later centuries, their numbers would have waned under the wave of migration that swept from Germany into Old Prussian land.
So the last name, Krause, is German. Alas, my wild fantasy of Shane being a direct descendant of some ancient oceanside clan that worshipped pagan deities, and sang deep-throated spiritual melodies like the one in this video, had to be tossed aside.
But my imagination was running wild, fueled by medieval scenes of sword-wielding knights riding from the West into Old Prussia, intent on ridding the land of these detested pagans, with the blessing of the Polish neighbours. I had a vision that perhaps Krause had been the last name of some Teutonic Knight.
Teutonic Knight
by Andre Mazzocchetti
Picture this. He was a brutal man with noble convictions and let nothing cross what he believed was an honorable crusade. He was there, for sure, when the Teutonic Order defeated the Old Prussian tribe of the Pomesanians, and when the Monastic State constructed the fortified castle that gave birth to the city of Christburg.
Reconstituted Christburg castle, now in ruins
Oh, it was all so believable and delicious. After all, Gustav Krause who came to Australia in 1877 with his heavily pregnant wife was in fact born in Christburg, today's Dzierzgoń. Surely that was a sign that his family had always been there for centuries? Ever since the time of the knights...
I pleased myself in this titillating fantasy. The idea that my very own Shane Krause was directly related to a Teutonic Knight was a historical novelist's porn.
Chrisburg
By the time Gustav Krause was born in 1847, as far as he knew, his city was part the Kingdom of Prussia. In this context, Christburg was part of West Prussia. But by 1871, when the German emperor, Bismarck, ruled and the German Empire was formed with Prussia as its leading state, Christburg eventually became part of East Prussia.
[Note: This is the reason why I found genealogical sources contradictory - some sources assert he was from West Prussia while some say he was born in East Prussia. It's all a matter of politics.]
And that's where I dug a little deeper and found the reason why Henriette Krause put up with being pregnant for an excruciatingly long journey.
In his essay on The Prussian-Polish Situation: An Experiment in Assimilation, William I. Thomas delves into Bismarck's policies, and the relationship between the Prussian-Germans and the Prussian-Poles.
After many centuries of Germans living side by side with Poles, one would expect intermarriage. And that is observable in my husband's ancestors. Gustav Krause is a fine example of this multi-cultural situation. While his father was a Krause, his own mother with a last name of Reikowski, was Polish. Gustav had also wed Henriette Pukallus, also Polish. It is arguable that while the family spoke German, they most likely spoke Polish and felt partly Polish.
Having established that the family was as Polish as it was German, it really helped to explain why they would wish to leave at this time.
According to Thomas,
"as long as the peasant felt that the [German] government was friendly to him, he paid little attention to agitators. But in 1873 he was attacked by the government. At this point, Bismarck took a hand and decided to force the process of Germanization. He said he was not afraid of the Polish man, but of the Polish woman. She produced so many children. He undertook the task with apparent confidence, but he was profoundly deceived in his judgment of the peasant. He said that the peasant who had shed his blood so generously for Germany was at heart a true German [alluding to the recent Franco-Polish war]. The fact is, the peasant had been gradually losing sight of the fact that he was a Pole and the policy of Bismarck restored to him that consciousness."
Otto von Bismarck
Despite being part of the most powerful empire in Europe, one that had demonstrated its superior military might by recently defeating the French, Gustav and Henriette Krause were not enthused about their new German ruler, and with reason.
During the process of Germanisation, the German language became a substitute of the Polish tongue in the schools. Teachers who had no knowledge of Polish were favoured for employment by the education system. According to Thomas, "at this point the peasant knew that the government was his enemy."
There would be other reforms too, like the systematic purchasing of Polish land by the German government with the intent of settling it with Germans. Construction was also prohibited without a permit, which effectively denied Poles the right to build on newly acquired land, nor build further on the land they already owned.
It is no coincidence that when in 1877, Gustav and Henriette boarded the Charles Dickens, Henriette's brother, his wife and children - all Prussian Poles - were also on board.
Henriette's niece, Ottilie Ward, née Pukallus.
Ottilie Pukallus came to Australia on the Charles Dickens.
She was then 2 years old.
As for Henriette, pregnant or not, she was getting on that ship. If Bismarck had said that the Polish woman produced too many children, then Prussia was no place for a Polish woman to be making babies.
It was just as well, for in 1907 the German government passed an expropriation act, allowing it to seize any land which the colonisation commission desired but could not purchase. If you were a Pole and refused to sell your land, you were in for a horrid time.
So there you have it. After much research, my Teutonic and pagan fantasies have now long vanished. In their stead, reality - the tyranny of an imperial government intent on Germanisation; the desperate plight of a German-Polish family dissatisfied with their poor treatment and dreaming of a better world. All these things brought me my husband.
After all that, Shane Krause has kept his German name and most people do not know how complex his family's story truly is. On the face of it, he is descended from a “German immigrant". And so in a sense, Bismarck has had his way.
In Bismarck, the seeds of Hitler. Such a satisfying article. Thank you.
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