Erdmann J€CKEL

Story

IMMIGRATION Bridge

Why Immigrate?

Carl Erdmann J€CKEL, with his wife J. Eleonore, nee BLEICHER, and two children, Hermann Carl J€CKEL (age 8), and Auguste Luise J€CKEL (age 5) left the Bohemian mountains of South Silesia for Australia to free, to better, themselves – spiritually, politically and economically. The J€CKELs had a fierce belief in spiritual freedom and the family emigrated as religious refugees from the oppresive attempts by the Absolutist Prussian State to dominate religious belief and practice; but they were also political and economic refugees – fleeing the Weavers’ Revolt and massacres by the Prussian army in their home town of Peterswaldau in the Eulengebirge (the Owl Mountains) of Silesia, but also fleeing a fervour of anti-authoritarian madness and Revolutionary uprisings of Europe in 1848.

The Journey?

The J€CKELs were part of Fifty People from the south Silesian ‘Peterswaldau Immigration Society’ recorded as emmigrating because of their beliefs. The fifty emigrated during the 1848 revolutions across German lands, and travelled through Berlin during the March days of 1848 where they saw the bodies of those killed piled up on the wharf for removal onto barges. They travelled from eastern Europe across Germany to the port of Bremen, as in 1848 the nearer port of Hamburg was bockaded by Denmark as part of the front of the first Prussian Danish war. They left under cover of darkness from the port of Bremen on the of April 1848 and went by way of Rio de Janierio, and arrived in Adelaide in August 1848. They were fortunate in the choice of the ship ‘Leontine\’ and package passenger carrier to the USA about to make the first of its two trips to South Australia. The master Captian Ariaans was also joined in a cabin aboard ship by the owner Herr Eugen LAUN, himself a captain who\’d been master navigator on two previous emigrant ships from Europe to Adelaide, and the ship was well-kept, well provided, and so free of disease, so that very few deaths occurred in the journey.

After Arrival?

Erdmann J€CKEL was a tischlermeister, a master joiner / cabinet maker, but though he bought land in the main street of Tanunda, in the Barossa valley, there was not much wealth among the early settlers, and people living in huts made of bush timber, bark or stone, did not have much call for finely-built interiors. He is recorded as having had to leave the tischler trade to take up farming just to survive. The first years were fraught with poverty and their difficulties might have approached occasional starvation. In 1853 after just five years in South Australia, but now a widower, Erdmann J€CKEL moved with his two children to the building-boom town Melbourne, Victoria, where gold was stimulating a population explosion that needed to be housed. His wife Johanne Eleonore died in penurious circumstances as no death certificate or burial site has been recorded. Erdmann J€CKEL remarried in February 1854 in Collins Street, Melbourne. The widower with two children married a widow with two children – J. Christiane Tzschoppe whose husband had also died after arrival in Australia. The blended family settled in what is now Surrey Hills. Though Erdmann went back to work as a tischler, he warily kept a small farm as a grounded provident support base for food, growing vines and becoming a vigneron, making apiary equipment and keeping bees. As their children married they went further east to Narre Narre Warren/ Berwick and Wantirna. The crofters house which Erdmann J€CKEL built still exists as ‘Spencycroft’ now much altered, added to, and renovated as the oldest building in Surrey Hills, Victoria.

< Back to the Stories