Charles Rasp, 'silver king', and Agnes Rasp, 'countess of Adelaide' leave Willyama and controversy legacies
Judith Armstrong's 1998 “factional” novel Anya: Countess of Adelaide gives the story of Charles Rasp from the perspective of his wife Agnes (Anya) and their life at the Willyama mansion at the Adelaide suburb of Medindie. The novel also includes the disputed theory that Charles Rasp was not his true identity.
Their South Australian heritage-listed Willyama remained among its finest bluestone mansions into the 21st Centre but the colourful lives of “The silver king” Charles Rasp and his wife Agnes, “The countess of Adelaide”, left another disputed legacy.
A lung weakness caused Rasp to move to Australia in 1869 from Hamburg, Germany, where he was a technologist with a large chemical manufacturing company. In Australia, he worked in viniculture and tried looking for gold in Victoria before becoming a boundary rider at Mount Gibbs station in the Barrier Ranges of New South Wales’s west.
After silver was found at Silverton and Day Dream station, the observant Rasp in 1883 pegged the first block on “Broken Hill” that he thought was a mountain of tin. On advice of the Mount Gipps manager George McCulloch, a “syndicate of seven” each pegged out a block to include the whole ridge. The syndicate had little success for months and Adelaide analysts only found tin before a rich silver ore in 1885 led to the Broken Hill Proprietary Co. with capital of 16,000 £20 shares – 14,000 of them to the syndicate. Within five years, Rasp had made a fortune.
Rasp met Agnes Maria Louise Klevesahl when he brought ore to be assayed in Adelaide and she was working as a waitress at the Rundle Street café of Gustav Kindermann. Agnes had met Kindermann in 1882 on the Wodan as she left Germany to make a life for herself in South Australia after being estranged from her father and stepmother. Agnes and Rasp married in Adelaide in 1886 and honeymooned in Broken Hill.
The next year, they bought the mansion they called Willyama (the Aboriginal name for Broken Hill) in the new suburb of Medindie from another German emigrant, doctor/surgeon Oscar Görger. Agnes (called “Anya” by Rasp after one of his earlier loves in Germany) furnished the house for entertaining in a grand manner at balls and dinner parties.
The quieter Rasp was more content with his library of French and German books. As a waitress marrying the more cultured Rasp, Agnes was anxious about social status. She was particularly conscious of antagonism from Adelaide University anatomy professor Archibald Watson, one of Rasp’s friends. Rasp died of a heart attack at Willyama in 1907.
On a trip to Europe, Agnes – travelling with long-time maid Anna Paech – became engaged to the Baron Richard von und zu Eisenstein, almost 70, whom the Rasps had met and befriended on a previous two-year trip to Europe. Eisenstein died of a heart attack in a London hotel the day before the wedding. Agnes then married Eisenstein’s aide Karl Joseph von Zedtwitz – another count – in London in 1914.
When World War I broke out, the Count and Countess von Zedtwitz stayed in Berlin until the war was over. The count died at war’s end. Any comforting thoughts for Agnes in returning to South Australia in 1921 as the socially impressive “Countess of Adelaide” were shattered when she found she was considered an enemy alien and had all her property, including Willyama, and shares confiscated under the Enemy Property Act. They were returned only through a special act of federal parliament, sponsored by prime minister Billy Hughes. Agnes Rasp died in 1936 at 79.
The controversial Rasp sequel stemmed from a 20th Century theory by historian R. Maja Sainisch that Rasp’s true identity was Hieronymous Salvator Lopez von Pereira, born in Saxony in 1846 but from Portuguese ancestors who changed their name and were being pursued by the financier Rothschild. According to the elaborate theory, in 1870, as a 23-year-old officer in the Royal Saxon Army laying siege to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, had taken the identity of a friend, called Raspe, killed in battle, and headed for Australia. This theory took hold in some accounts and was featured in Judith Armstrong’s 1998 “factional” novel Anya Countess of Adelaide.