Tree home for Caroline and Friedrich Herbig, at Springton in South Australia, a testament to German settler spirit
The large Herbig family held reunions at the tree in Springton, in South Australia's Barossa Valley, usually every five years.
Image courtesy ExploreOz
A twisted and bent old river red gum on Angaston Road, Springton, in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, became a state heritage listed tribute to the drive and persistence of early German settlers and to much earlier inhabitants. At 300 to 500 years old, with a seven-metres diameter and 24 metres high, the tree carried the coolamon scars of Peramangk Aboriginal people carving wooden dishes out of the tree's bark.
The tree was the first Australian home of 27-year-old tailor Friedrich Herbig. Herbig had left his village of Grünberg (160 kilometres southeast of Berlin, later part of Poland) to emigrate. He travelled on river barges along the Oder River, through Frankfurt an der Oder and Berlin, on the Aller canal, into the Weser River and then Bremen.
In June 1855, Herbig was among 110 passengers on the Wilhelmine, making its second trip to South Australia. He arrived in October and went to Blumberg (later Birdwood), settled about seven years earlier, northeast of Adelaide. Getting work at George Fife Angas’s dairy “The Springs”, 19 kilometres to the north, Herbig made a home in a river redgum tree, with its hollow opening facing away from the rain, on the banks of a stream and near the dairy. Herbig leased 32 acres from Angas (11 years later he owned it) and planted wheat while working at the dairy.
In November 1856, the Vesta reached Port Adelaide from Hamburg, with 16-year-old Caroline Rattey (anglicised from the Polish name Ratachi) and her uncle and aunt. The illiterate family group settled at New Hoffnungsthal in the Barossa Valley in 1856. In 1857, Caroline’s uncle and aunt moved to Black Springs (later Springton) but she stayed at Hoffnungsthal as a maid with Johann Leske.
In 1857, Leske’s father Samuel died in an accident when horses pulling his German wagon bolted. On the funeral day, Caroline, alone at the Leske house minding Johann’s two young children, was attacked by an intruder who’d seen Samuel Leske’s wife take money from her husband’s clothing after the fatal accident. The intruder attacked Carole, hung her by the neck from a wattle tree, stabbed her above the left breast and went inside to burgle the house. The sturdy Caroline freed herself and ran about a kilometre to another farmhouse before collapsing.
After the attack, Caroline joined her aunt and uncle at Black Springs, where she met Friedrich Herbig. The pastor who married them in July 1858 was one of the first graduates from the first Lutheran seminary in the southern hemisphere. The seminary (preserved in the church museum at Lobethal) was a hut, with classes conducted by Daniel Fritzsche.
Caroline and Friedrich Herbig started living together in the tree home. In September 1860, after their second child was born, they moved to a two-roomed pine and pug hut, with a thatched roof, that Friedrich built about 370 metres upstream from the tree. In 1864, Friedrich’s mother Anna Rosine joined them, having arrived from Hamburg on the Suzanne. The Herbigs had 16 children.
The Freidensberg (“Hill of Peace”) Lutheran congregation was formed at Black Springs in 1859, with services in homes until the church was built in 1861. Friedrich Herbig became a church elder, layreader, and president of the congregation. In 1886, while delivering a load of chaff to Friedrich Kuchel, Friedrich Herbig fell off his wagon crossing a creek and was fatally concussed. His eldest child August was 27 and his youngest, Clara, 15 months old.
Caroline Herbig died in 1927, leaving behind four of her sons, five of her daughters, 44 grandchildren and 35 great grandchildren.
