ABSTRACT
By 1891 it was estimated that 7.7 per cent of South Australia’s population was of German birth or descent; the figure for Queensland was 6.2 per cent and for Australia overall 2.8 per cent. By the end of the century Germans had replaced the Chinese as the largest foreign minority. In the early years of the South Australian colony one in ten citizens is said to have been of German origin, most working small-scale farms or as artisans. Soon authors were passing isolated farms, and admiring luxuriant wheatfields. By contrast, the clusters of eucalypt trees, with their scarcity of leaves (some were quite denuded and probably already dead), did not present them with a very pleasant impression. They weren’t too taken, either, with the sight of the impoverished huts of the farmers, compared with which their farmers’ cottages seemed like magnificent mansions.
