By Diane Gabb
Introduction
Much has been written about the large numbers of Dutch migrants who sought a new home in Australia after the devastation of World War II when over 200 000 citizens had lost their lives and the failed Netherlands economy had little to offer but emigration propaganda. Australia was able to receive them with some settlement infrastructure in place to make settlement feasible. The result was the formation of a large and relatively prosperous community, with notable contributions made to the fabric of multicultural Australia.(1)
In contrast, little is known of small groups of earlier Dutch emigrants who were true pioneers in that whatever they undertook would be entirely under their own auspices, and without the benefit of the support of numbers. Most accounts of this time point to isolated migrations of individuals or small family groups who did not attempt to form close-knit communities.(2) Most of these people were highly motivated by an acute lack of opportunity for personal growth circumscribed by their experience of the class struggle in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. Motivated by the same desire for a better life, an early 20th century group of young Dutch settlers from Amsterdam is the focus of this story. Their determined group organisation provided the foundation for setting out on an emigration adventure to Australia driven not only by difficult economic circumstances, but also by strong egalitarian ideals.
As the granddaughter and grand-niece of six of the original settlers, I cannot help but be intrigued and at the same time astounded by the story of my forbears and their friends, a group of poorly prepared young people with socialist ideals who, against great odds, sought to take up land in southern Queensland around the time of World War I. In fact, the grandfather and great-aunts I knew as a child take on a heightened stature as I piece together the facts of their migration and settlement. When I consider their story from an academic perspective in my capacity as a psychologist working in the area of the mental health of immigrants and refugees, I see in this migration story strong evidence of the type of motivation and coping behaviour that characterises many migration stories about life-changing circumstances where grief and loss – and triumph over hardship – are substantial components.
With only very slender material and educational resources, about 80 young people from Amsterdam, some of them young children, set out on lengthy voyages, the privations of which they could only guess at. However, they retained their youthful optimism and remarkable self-confidence, fuelled by sustained communal effort in the planning, transit and settlement phases. As the story unfolds, they experienced a legacy of troubled agricultural ventures and some change of heart in their utopian quest. Despite this, the pioneering first-generation firmly established the seeds of a middle-class lifestyle and extended family and community foundation, resulting in prosperity for four successive generations.
Details of the experience of three of these families, Lecker-Roelofs-Smit (an extended family), De Vries and Otterspoor have been made available to me through information gained largely from three former child emigrants, who, at the time of researching, were octogenarian women: my mother Johanna Needham (née Lecker, 1912), Aagje Smith (née de Vries, 1910) and Jeanette Harvey (née Otterspoor, 1913). They provided a wealth of their composite memories, family correspondence, documents and photographs. Special thanks are also due to two descendants Robyn de Vries and Elaine Bourke for their willingness to share their collections of family archives, photographs and anecdotes.
Pioneering circumstances
Around 1910, a group of disaffected young Dutch people born in the second-last decade of the 19th century met in the outer Amsterdam working-class area of Buiksloot Canal to discuss the possibilities of migration to Australia, and of farming co-operatively.(3) Buiksloot (literally, ‘stomach ditch’ or ‘dyke’) at the time symbolised the cold greyness and watery landscape of 19th century working-class Holland where illness and poverty robbed people of opportunity.
These young people were of working-class background, all with personal histories of family hardship, meagre diet, premature family death through consumption from overcrowded, damp living conditions, and minimal education to primary school levels. They had also experienced times of great religious conflict between Calvinists and Catholics, and the ensuing political repercussions of prejudice and discrimination, which often divided families and friends.
They had grown up at a time when families in recent memory had moved from rural areas to the city as a result of the Agrarian Depression of 1878–1895, leaving behind traditional community and religious loyalties. They were caught up by industrial unrest in the cities, high unemployment and the increasing demands by many working-class men and women to secure minimum standards in their conditions of employment, in terms of wages, work safety, hours of work, child labour laws and insurance against ill health.(4)
Popular social democrat gatherings held in trade schools inspired them to demand greater access to education, female emancipation and universal suffrage. They listened attentively to Pieter Jelles Toelstra, a Frisian lawyer, who emerged as the powerful and inspirational leader of the Social Democratic Labor Party (Sociaal Democratische Arbeiders Partij), and who reacted negatively with strong accusations of ‘social procrastination’ to measures taken by the government of the day to reform labour. They could see that despite some steady economic and political progress the benefits did not ever reach the most needy.(5)
With the rise in trade union membership and increasing numbers of declared socialists determined to maintain solidarity, the government attempted to pass anti-strike laws, which resulted in a general strike and increased factional divisions between religious-based unions and those distinctly anti-religious. Even the vote for all working men and women was not implemented until 1917 when the Constitution was eventually revised and a public proclamation took place.(6)
‘Too little, too late!’ might well have been the catch-cry of that young group of committed socialists, who formed what they dubbed symbolically in English ‘The Company’, in preparation for a new life in British Australia. They had been exposed to migration propaganda, assisted passages were a reality, and they were ready to embrace an optimistic set of selective facts and beliefs about how hospitable the new land would be and how well they would be able to meet all possible challenges.
True Dutch Settlers
The Company was inspired and led by Hubert (Bob) Nearing, an ex-merchant seaman, cabinetmaker and charismatic self-educated bachelor.(7) Many of his followers were tradesmen with low levels of formal education but healthy political appetites. A number were natural intellectuals, self-taught and interested in the arts. Many were under 30, all were married or betrothed (with the exception of their leader), and many had small children. The women reflected an early feminism: they were politically aware, had adventurous attitudes about migration, and favoured wearing loose-flowing garments instead of the boned silhouettes of the day. Many had worked as domestic servants or seamstresses before marriage. Some marriages had been formed between Catholic and Calvinist partners so the anti-religious stance of socialism was attractive as it eliminated grounds for religious conflict within marriage and childrearing.
These people expressed a yearning to farm even though they were largely ignorant of farming anywhere let alone in unfamiliar Australian conditions. The only exception to this was Jannetje de Vries, who had worked briefly as a milkmaid before marrying and settling in Amsterdam.(8) Frans Lecker had attempted to learn some milking skills from a local farmer near Amsterdam and carried a letter to prove it (see reference). Even though he was a discharged seaman from the Royal Netherlands Navy, he gave ‘farmer’ as his occupation when embarking.(9)
Twenty-six surnames of families and their occupations (see Appendix B) have been identified as those migrating during the period 1910–1920.(10–12) They were acquainted with one another in Amsterdam or were closely connected with the planning of the ‘chain’ migration undertaking organised by The Company under the guidance of Nearing, who had briefly visited Australia himself earlier. They numbered about 80 individuals, including their children. Interestingly, the total number of Dutch admitted into the whole of Australia in 1913 was only 288, and in 1914 only 287.(13)
Roelofs-Lecker-Smit (an extended family), De Vries, Otterspoor and friends
Despite their youth and close family ties, and knowing they had little or no hope of ever returning, Jacob Roelofs, a cabinetmaker, and his sisters Cornelia Lecker (née Roelofs) and Marie Roelofs, had taken the decision to leave Amsterdam, with their parents and four other sisters.
Their father Jacobus Egbertus Roelofs was a hard-working tailor whose skills were good enough for him to be employed to make uniforms for the Queen’s household staff. Despite this, he and his wife Grietje still struggled financially with a family of seven children. All six daughters were expected to find respectable work before they married. Jacob and his friend Anton Smit, Marie’s fiancé, were the first to embark in late 1910 in the expectation that they would be able to make the first moves on the way to establishing a rural life in Queensland for their families in co-operation with other migrating friends.
They were followed by Klaas de Vries, a carpenter, his wife Jannetje and baby daughter Aagje aboard the SS Zieten, which left Antwerp on 9 June 1912. Also on board were Nearing, Hermann Souwer, a bank clerk, his wife Hendrika and their three children Herman, Max and Eliza, and also Atze and Lena Spoor and their four children Rommert, Pieter, Klaas and Christina.
Jacob’s wife Marie Roelofs Sagel set off alone with their two young sons Jacob (aged three) and Hendrik (aged two) aboard the Scharnhorst, also out of Antwerp, 31 August 1913.(14) At the last minute she was joined by her mother Alida Sagel who could not bear parting from her only daughter. (It was to be many years before Alida was reunited in Australia with her husband.) These two women were followed by Cornelia Lecker Roelofs, her husband Frans Lecker (ex-Royal Netherlands Navy), and baby daughter Johanna, together with Cornelia’s sister Marie Roelofs.
The Leckers, Marie Roelofs and an unaccompanied nineteen-year-old youth Carel Pohlmeyer (whose parents and sister sailed later) embarked from Portsmouth in early 1914 aboard the SS Limerick.(15) The same year, on 9 April the SS Waipara left London carrying other members of The Company. They were Jacobus and Tietsje van Noort, both tailors, and Arnoldus and Leentje Schuurs, and their children Jan, Galina and little Arnoldus.(16)
Like Frans Lecker, a number of the men had anticipated their future calling by recording in shipping lists their occupations as ‘farmer’or ‘farm labourer’,(17) even though there is little evidence that as city dwellers they had any real agricultural knowledge and experience.
The Otterspoor family undertook the voyage aboard the SS Gneisenau, arriving in Brisbane on 26 August 1912.(18) Within about two years they experienced the immeasurable loss of their two teenage sons Arnoldus and Frans who were killed fighting for their new country in the Great War. Their grief was so great that they returned to Holland shortly afterwards and tried to slip into their old life. However, by about 1920 they found themselves migrating again to Queensland, and settling near their old friends the Leckers in Rocklea, about 13 kilometres south of Brisbane.
Sea journey on the Limerick
Each voyage took about nine weeks, during which men and women were segregated into separate third-class communal cabins. As rumours of impending war circulated, on the Limerick there were incidents of extreme hostility and physical violence between German and Dutch women forcibly cabined together. The actual declaration of war prohibited the ship from allowing passengers to go ashore at any foreign ports. Few fresh provisions were available during the voyages in 1914. As a result, children died of gastroenteritis from contaminated ship’s food in alarming numbers. Remarkably, twenty months’ old Johanna Lecker remained in good health due no doubt to her mother Cornelia’s foresight in feeding her only preserved food she had prepared herself in Amsterdam. Cornelia also befriended the ship’s cook who against the rules allowed her small saucepan containing her own food to warm on the edge of the ship’s stove, and then be kept warm in a hay-box (hooikast). She also used her small kerosene primus stove (stelletje) she had smuggled aboard, when opportune.
After nine long weeks at sea without stepping on to dry land, the Limerick’s passengers were desperate for landfall. With great joy they savoured first land at Townsville in north Queensland, where Frans Lecker, to better survey the unfamiliar terrain, hiked up the rocky volcanic outcropping of Castle Hill with his little daughter clinging to his shoulders.
The Limerick delivered them to Brisbane some 1600 kilometres south, where they were joyfully reunited with those of the group who had arrived earlier. The ship had been in regular service bringing emigrants from England to Brisbane two or three times a year, for some years.
However, they could not guess that soon after their safe arrival, the Limerick and all its hands were to meet death by German torpedo on the return voyage.
Other difficult land journeys were to follow for the settlers, but not before they had to make the difficult decision whether to take up small land holdings (of cleared land) on the outskirts of Brisbane where a handful of friends and relatives who had already settled, or whether to continue with the original plan of The Company’s communal farm in remote and undeveloped country between Gayndah and Mundubbera, 390 kilometres north of Brisbane.
There followed a period of temporary settlement in tin huts with dirt floors, which they built themselves while the men folk worked as labourers or workers on the Brisbane Tramways, in order to earn enough money to purchase or select (lease) land.(19) Then, each family would then have been in a better position to make that important decision. I can only speculate on the lengthy arguments about the pros and cons of whether to press on further north into the interior country, unseen and undeveloped, which was of course The Company’s original plan, where they would be without even the most basic of services or facilities, let alone cleared land. The other option was an outer Brisbane holding with no public services like water, streetlights, public transport or sewerage, but the promise of infrequent access to the city by a 40-minute train trip. In any case, it would mean a major split in The Company, which could not have been without considerable pain and disappointment, and no doubt strained friendships.
Cornelia’s miscarriage, and the nearness of the Roelofs and Smit relatives who had already decided to settle near Brisbane, helped the Lecker family to opt for Rocklea, south of Brisbane, where Frans, along with his brothers-in-law Jacob Roelofs and Anton Smit, set about building temporary tin huts, and later permanent wooden houses on high stilts Queensland-style, with vegetable gardens, chickens and a few milking cows. Life in Rocklea then was quiet, with few neighbours and long walks along unmade roads or bush tracks to school, shops or the railway station. Social life for the Lecker, Smit and Roelofs families revolved round one another as there were no other Dutch-speaking people in the vicinity.
True pioneers
The De Vries family took the more intrepid option and set out for Cattle Creek, in the Burnett area north of Gayndah, where they left the train at the Gayndah rail head. They then walked 70 kilometres to a site west of Mundubbera at the junction of Cattle Creek and O’Bil Bil Creek, their sparse belongings following by horse and dray. The official Lands Department description of the vegetation in 1914 was ‘very thickly timbered gum and ironbark forest, with dense wattle, vine, turkey and needle bush undergrowth’,(20) so turning the land into farming country would be very challenging, to say the least. In addition to the native bush there was the exotic cactus prickly pear, covered in sharp spines, growing in huge clumps and highly toxic to cattle. Indeed, the Prickly Pear Land Act of 1910 had made it possible for impoverished migrants to select uncleared land between 160 acres to 300 acres in size for as little as £5 in remote areas for agricultural or grazing purposes. This held the promise of converting the land to freehold tenure after a fixed number of years of residence and improving the land to a set value.(21) The Act required the eradication of prickly pear, which was classed as a noxious weed and extremely difficult to destroy. Despite this challenge, the young settlers, urged on by Nearing, who had after all visited Queensland earlier and pronounced the area as the best proposition for acquiring land, were quite convinced that clearing and farming the land available in the Burnett area would be well within their capabilities. It seems unlikely that he had actually seen the land in that earlier visit, or had had the opportunity to learn anything about the prevailing conditions in that region of Queensland.
The De Vries and Souwer families together with Nearing settled on the north side of Cattle Creek north of Mundubbera, while the Spoor and Schuurs families were joined by five others by name of Fros, Kammerling, Van der Hove, Boes and Mour. They all established themselves on the southern side, which became known as Glenrae. Clearing the vegetation from their blocks to a certain stage was undertaken by many of the settlers communally, but after that they continued independently.(22)
At first the families camped in tents. Then bark huts (known locally as ‘humpies’) were built with rammed earth floors and remained the only housing for the next two decades.
Klaas de Vries and his friends felled the trees themselves for all buildings including the permanent house that took him three years to build and into which the family moved in 1937. By 1914 he had built extensive cattle yards. The settlers put their labour into digging wells and pumping water by hand from the creek, building cattle yards and sheds, all the while struggling against the erratic seasons that brought drought, bushfire, floods, insect plagues and crop diseases.
At the same time they were under threat of losing the battle against the hardy prickly pear, the elimination of which would determine the improved value of the property and its conversion to freehold. Letters dating from 1926 between the land authorities and Klaas de Vries and his old friend Hermann Souwer attest to their failure to eradicate prickly pear, and the detrimental effects on the valuation of the land, which Souwer described as ‘ridiculous low’ [sic](23) (see Appendix C).
The settlers’ lack of knowledge of farming techniques and soils added to the problems they experienced in establishing a dairy herd, which was sometimes decimated by tick fever, also known as ‘red water’. This is a disease borne by the tick, a blood-sucking insect that causes cattle to bleed into the bladder, hence its name. Another trial faced was the weakening effects of drought on animals and humans when feeding and watering had to be done by hand. Water came from a well dug 8 metres into the creek bed. When the cattle were too weak to walk back up the bank with a belly full of water, a pump had to be worked by hand to fill troughs. Crops too required water; lucerne grew well in the black soil, but failed without adequate water. It was the same with the cotton crop; without good seasons, it failed.(24)
Other crops were tried with very limited success: wheat, barley, rye, sugar beet, tomatoes, and mangelwurzel (as cattle fodder). Disappointment prompted Klaas de Vries to consider leaving it all behind and heading off to start all over again in San Francisco where land for settlement was being advertised in the Brisbane newspapers of the time. But he stayed on in the Burnett.
When times were especially lean, the exhausted yet resourceful young Dutchmen turned to other bush work staples: cutting scrub, ring-barking trees (a technique for killing trees by removing a ring of bark), possum and wallaby snaring for skins and shooting wild turkeys for meat.(25)
Aagje de Vries recalled that at first there was no school. In 1916 her primary school days started in a school room held in a tent till 1917, under the care of a succession of young solo ‘pupil teachers’ (who had just completed school themselves) and who were forced by necessity to board with local families in their cramped huts. Aagje’s brother and sister were both born after the move to Cattle Creek but were young enough to attend the Cattle Creek Valley School in the 1920s.(26)
Despite the distance separating them the De Vries family and Lecker family, who had elected to stay near Brisbane, kept in close contact by letter. In 1917, Cornelia made the long journey with five-year-old Johanna by train and horse dray to stay for two months with the De Vries family when Frans, forced to work in far-off Cloncurry, suffered a serious accident. Aagje remembered how she enjoyed their visit, particularly as she could then read to little Johanna.(27) Later, Aagje came to board with the Leckers at Rocklea for the duration of her high school education at the Brisbane State High School. Intermittent schooling in the bush and her farm work responsibilities impeded her educational ambitions and she was now a highly motivated and very successful student. She and Johanna were the first of the group’s children to complete secondary school, and later teachers’ college. Johanna became the first university graduate of the group.
The sense of community and common purpose was sustained throughout those difficult settlement years among this Dutch group, even though some had ended up in the southern outskirts of Brisbane and others in the Cattle Creek area. Helping one another in the face of adversity was the only resource they had. The original socialist co-operative work venture had evolved into a strong sense of neighbourly community, with families eventually working independently of one another. Family anecdotes ascribe the failure of the original communal farm to the problems the women had in sharing the kitchen facilities!
However, other real hardships remained. During World War I, some of these Dutch women and children were vilified as enemy Germans in schools and shops. People with halting English were conspicuous in Anglo-Celtic Queensland and partisan memories of the South African Dutch as the enemy in the Boer War lingered. Johanna remembers her mother’s periods of deep depression. Inevitably, loneliness and hardship led to periods of earnest talk of returning to the homeland. Letters dating from 1917–1922 from the Roelofs’ parents in Amsterdam reflect the possibility of reunion. They wrote of the emotional struggle between longing to see their children and grandchildren again, and at the same time delivering dire warnings about the extreme privations of life in contemporary Holland, should the young emigrants somehow find their way back.(28)
In Brisbane, times were particularly hard during the Great Depression when families like the Leckers relied on what they could grow for food for themselves, with sometimes a little extra for sale. Johanna recalled having to sell boxes of strawberries early in the morning at the market before she could attend her university lectures.
Continuity
The Brisbane group maintained an affinity with Dutch culture despite the fact that almost all the child migrants and those born in Australia married outside the Dutch community, a common trend throughout later Dutch communities.(29) However, the group showed variable maintenance of the Dutch language at home for some 50 years, and there is the occasional use of some Dutch words in conversation even today by grandchildren and great grandchildren. They sang Dutch songs, taught them to their children and grandchildren, and passed on anecdotes about life in the old country. Touches of blue and white Delft china and polished brass are still cherished icons from a long-ago time. Both groups maintained links with Holland through personal correspondence over a period of some 80 years, and the meetings, friendship and occasional business links between Dutch and Australian third cousins are warm, with a feeling of connectedness. To my knowledge, none of the migrating adults ever returned to Holland. Their children fared better: Johanna revisited Holland for the first time when she was 64 and retired from school teaching, and Jeanette Otterspoor was planning to do so at 83. For their grandchildren and great grandchildren, visits to their ancestral homeland are relatively common and greatly savoured.
The Cattle Creek group has descendants still living in the Burnett area and other nearby central Queensland districts. Farming remained the occupation for at least two Australian-born generations. Dan de Vries farmed his father Klaas’s hard-won dairy land until 1963, before moving to another farm.(30) Aagje Smith de Vries continued to farm with her Australian farmer husband throughout her working life as a teacher in the nearby Nanango area. In 1996, there were 26 direct descendants of Klaas and Jannetje, many of whom were engaged in the professions.
Jacobus and Grietje Roelofs, who farewelled their son, two daughters and three grandchildren all those years ago in Amsterdam are now the forbears of more than 100 Australians whose middle-class lifestyles reflect a range of trades, business occupations and professions. Similarly, 32 descendants of Servanus and Hendrika Otterspoor are represented in a range of skilled occupations and professions.
Seen through the lens of time, the migrant children and their families have benefited from the hard work and personal sacrifice of the founding adult settlers, who reaped very little monetary reward for their labours, working hard well into their old age. Their real satisfaction was realised in the relatively comfortable and healthy lives of their children and grandchildren. Their source of support throughout the long years of loneliness and homesickness in an alien environment came from the strong sense they had of a community of friends, established so long ago near the cold, grey Buiksloot Canal, where a bold idea was embraced by the members of The Company and turned into action.
Commentary
With the benefit of hindsight, the story can be analysed through Yinger’s model of migration and settlement,(31) which endeavours to explain ‘ethnic strength’ on the part of migrant communities in terms of multiple variables that show the degree of salience to ethnic group membership. Some characteristics of a group that increase this degree of salience are: a large group; the group is residentially concentrated, with short-term residents or frequent newcomers; different languages are spoken, members are racially different and have a different religion from the host community; it entered the host community by forced migration; it monitors the political and economic homeland developments; its members are homogenous in class and occupation; they have a low level of education; they experience a frequent amount of discrimination; and they have little chance of social mobility. The opposite of these characteristics indicate the tendency of decreased salience of ethnic group membership.
How do our young Dutch group measure up? The residential pattern in a rural area or in the outskirts of a town was true for this group, so in a sense they were scattered by the terrain from one another in both the Cattle Creek and Brisbane outskirt areas. They clearly expected to stay; they became long-term residents with five generations in Australia from 1908 to 2006. There was no return home for the first generation, and only limited travel for the child settlers when elderly adults. The settlers arrived with little or no English proficiency, learning the language through their school-aged children. As socialists they ignored or denied family-of-origin religious ties; to the Anglo-Celtic Australians they seemed nominal Protestants, as well as racially congruent to themselves. They migrated of their own free will, but were driven out by poverty and lack of hope. Initially their intellectual and cultural interests differed from the host community, but they were keen to learn the skills needed for survival in and acceptance from the local community. This led to a waning interest in homeland developments, but distant family ties remained strong with the pain of separation present for many. As members of a group they were largely homogenous in terms of their working-class status, skilled or unskilled occupations and primary school level of education, with the addition of trade training for some. They experienced a level of discrimination during World War I owing to local perceptions of their ‘Germanic’ origins linking them with the enemy. Despite close family ties, and the existence of extended family, almost all children married non-Dutch spouses.
According to Yinger’s model, most of the above points indicate a lack of salience in ethnic group membership. However, the level of salience may shift over time. Indeed, the personal relationships and common values nurtured in a common cultural environment were probably vital to the success of this group in the early stages of their settlement. A general lack of formal education together with class and background homogeneity would suggest a tendency to salience of group membership, receiving strength from a common ethnicity. But, over the passage of time, the need for this waned, with the phenomenon of acculturation to new ways, new lifestyle conditions and a growing confidence. It can be truly said that the members of The Company contributed their lives to the fabric of Australia in the fullest sense.
Diana Gabb is a Psychologist/Educator, Victorian Transcultural Psychiatry Unit, Melbourne
End notes
1 Duyker E (1987), The Dutch in Australia, Ethnic Heritage Series, Melbourne.
2 ibid.
3 De Vries R (1996), pers corresp.
4 Lourens MM (1943), Labor, in: Landheer B (ed), The Netherlands, ch 12, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
5 ibid, p 194.
6 ibid, p 198.
7 De Vries R (1996), pers corresp.
8 ibid.
9 List of Queensland Passengers per SS Limerick, Plymouth, 1914, Bundle No IMA 1/9, Queensland State Archives.
10 Shipping list SS Zieten,1912, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
11 Shipping list SS Gneisenau,1912, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
12 List of Queensland Government Passengers per SS Waipara,London, 1914, Bundle No IMA 1/1, Queensland State Archives.
13 Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs (1993), Dutch in Australia, 1902–1946, Commonwealth Government of Australia, Canberra.
14 Norddeutscher Lloyd, Embarkation Certificate SS Scharnhorst, 1913, by kind permission of Elaine Burke.
15 List of Queensland Passengers per SS Limerick, Plymouth, 1914, Bundle No IMA 1/9, Queensland State Archives.
16 List of Queensland Government Passengers per SS Waipara,London, 1914, Bundle No IMA 1/1, Queensland State Archives.
17 List of Queensland Passengers per SS Limerick, Plymouth, 1914, Bundle No IMA 1/9, Queensland State Archives.
18 Shipping list SS Gneisenau,1912, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
19 Queensland State Archives (1996), BG5: Brief guide to the use of records concerning the ownership or leasehold of land, p 1, Queensland State Government.
20 Survey Map of Cattle Creek and O’Bil Bil Creek, Survey Office Queensland, 1914.
21 Prickly Pear Act 1910, Queensland State Archives.
22 De Vries R (1996), pers corresp.
23 Department of Public Lands, Brisbane (1926), letter from S Souwer (Appendix C).
24 De Vries R (1996), pers corresp.
25 ibid.
26 Smith A (1991), pers comm (audio tape).
27 ibid.
28 Roelofs G and J Roelofs (1917–1922), pers corresp to Cornelia Lecker Roelofs.
29 Cahill D (1995), Ethnic community development and the Dutch presence in Australia, in: Gruter B and J Stracke (eds), Dutch Australians Taking Stock, DACA, Melbourne.
30 De Vries R (1996), pers corresp.
31 Yinger JM (1994), Ethnicity: Source of Strength? Source of Conflict? State University of New York Press, New York.
