up the hill, over the city

This is the Gamle Aker Kirke, the church where my great, great grandparents were married. It is a severe building positioned on a hill above central Oslo, with a beautiful cemetery attached. The late spring evening I visited here with my parents it was almost silent. There was no sense of being in a city at all. There were purple flowers in the trees around the church and occasional birdsong. The church was built here in the eleventh century and it is Oslo’s oldest surviving building. It was originally a basilica in the Roman style. Frederick Martinsen (later known as Pedersen) and Anne Lovisa Iversdatter married here on 28 April 1871, only 10 days after Anne Lovisa registered as emigrating from the parish of Aremark and a mere 18 days before leaving Hamburg for Australia on the Lammershagen. She was 6 years older than him. When you assemble the genealogical data on individuals there are always fascinating gaps and mysteries. This is the addictive element of the research. Standing on the top of the Telthusbakken hill on a beautiful, fine and mild evening, I try to imagine them coming to the church to marry. He was a cork cutter and I assume she had been a farm servant girl. But I cannot know how they met, how they decided to marry and emigrate together or how they decided upon Queensland as their destination. What struck me most about the church grounds was how richly green everything was. This whole part of the world seems to have an astounding wealth of water. What a shock it must have been for them. Anne Lovisa had expressed her intention to leave Aremark for Amerika, but instead she would end up in Aramac.

first impressions

When the 'Shakespeare' arrived in Maryborough, with Jens Peter Jensen on board, it was reported that the passengers were all 'Germans'. Looking through the passenger list, it's clear to see that a majority of those aboard were from Denmark, with significant numbers from Germany and Switzerland and a smaller number from Sweden. I read somewhere that on days when ships from Hamburg arrived, it was difficult to hear a word of English spoken in town as farmers from the surrounding area came in to meet up with their countrymen and potentially hire someone for a job of work.

On August 10, 1871 the Mayborough Chronicle described the passengers this way: "The immigrants per Shakspere prove to be as fine and well-conditioned a lot of people as evere arrived here [...] Their healthy, sturdy, clean, and comfortable appearance speaks for itself, and from what we hear many of them possess the additional recommendation of adding in some degree to the available capital of the colony. We are told that quite a considerable amount has been deposited by these new chums during the day at our local banks. These are the right people to send out to Queensland, and we are glad to hear that there is a prospect of more of the same sort from where they came."

It's hard not to hear Australia's contemporary immigration priorities echoed in those sentiments: healthy, clean and comfortably off. Many of those on board this ship were agricultural workers, destined to be part of the farming district stretching out from Maryborough. They were described (perhaps not as ironically as I would hope) as 'more acceptable "material"' in the Brisbane Courier of 9 August.

Image reference: Adelaide Street, Maryborough, 1880 - Image Number: qmar00063 State Library of Qld collection