I read a book some years ago with a title like "Germans in Queensland". It *might* be this book: http://srlopac.slq.qld.gov.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=321667 Anyhow, the book talked about what motivated the Germans to emigrate to Queensland in the late 1800s. As I recall, there were three main reasons and obviously some people would have been motivated by more than one: * conscription of young men into the army (as already mentioned) * a schism in the Lutheran Church, one variant of which was being promoted as the State Religion to the disgust of the followers of the other variety of Lutheranism, i.e. religious freedom * general poor economic conditions The poor economic conditions had two aspects. The first aspect related to small farmers (freehold or leasehold). Traditionally farms passed from father to sons but the problem in the 1800s was that child mortality rates improved through better understanding of germs and innoculations etc. So while in the 1700s, a man might have been lucky to see one or two sons reach adulthood to take over the farm, by the 1800s, a man might find himself with several sons. Thus over a few generations it became impossible for all the descendants to live and work that small farm, forcing some of them to seek other opportunities. The other issue was the closure of a number of coal mines, putting a lot of miners out of work. I'm not sure why they closed, maybe they had run out of coal? Meanwhile in Queensland, there was a huge demand for workers especially on farms and there was pressure put on the government to encourage immigration. However, not all immigrants were equally welcomed by the employers. There were already a lot of Irish immigrants and they were not so popular with employers, who found them lazy, dirty, and drunken and many of them came from cities and knew little about farming. And worst of all, they were Catholic! However, the Germans who had already immigrated to Queensland in the early 1800s were generally seen as hardworking, sober and reliable farming folk, and as an added bonus, they were mostly Protestants! So, the Qld government engaged immigration agents in Germany specifically to attract more German immigration. And cheap land deals were often part of the "carrot" to get people to immigrate. So given the demand for farm workers in Queensland and the ready supply of cheap land and the motivations for Germans to leave Germany including the over-crowding on their farms, it is little wonder we saw so much German immigration to Qld in the late 1800s with a view to taking up farming. Now, I don't want to swear that all of this info came from that one book. It's probably a mish-mash of information I got from a number of sources, but I hope it helps to explain that boom in German immigration to Qld in the late 1800s, that many of us are descended from. As for why we didn't get told so much about our German ancestors, I think the answer comes down to World War 1. While Germans were in favour in Qld in the 1800s, things changed with World War 1. There were internments of German residents here in Australia, towns were renamed etc. Also the sons and grandsons of German immigrants went off in the Australian armed forces to fight against Germany. Even holding Lutheran church services in German was seen as suspicious. It was hardly a good time to be trying to encourage children to take an interest in their German ancestry. And then a generation later there was World War 2. So I suspect sharing your pride in your German ancestry with your Australian children and grandchildren wasn't so easy in the early 1900s. And as many of us know, when you are young, you don't want to know about your ancestry. It's not until you get older yourself, you start to take an interest in these things and, sadly, you've often lost your older generations who might have told you. Kerry