G'Day List The following is an excerpt from this web site: www.lca.org.au/schools/schools_pdfs/voicesacle02.pdf I have chosen to cut and paste because the site is a PDF and 14 pages which takes time to download. The website is titled: Keynote Paper Presented at The Australian Lutheran Conference on Education September 1999 and is the compilation of the history of Lutheran teachers in Australia told in a present day format. Langebecker is the only Darling Downs pastor featured. Regards Alan Langebecker: My name is Theodor Friedrich Langebecker. I was born in Prussia in 1845. I decided to become a missionary and studied at the Gossner Institute in Germany. As a young man aged twenty two, I accepted a call as pastor to the Lutherans in Toowoomba in Queensland. Outside of South Australia, the second state to which there was the most German migration in the nineteenth century was Queensland. There was active recruitment of Germans to that state by the government. They wanted them for indentured labour to build the roads, bridges and railways in their rapidly developing state, partly because they had the technical expertise, but mostly because they were considered to be good workers. When their period of service was over, there was plenty of land to select. By the 1850s large numbers of them were attracted to Toowoomba and the Darling Downs. With the exception of the Bethania settlement south of Brisbane, most Queensland Germans did not come from a strong Lutheran background, half of them not even Lutherans at all. The great father of Lutheranism in Queensland was Pastor Schirmeister, a former Lutheran missionary to the south seas, who travelled all over southern Queensland from his base in Brisbane, ministering to German communities and organising them into congregations. He did this in Toowoomba too,eight years before I came in 1867.When I arrived in my new parish, one of the greatest needs I found among the people was for a school. There were no state schools at that stage, only an Anglican one, as well as a college for young ladies. Local Lutherans did not have much access to those. One of the first things I did then was to start up a school in the church building at Phillip Street. I was the main teacher there for three years until we were able to procure the services of Wilhelm Guhr, also trained as a lay missionary in Germany, as our teacher for the next twenty years. The school taught in German and English, concentrating on literacy and numeracy and other academic disciplines,as well as imparting to the young, Lutheran doctrine and Bible knowledge. It met the needs of the local Lutheran people very well. Seven years after I arrived, I began to have trouble with my eyesight. I decided to go back to Germany in order to get medical attention. After that, I went to the United States where I spent seven and a half years as a pastor. In 1883 I returned to Toowoomba to find Teacher Guhr and his school prospering. In 1881, the St Paulís congregation had built a new church, and when I returned plans were being made for a separate school building and teacher ís residence as well. These were completed and opened in 1884. It was a great day for Lutheran education in Toowoomba. We had a big opening with a number of preachers and received wide press coverage. It gave me an opportunity to enunciate for the congregation and the community our reasons for having a Lutheran school. I stressed to the people how important it was for them to keep the German language alive among their children; German was the language of science, it had a rich literature, and with the great influx of German migrants to Queensland, it would continue to be a major local language,as evidenced by the fact that Toowoomba continued to have more than one German newspaper. There was commercial sense in maintaining the language as well. But, most important, German was the language of the Lutheran faith. If young people were to stay in the church they had to be able to use the language of Lutherís Bible and the liturgy. Not many years later, in the 1890s, however, the school began to wane. Teacher Guhr became a pastor in 1890 and moved on to a new parish. I carried on the school myself after he left but could only afford one day a week of teaching in my busy schedule. I did this for fifteen years to gradually declining numbers, and I had to give it up in 1905 when I became President of our church in Queensland. For a time Miss Kate Mengel took over as teacher, but gradually it became a Sunday School only, with most Lutherans attending the state schools which were now provided by the government.What happened in Toowoomba, also occurred all over Queensland and parts of New South Wales where similar schools had been in operation. By the onset of World War 1, even the Bethania people south of Brisbane had lost their school,although it lingered longest. One of the main reasons was the difficulty of finding suitable teachers. Ours was one of the strongest schools because we had Teacher Guhr for twenty years. Bethania managed to recruit some from the south. But there was no training programme in Queensland for Lutheran teachers, and many schools met their demise because there was no one suitable to teach in them. We Queenslanders also were more widely spread, and integrated with the local community more quickly, losing our cultural distinctiveness at a greater rate. There was also the problem that many of our people spoke Plattdeutsch, Low German dialect, rather than the Hochdeutsch, or High German, of the educated which made German schooling much more demanding for the children, and resulted in it not being reinforced in the home. But most of all, it was the easy availability of state schools which lured families away. Even those who wanted a religious grounding for their children thought that they could still gain this through a Sunday school programme rather than a Lutheran day school. By the time of my death in1909, unlike their southern counterparts, Lutheran schools in Queensland had virtually died as well.I found that there were many who would support a Lutheran school because there was no other alternative. Many, however, lacked the commitment to Christian schooling, which is at the centre of the church ís involvement in education. Lutheran schools have always tried to give a solid education for citizenship and vocation while providing a strong grounding in Christian faith and belief. Most people will say they want both, but they have their priorities. Where Christian nurture is not their greatest priority, we learned in Queensland that Lutheran Schools have a much greater fragility. In your day, Queensland Lutheran schools provide for as many students as the rest of the states put together. Most of these schools are young and tender plants which will need careful tendering if history is not to repeat itself. Never take your schools for granted. Make sure they have a ready supply of teachers. Nurture your families in the faith so that their commitment to Lutheran schooling is real and permanent. I, too, commit our Lutheran schools to your care.