Friedrich August HAGENAUER

HAGENAUER, FRIEDRICH AUGUST (b. Hohenleuben, Saxony, 10 March 1829; d. Lake Tyers, Vic, 28 Nov 1909). Moravian missionary to Vic Aborigines.

A son of a Lutheran couple, Johann and Marie Hagenauer, he was confirmed in 1843. Leaving school in that year he worked with his father for two years and then on railway construction and bridgework at Elster. In 1850 he joined the Moravian church at Ebersdorf. This church was established by the followers of John Hus, a popular preacher and rector of the University of Prague (Bohemia) who opposed the Roman Catholic practice of selling indulgences. He was burnt at the stake on 6 July 1415. The number of followers, known as Hussites, increased in the small kingdom of Bohemia and the neighbouring state of Moravia. The Moravian church was established in 1457. The Moravians were persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Many members fled to Poland, but a remnant remained in Bohemia. In 1722 a group of 10 refugees led by a Moravian, Christian David, to the estate of Count Zinzendorf, in Saxony. Zinzendorf was a German Pietist who moulded together the traditions of Moravian zeal and practical service, Pietist devotion and scholarship and his own commitment to worldwide mission. As other Moravians joined this small group, their village, Herrnhut, grew, and became a centre for Moravian missionary training. The Moravians had a special concern for peoples they considered to be outcasts or the most degraded and according to the racial theories of the time, the Australian Aborigines fitted these categories.

Hagenauer commenced missionary training at Herrnhut in 1851. In 1856 he was instructed to travel to Victoria with the Rev F W Spiesecke (q.v.) who had been involved in an earlier failed attempt to establish a Moravian mission in Victoria. He was ordained on 6 Jan 1858. They left London on 15 Feb and arrived in Melbourne on 7 May 1858. Supported by the government, the Church of England and the Presbyterian Church they travelled to the Wimmera district, and having rejected two proposed sites as unsuitable, accepted the offer by a Presbyterian layman, Horatio Ellerman of land on his Antwerp station. They commenced work at Ebenezer Mission on the banks of the Wimmera River on 10 Jan 1859. They began learning the local dialect, opened a school, erected their houses and sought to encourage the local Aborigines to settle and work on agricultural and pastoral projects.

Although frustrated by the movement of the people and their continuing involvement in what Hagenauer viewed as pagan ceremonies and customs, they were encouraged in Feb 1860 by the conversion of a young man who was baptised on 12 Aug 1860, taking the name Nathanael Pepper (q.v.). A church building was dedicated on the same day. On 15 June 1861, Hagenauer m. Sister Louise Knobloch, who had come from Germany, in St Paul's Church, Melbourne. They had nine children. She died 23 Oct 1917. In 1861, he was asked by the Presbyterian Church to establish a new mission station for Aborigines in the Gippsland region of Vic. They arrived in Gippsland in Feb 1862. After some delay, land was granted and they opened Ramahyuck Mission on the River Avon at Lake Wellington in 1863.

Hagenauer devoted himself to the development of Ramahyuck as a model Christian village, based on the Moravian experience at Herrnhut. He sought to eliminate traditional practices and to encourage consistent work practices and settled family life. In 1863 he wrote that 'hopelessness and encouragement hold alternate place in our hearts, while engaged in such a work ... Yet faith ever encourages us to go on in obedience to the Lord's command and preach the gospel to the heathen.' In 1866 a church building was opened and two converts baptised. By 1875, fifty-one had been baptised. Nathanael Pepper joined Hagenauer in 1869 and assisted him in the work of evangelism until his death at Ramahyuck in 1877. In 1877 a Royal Commission Report on Aborigines in Vic referred to Ramahyuck as the most successful of the missions with its thirteen cottages, missionary's home, church, schoolhouse, boarding-house for children and the production of arrowroot, hops and vegetables. Sheep and cattle were pastured on the land to provide other employment. The school at Ramahyuck was praised in several reports as one of the most successful in Victoria. Following the commission Hagenauer was asked to visit Aborigines in the Murray River region to encourage them to settle at missions.

In 1885 he travelled to north Qld while on leave, to report on the needs of Aborigines. His report led to the establishment of Mapoon Mission in 1891. He became increasingly autocratic and paternalistic in his approach to the protection of Aborigines and advised the government on the policy of distinguishing between half-castes and Aborigines which was enshrined in an Act of 1886. He clashed with the secretary of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines, Brough Smyth, and in 1889 became acting secretary of the Board, a position he held until 1906. While Ramahyuck residents respected him for the protection he had provided, other Aborigines resented his interference in their lives as secretary of the Board. While his work enabled the survival of some Aboriginal people whose descendants remain in the Gippsland region, the population at Ramahyuck declined and the mission was closed on 17 March 1908.

J Harris, One Blood, (Sutherland, 1990); A Massola, Aboriginal Mission Stations in Victoria (Melbourne, 1970)

BILL EDWARDS