FoLA Meeting August 2024 – Guide us by Thy hand to our fatherland: New perspectives on the Kavel migration to SA

Also available via YouTube LiveStream: https://www.youtube.com/@friendsoflutheranarchives9644/live

Speaker: Johannes Boxdörfer

$5 donation at the door. No bookings required.

This presentation will focus on undocumented episodes in
Kavel´s search for a new home for his church during his
time in Posen, Berlin, Hamburg and London prior to his
departure for SA. He will also discuss the disparity
between Kavel’s vision for SA and the perspective of his
patron, George Fife Angas, and the resolution of these
tensions in the first years of settlement.

A high-school teacher in Lindau, Bavaria, Johannes
studied German, history and politics at Bamberg
University, and in 2019 completed a doctoral thesis on the
Old Lutheran migration to SA in the mid-19th century,
published by Franz Steiner Verlag as Führ uns an der
Hand bis ins Vaterland! in 2020. A keen traveller,
Johannes wrote a paper on the migration story following
his first visit to Australia in 2004, when he bought a copy
of David Schubert’s Kavel’s People in Hahndorf and
became acquainted with Lutheran Archives.

Having loved Australia on his first visit, in 2011 he took
over the exchange program his high school, the Valentin-
Heider-Gymnasium in Lindau, was running with Reynella
East College and therefore came to South Australia in
2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 for a month. Making use of
these weeks to visit Lutheran Archives to research some
still-open questions on this migration story, he decided to
write a PhD thesis on it while working fulltime as a
teacher.