Bethany (South Australia)

The small town called Bethany, Bethany or even Neuschlesien, located in South Australia in Australia in the Barossa Valley, about 2 km south-east of Tanunda and 74 km north-east of Adelaide. It is a place that was founded in 1841 by German immigrants.

Bethany was founded with the biblical name Bethany became the first site in the Barossa Valley of Lutheran believers from Posen and Silesia in 1841 on the initiative of Pastor Gotthard Daniel Fritzsche, who migrated because of religious disputes with the authorities of Prussia from their homeland. The 270 immigrants who arrived Port Adelaide on 27 October 1841 the ship Skjold, formed the second wave of emigration from Germany to Australia and split up after settlement areas. Some of them settled in the towns of Hahndorf and Klemzig already established by Germans, of which 21 families built on Bethany. There are also called other numbers: 28 families, 34 children and 83 adults.

In the region of the Barossa Valley originally lived a small group of Aborigines.

George Fife Angas, who was connected Fritzsche, leased the land, was founded on the Bethany, to the immigrants, who bought it from him later. 1843, the place had about 200 inhabitants and 1844 had made ​​the settlers 500 acres of land under cultivation, built on wheat and raised livestock. The place they had built in the shape of hooves village. The construction of a village hooves enabled the construction of a thoroughfare, the access to the water of the nearby Tandunda River and to the fields.

Founded in 1842 Pastor Frietzsche a school in the village, which consisted for many years.

Bethany did not perform as good as the earlier founded by German emigrants nearby town of Tanunda. One reason for this could be that the main road connection ran through Tanunda through and that there the first post office was established in this area. Another obstacle was that the surrounding country was at Bethany, in the possession of the British crown and no wood, stones or soil could be removed, which hampered the economic development of the town.

Life in Bethany was hard and many of the town settled in the surrounding villages Rosenthal, Hoffnungsthal and Langmeil to.

In 1848, Pastor Heinrich AE Meyer was in charge of the parish in the year and she worked until 1862, carried his missionary activity to the fact that members of the Bethany Congregation left the place and missionary other place like Ebenezer, Neukirch - Schönborn, Gnadenfrei (now Marananga called ) Steinau and Eden Valley founded. When the religious disputes in Germany after the 1840s ended, more immigrants came there because of social, family, economic or other reasons. The citizens of Bethany to have been involved in the founding of the Mission Station Hermannsburg.

During the time of the First World War, the city, like many other German place names in Bethany has been renamed.