Carl Wilhelm Schmidt

Reverend Carl Wilhelm Schmidt (died 1864), also known as Karl Schmidt, was a German missionary, and an ordained minister of the Prussian United Church. Schmidt's missionary work took him to Queensland and Samoa, where he founded a number of Lutheran institutions and settlements.

Schmidt was born in Stargard, Pomerania (now Poland). He studied at the Universities of Halle and Berlin, before becoming the first theological student of Johannes Gossner, a minister of the Bethlehem Bohemian Church in Berlin. Gossner was the founder of the Evangelical Union for the Spread of Christianity among the Heathen, and he recommended Schmidt to lead a party of nine missionaries trained for work with a British society.

In 1837, Schmidt came to the notice of Rev John Dunmore Lang in Australia, via Samuel Johnson, a friend of Gossner's in London. After being joined by fellow missionary Christopher Eipper in Greenock, Scotland, Schmidt and his party set sail for Australia on the Minerva. Conditions aboard the ship were harsh, with Moritz Schneider, a surgeon employed by Lang, dying of typhoid en route. Schmidt arrived in Sydney in January 1838.

Upon arrival in Australia, Schmidt was admitted as a member of Lang's Presbyterian Synod of New South Wales on 15 March 1838. He founded the New South Wales Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, whose mission involved supporting a mission in connection with government funding. Schmidt ministered to a German congregation in Sydney for some months while a party scouted in the Moreton Bay area for a suitable site. Upon arrival in Brisbane in June 1838, Schmidt found that his scouting party had selected a location north of the settlement that they called Zion's Hill.

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