Zion Hill Mission
The Zion Hill Mission was a Christian mission founded in the area now known as Nundah, Queensland by German Lutheran missionaries. The mission is notable as being the first free European settlement in what is now the state of Queensland. Despite limited success at converting the local Aboriginal Australians to Christianity, many of the missionaries later became pioneers and farmers in the district, shaping the social fabric of the North Brisbane area for decades to come.
The idea of establishing a Christian mission in the Moreton Bay district was the idea of John Dunmore Lang, who had ambitious plans to establish a series of missions along the Australian coast north of Sydney, ostensibly in order to bring Christianity to the Aboriginal peoples, but also to pacify them and prevent attacks on shipwrecked European sailors, as had happened in the case of the Stirling Castle incident some years prior. Lang justified the placement of the mission far from the main colonial settlement of Sydney to his superiors in Britain by asserting that "Aborigines of that distant portion of the colonial territory would be less contaminated by intercourse with the depraved convict population of the colony than those within the present limits of location."
At the time, the Moreton Bay region was still administered by New South Wales, as a "prison-within-a-prison" for particularly troublesome convicts. Private settlements by free Europeans was not permitted until 1839, and widespread free settlement by Europeans in the Moreton Bay region would not begin until 1840. The proposed mission would therefore be the first free (non-convict) European settlement in the area, although this went unremarked upon at the time, as the area was still a part of the colony of New South Wales.
Although Lang was a controversial figure within New South Wales at the time, he did manage to convince the colonial government to reserve 650 acres (2.6 km2) of land for the missionaries' efforts, seven miles (11 km) north of the settlement at Eagle Farm. Lang was also able to recruit Carl Wilhelm Schmidt and Christopher Eipper, two ordained ministers of German origin who had joined Lang's Australian Presbyterian synod, to lead the mission. He was also able to secure a grant of £450 from the British government, as well as a further £150 from his brother, to finance the expedition. It is likely that Lang borrowed even more money for the project, as £600 would not have been enough to arrange the passage of twenty people, and he remarked in 1839 that he still owed £350 in establishment costs for the mission.
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