David Beyer and Karlsruhe Farm

The oval at Moana Primary School was once a farm called Karlsruhe — named for a city on the Rhine by a carpenter who had tried, and failed, to make a new life in New Zealand before finding his footing on the South Australian coast.

David Beyer came from Karlsruhe, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Baden, a city of broad avenues that its rulers had laid out on a rational grid in the early eighteenth century. A carpenter by trade, he was part of a generation for whom emigration had become a serious proposition, and in the early 1840s he joined one of the first immigrant ships bound for Nelson, in New Zealand's South Island. The New Zealand Company had been selling land it did not quite have the means to survey or settle, and Nelson proved difficult. More people had arrived than the colony could absorb, and many found themselves without the land they had been promised, without adequate work, and without the means to leave.

In August 1844, about forty German emigrants and their families departed Nelson aboard the Joseph Albino, captained by Finnis, for South Australia, where German settlement around the Barossa and the hills had already established a foundation. A South Australian newspaper noted their arrival and the land available to them — conditions considerably more stable than what they had left behind.

Beyer settled first in the Morphett Vale district, leasing land there while he found his bearings. There he met Janet Aird, and the two were married in 1849. Over the following years he looked south along the coastal plain and began purchasing sections in the Hundred of Willunga — flat, open country between the main road and the beach, running down to sand dunes and the Gulf. In March 1859 the press recorded his intended purchase of section 348, near the corner of Griffiths Drive and Commercial Road, from a neighbouring landholder. Further land followed. He called the property Karlsruhe.

The name carried something of both sentiment and statement. In a district of farms with English and Irish names — Worthing Farm, Melville Farm, Glenthorne Farm — calling your land after a German city announced who you were and where you came from. His holding eventually comprised sections 343, 344, 348, and 349 in the Hundred of Willunga together with lots fronting the beach, nearly four hundred acres with buildings and pasture on the low ground where the Moana Primary School oval now stands.

When the District Council of Noarlunga held its elections in 1863, Beyer stood and was returned as a councillor. The chairmanship, a local correspondent noted that winter, had been allocated in an unusual way. Where most district councils experienced contests for the position, Noarlunga's difficulty was finding anyone willing to accept it — councillors apparently hoping the duty would fall on someone else. Beyer accepted, and the correspondent wrote that the council had already completed "several extensive works" involving roads and bridges in the previous year, earning "general approbation of the ratepayers," a record that suggested the new chairman had been given something worth continuing.

The work of a rural district chairman in the 1860s was seldom dramatic. It ran to tenders for road repairs, impounding licences for stray cattle, disputes over rights of way, and correspondence with the Central Road Board about damage done to main roads by heavy cartage in wet months. His fellow councillors in the early years included Richard Balderston, James Clark, and John Clift junior; the district clerk was Martin Burgess, who would serve the council for more than twenty-five years. Beyer presided, signed, and wrote the letters that kept a thinly populated agricultural district in some order.

The most contentious episode of his first chairmanship concerned the Noarlunga district school. In 1865 the council had received persistent complaints from parents about the conduct of the schoolmaster, John Forsyth, and voted unanimously to end his appointment. When ratepayers called a public meeting and the proceedings were reported in a way he considered garbled, Beyer wrote to the Advertiser to set the record straight:

For some time past complaints have been made to the several Councillors by parents of the children attending the district school, which were duly and privately notified to the teacher, ultimately resulting in the unanimous resolution of the Council "to give Mr. Forsyth notice of dismissal from the situation of teacher in the Noarlunga district school." This being done, the ratepayers requested the public meeting in question, to be called for the reasons of dismissal. The meeting, being composed chiefly of Mr. Forsyth's friends, loudly persisted on our entering into particulars, which, while willing to do our duty to the public, we were anxious to refrain from, for the sake of that gentleman and his family; but the complainants were quite willing to appear with their proofs before the Board of Education, who would be more competent to decide, and which, I insisted, was the proper course.

South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1858–1889), 15 February 1865

More than seventy residents signed a petition in Forsyth's defence, but the decision stood. Forsyth eventually moved north and took up teaching positions in other districts.

In the same year, 1865, Beyer took out naturalisation as a British subject. For German-born settlers, this was both a legal step and a public declaration — renouncing allegiance to the German states, swearing loyalty to the Crown, and gaining the right to hold land in his own name, to vote, and to sit on a jury. He had been exercising civic authority for two years already; the naturalisation formalised what settlement and election had already made practical.

He served as Chairman until 1865, was re-elected to the council in 1869 — shortly after the sitting chairman resigned — and served again in the chair until 1871. A third period of chairmanship ran from 1875 to 1877. In March 1870 he presided over an election meeting at the Horseshoe Inn at Noarlunga, at which the sitting parliamentary members, Colton and Carr, put their cases to a large attendance of electors. In February 1878, in what appears to have been his last sitting as chairman before William Pavy succeeded him, he opened a meeting at the Horseshoe Hotel to consider the district's parliamentary representation, forty people present, the motion carried with eight hands to two. The council records list his total service as three separate periods — 1863 to 1865, 1869 to 1872, and 1875 to 1877 — with the chairmanship running through most of that time.

Beyond the council, Beyer was described as vocal on the questions of immigration, free trade, and education, the three interconnected issues that ran through South Australian political life in the decades after self-government. A man who had himself arrived as an immigrant, who farmed land whose produce depended on an open economy, and who had children to educate, might be expected to have settled views on all three, and apparently he did.

He died in 1892. The estate put to tender the following year was substantial: nearly four hundred acres at Seaford, with buildings, offered on a seven-year lease by the executors — his children, identified in the notices as D. and J. T. Beyer. Janet left the south after his death and went to live with her children in the north of the state, where she died in 1898. One of their daughters, Agnes, had married William Cliff junior, a son of one of the farming families at McLaren Vale, and through that marriage the Beyer name persisted in the district for another generation.

The land itself continued to be known as Karlsruhe. William Charles Cobb Robinson, the son of an Irish immigrant who had farmed in the district since 1856, took over much of the old Beyer country and is listed in the Cyclopedia of South Australia as residing at "Karlsruhe Farm, Noarlunga." He built a homestead on Section 346 at Seaford around 1911, and the Robinson family farmed the property through the early twentieth century, four generations keeping the ground that Beyer had named and worked. The oval at Moana Primary School is the least of what remains.

Sources

• South Australian Register (Adelaide, SA : 1839–1900), 1 August 1863 — district correspondent on Beyer's acceptance of the Noarlunga chairmanship and the council's recent works Trove
• South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1858–1889), 15 February 1865 — Beyer's letter to the editor defending the council's handling of the Forsyth school matter Trove
• South Australian Register, 25 March 1870 — District of Noarlunga election meeting at the Horseshoe Inn, Beyer presiding Trove
• South Australian Chronicle and Weekly Mail (Adelaide, SA : 1868–1881), 11 February 1871 — Noarlunga pump question; Beyer signs as Chairman of District Council Trove
• South Australian Register, 2 March 1878 — District of Noarlunga representation meeting, Beyer as chairman Trove
• South Australian Register, 13 August 1844 — report on the Joseph Albino arriving from New Zealand with about forty German emigrants for South Australia Trove
• Express and Telegraph (Adelaide, SA : 1867–1922), 8 September 1893 — tender notice for the lease of David Beyer's estate, Seaford sections, executors D. and J. T. Beyer Trove
• Kelly Dyer, High on the Hill: A History of St Philip & St James Church, Old Noarlunga (City of Onkaparinga Libraries, 2019) — Cliff and Kimpton family genealogies; Beyer's farm identified on site of Moana Primary School
• Noarlunga Library Local History Collection, Council Records (NRL-LG-005) — chairmen of the Noarlunga District Council 1856–1932; members serving ten years or more
• Cyclopedia of South Australia (1907) — entry for William Charles Cobb Robinson of "Karlsruhe Farm, Noarlunga"
• Lester Firth & Murton Pty Ltd, Noarlunga Heritage Study 1979 — Item MS13, Robinson Homestead (Karlsruhe Farm), Section 346, Seaford Road