Stepping back in time: The Toowoomba family behind the discovery revealed
When news of the Toowoomba Bypass coin hoard first broke, numerous theories abounded as to who or what was responsible for leaving them in the ground all those years ago.
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This three-part series from The Chronicle tells the story of how a cache of historical coins were buried on a Toowoomba family orchard, and how this treasure was miraculously unearthed on the site of the Toowoomba Bypass decades later.
Once there stood an orchard on the western side of a dirt road that is now the New England Hwy.
In an image from 1902, you can see the track winding its way down the side of Mt Kynoch toward Harlaxton, and then a fence surrounding a young orchard, with massive camphor laurel trees on the right acting as a wind break.
Nestled among the trees is the farmhouse of Adolph and Anna Müller.
It is thought Adolph Müller, a Prussian migrant born in Gembitz in Poland, arrived in Queensland in 1882.
His parents, Christian Gotthelf Müller and Justina Stelter, had arrived in Australia eight years earlier.
Records show Adolph purchased the block that was to become his home, named Hillview, from Daniel Horrigan in 1892, and he married Anna Elizabeth Mengel at St Paul’s Lutheran Church in Toowoomba on June 22 of the same year.
It was on this property, buried either under or beside the second farm shed behind the house, where archaeologists are “almost certain” the coin hoards were buried.
The archaeological report suggests the larger of the coin hoards was buried beneath the floorboards of the shed in a large wooden, iron-framed chest, while the smaller collection was placed in a tin – such as an Arnott’s biscuit tin – in shallower soil, “perhaps only as a temporary measure and then transferred to the chest as the tin filled”.
The Müllers were one family among many who contributed to a wave of German migration to Australia in the mid to late 1800s, and one of vast number who settled in Toowoomba and the Darling Downs.
According to Toowoomba historian Professor Maurice French AM, the principal factor driving German immigration to Australia and the Darling Downs was religion.
In the mid-19th century, the country we now know as Germany was a series of independent principalities, and there were “tremendous religious pressures” within those principalities, sometimes between the Catholics and the Protestants but also within Lutheranism itself, Professor French said.
“That was compounded also by the move towards German unification in the 1860s, which again caused much unhappiness among many Germans,” he said.
In addition to the pressures pushing people out of their German homelands, there were also incentives drawing them to Australia.
Some Australian colonies had specific migration schemes aimed at bringing out German migrants.
“There was a Drayton storekeeper called Edward Lord, who was the main organiser of that in Queensland and particularly from Toowoomba in the early 1850s,” Professor French said.
Broadly speaking, Germans were hard working, which made them attractive as migrants.
They came to Australia initially as pastoral workers on the squatting stations and usually worked for two years, mainly as shepherds but sometimes as gardeners or agricultural laborers of some kind, Professor French said.
They were usually bonded for two years in order to pay off their migration passage, and once that time was up they typically had saved enough money from their own wages to buy their own land – especially their own farms.
The German principalities were unified in 1871 under Kaiser Wilhelm I.
“After that the migration is really what we call chain migration, that is families who are already here who inspire or persuade their relatives back in Germany to come out because its such a good prospect for them,” Professor French said.
“Farming land was readily available, so that’s why we have especially heavy German settlement on the Northern Downs in the Toowoomba, Oakey, Dalby, Highfields areas.”
The property at Hillview stayed in the hands of the Müllers until Adolph’s death on June 11, 1940, when it was transferred to his wife Anna, and his youngest son Charles.
Anna then died on December 30 of that year, and the property was transferred to Charles in March 1941.
In the 48 years Adolph and Anna had tended the land, the orchard flourished, and in the title deed under Charles’ name, he was listed as an orchardist, “suggesting this had become the main source of income”, the archaeological report said.
The last of the coins to be placed in the stash were minted in 1940.
Charles Müller, a lifelong bachelor, took over the running of the orchard, and when he died in 1992, the property passed into the hands of his nephews, Mark and Syd Volker.
The archaeological report noted that the orchard and farm house “did not long survive Charles’ death in 1992”.
An aerial image from October 6 of that year shows the burning of the orchard, with the house intact.
A later image from 1993 shows the land vacant.
Time passed, and Toowoomba grew bigger, its footprint expanding outwards, swallowing up farmland.
In government departments, bureaucrats made plans, and politicians made promises of a longed-for second road crossing of the Toowoomba Range.
And then one fateful day in 2016 while building that new road, a piece of heavy machinery clipped a rusty tin buried in the earth, on land Adolph Müller had purchased more than a century earlier, and scattered its contents among the dirt.