SOPHIE ELISABETH SUBRITZKY
(NÉE KÖRBER)

Sophie is buried in the family cemetery at the foot of Mount Camel, at Houhora in the Far North — a few hundred metres from the homestead her sons built for her, and where she spent the last fourteen years of her life.
It is a long way from Uelzen.

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Every family has a story it cannot prove. The Subritzkys have three.

Stephen Subritzky spent fifteen years chasing these stories, and he wrote down what he found with admirable honesty: as of today, there is no proof on paper that any of them are true.What there is, is a paper trail. It runs back to 1785. It shows a bricklayer from the Baltic and a weaver's daughter from Uelzen, and no crowns anywhere.

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Subritzky Family History from
1785 to 1915
(by Stephen Subritzky)

So why did the legend begin? Nobody knows. And the family has never quite been able to let it go — because as one writer of it put it, where there is smoke, there is fire.

We have kept the stories here, exactly as they were handed down, and we have kept them separate from the record. Both are part of who she was.

Germany

What survives of the years before she left: the records that name her.

Marriage register, St Michaelis, Lüneburg — 16 November 1817. The record of Sophie's marriage to Reinhold, naming her late father, Johann Martin Körber of Uelzen.

Passenger list, the St Pauli — the German families who sailed from Hamburg for Nelson, December 1842.

Report on the Immigrants — the official account of the voyage, filed on the ship's arrival at Nelson, 14 June 1843.

Lüneburg today — the old town where Sophie married, raised her children and was widowed. Many of these gabled houses were standing when she walked past them.

Australia

Nelson broke them. Australia made them.

Death certificate, 1849 — Doris, aged 31, died at the Stanley Street house in North Adelaide. The record that corrected the family story: not the Barossa, as long believed.

Stanley Street, North Adelaide — the house Fred Spanhake built in 1848, with a bakery and stables behind it, after he left the South Australian Police Force.

Death notice, 1873 — the Ballarat Courier.

Maldon today — the goldfields town the Subritzkys helped build, its 1850s streetscape now classified by the National Trust.

Houhora

The last fourteen years, and the things she left behind.

The Homestead — the Wagener/Subritzky Homestead at Houhora, built 1860. Sophie arrived here in 1861, aged sixty-three.

Stone and cement — the gable end, showing the stone and local cement her sons built with, alongside swamp kauri.

The outbuildings — the working buildings of the homestead farm.

Subritzky Homestead — the name on the farm gate today.

Mount Camel — the hill at whose foot Sophie was buried in 1875.

Mount Camel at dusk — across the harbour from the homestead.

10. Marriage register, St Michaelis, Lüneburg, 1817 — from John Anderson's Maldon Story archive.

11. Passenger list, the St Pauli, 1842 — from the Subritzky Family 1843–1993, compiled by Maria M. Beniston.

12. Report on the Immigrants, the St Pauli, 1843 — from John Anderson's Maldon Story archive.

13. Lüneburg, Germany — photograph by Philipp Deus (@deuspix), via Unsplash.

14. Death certificate of Doris Spanhake, 1849 — from John Anderson's Maldon Story archive.

15. Stanley Street, North Adelaide — heritage record, from John Anderson's Maldon Story archive.

16. Death notice, the Ballarat Courier, 1873 — from John Anderson's Maldon Story archive.

17. Maldon, Victoria — photograph by Mattinbgn, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain.

18. The Wagener/Subritzky Homestead, Houhora — photograph by John Anderson.

19. The homestead gable, Houhora — photograph by John Anderson.

20. Homestead outbuildings, Houhora — photograph by John Anderson.

21. Mount Camel, Houhora — photograph by John Anderson.

22. Mount Camel at dusk, Houhora — photograph by John Anderson.

St Marien-Kirche, Uelzen — where Sophie was christened, 25 April 1798. ¹

The Weaver's Daughter

Uelzen, Kingdom of Hanover · 1798

Sophie Elisabeth Körber was baptised in St Marien Kirche in Uelzen on the 25th of April 1798, the daughter of a weaver. The weavers were the poor of the town. When her mother died, Sophie was two years old, and she was buried in a pauper's grave. Her father was gone before Sophie left her teens. She and her brother Heinrich raised themselves. Neither of them ever learned to read or write. Sophie went to work as a mercer — a cloth seller — and that, by every reasonable expectation of the age, was the shape her whole life was going to take.

St Michaelis, Lüneburg — where she married Reinhold Subritzky, 16 November 1817. ²

The Bricklayer's Bride

Lüneburg · 16 November 1817

She was nineteen when the banns were read in the church of St Michael in Lüneburg, and she married a journeyman bricklayer from the Baltic named Reinhold Subritzky. The parish record describes her as tall, buxom and very attractive. Over the next thirteen years they had four children who lived: Doris, Ludolph, Heinrich and Johannes Anton — and one daughter, Elisabeth, who did not. Reinhold carried a past he never fully explained, and a name the family would spend the next two hundred years arguing about.

St John's, Lüneburg — where Reinhold was buried, 24 June 1833. ³

Widow at Thirty-Five

Lüneburg · 24 June 1833

Reinhold died of a wasting disease and was buried at the church of St John. Sophie was thirty-five, illiterate, penniless, and left with four children. In the Europe of 1833 a woman in that position was finished — no longer a marriageable prospect, her life effectively over.She had another forty-two years to run. Almost everything she is remembered for was still ahead of her.

The St Pauli, 1/48 scale model by Peta Raggett — Motueka District Museum. ⁴

The Sea

The St Pauli · Hamburg to Nelson · 1842–1843

On Boxing Day 1842 the St Pauli weighed anchor on the Elbe with about a hundred and forty German settlers aboard. Eleven of them were Sophie's: herself, her three sons, her brother Heinrich Körber and his family, and her daughter Doris with her new husband Frederick Spanhake and their baby, Otto. The register describes her as a well-dressed widow.In mid-January the baby sickened. Sophie was holding him when he died. She handed his body to the boatswain, and at dawn on the quarterdeck the Reverend Wohlers gave a short service before Otto was committed to the deep — the first of four burials on that voyage.Weeks later, still at sea, a commotion broke out below decks and the agent Beit summoned the offender to the poop deck. It was Sophie. She had fallen in love with a fellow passenger and intended to marry him. Her daughter had objected on account of her age, so Sophie had boxed her ears. Beit informed Doris that she had no power to prevent her mother from marrying, and shortly afterwards Sophie married Heinrich Dieckmann. She was forty-five.

Nelson, c.1920 — the growing town that rose where Sophie's family had landed to little more than huts in 1843. ⁵

Nelson

New Zealand · 1843–1845

They landed at Nelson in June 1843 to find a handful of huts and none of what they had been promised. Within a month the settlement was in terror: word came that Captain Wakefield and twenty of the town's leading citizens had been killed at the Wairau. Every man in the settlement, and Sophie's eldest son Louis, worked on the building of Fort Arthur while the town waited for an attack that never came.The land the Germans had paid for never materialised. When the deputations to Beit failed, and he told them the land was too good for them, Sophie's blood boiled. She gathered a large group of women and marched on his house intending to stone him. They were stopped only by the timely intervention of one of the Lutheran missionaries.After two years of hardship the family cut their losses. They sailed on the Palmyra in August 1845 for South Australia.

Klemzig, the German settlement outside Adelaide, painted by George French Angas in 1846 — the village as Sophie's family knew it. ⁶

Gold and Grief

Klemzig, the Barossa, and the Victorian diggings · 1845–1854

At the German settlement of Klemzig, outside Adelaide, life improved. It did not stay improved. In 1849 Doris — her firstborn, the daughter whose ears she had boxed on the St Pauli — died at the Stanley Street house in North Adelaide that her husband Fred Spanhake had built the year before, with a bakery and stables behind it, the business he took up after leaving the South Australian Police Force. She was thirty-one. Her brother Ludolph, a butcher out in the Barossa, came back to North Adelaide to be with her at the end, and to see her buried in the old cemetery there.Two years later gold was found in Victoria, and Sophie went with her sons. She was in her fifties. For three years the family moved from one rush to the next, living on the diggings, chasing the next strike.

The original Subritzky homestead at Maldon — the first house the family built on their own ground. ⁷

Building a Town

Maldon, Victoria · 1854–1860

When the rush at Tarrengower was over and the diggers had moved on, the Subritzkys stayed. They and a handful of other families bought up blocks of land, and on them they built a town: Maldon.From late 1854 Sophie's second husband Henry Dieckmann and the brothers built the first Subritzky homestead on the family's mining claim. That claim was later subdivided, and Henry bought the freehold outright in 1858 or 1859 — the cottage still stands, and the National Trust knows it as Dickman's Cottage. On their own broad acres, John Anton and his apprentice George Upton built a thriving whole-carcass and retail meat trade — a slaughter-yard, piggery and blacksmith's shop.In August 1858, Ludolph — by then known as John Louis — was elected to the very first Maldon Council. He was not eligible to be its President: he was the only German, and it was held that a man who was not English could not properly grasp British law. He served anyway, outspokenly, ruffling establishment feathers and standing up for what he believed were the right decisions.And the family quietly learned the lesson of every gold rush in history. They made far more money selling implements and produce to the diggers than they ever made out of the ground.It was also in Maldon that the Subritzkys met the Wagener family — brickmakers — and the two families have been bound together ever since.

Maldon, looking north-east — an 1904 survey photograph of the gold town where Sophie kept house, sold her herbal remedies, and raised Doris's two children. ⁸

The Grandmother of Maldon

Maldon, Victoria · 1854–1861

While her sons built the town, Sophie built the family.When Doris died in North Adelaide she left two small children, Louisa and Henry, and Sophie took them as her own. She schooled them at home for years before sending them to the local Denominational School. By 1859 Louisa, just fifteen, was working as a housemaid in Maldon. Henry was sent north to his father at the Union Hotel in Ballarat East, hated the place, and ran away — back to his grandmother, back to Maldon, the one home that felt like one.She could not read or write in any language, and it changed nothing. She ran the domestic side of a large and growing household along the sandy bed of Tarrangower Creek, below Dickman's Cottage. She helped her daughters-in-law, Maria and Betsy, raise their own families. And she began making and selling her herbal remedies out of the new butchery on Main Street — the same "Mrs. Subritzky's" trade she would one day carry to the far side of the world.On Sundays she took the children to church; several of them were christened Methodist and Anglican in these years. And in the early days, the story goes, the children would walk the creek bed after the service and pick up small nuggets of gold.She left almost no trace. She is not in the newspapers and never troubled a court. She simply held the family together, quietly, for seven years — and then, sometime around 1861, she left it all behind and sailed north to her sons, and to the last and most formidable chapter of her life.

The Subritzky homestead at Houhora — raised out of stone, local cement and swamp kauri, with Mount Camel beyond and schooners at anchor. ⁹

The Matriarch of the Far North

Houhora, New Zealand · 1861–1875

Ludolph and Heinrich sailed for New Zealand in 1860 to begin building. Sophie arrived at Houhora in 1861, aged sixty-three, to find that her sons had raised a great homestead out of stone, local cement and swamp kauri. They were the first European settlers in the Far North; their nearest neighbours were the mission families at Kaitaia. There were no roads. So the family bought a small schooner, the Isabella — and began a association with coastal shipping that runs in the family to this day.She had been making her herbal remedies since Maldon. In the Far North she turned them into something rarer — one of the first women in New Zealand to establish her own brand name. "Mrs. Subritzky's."And then there is the axe. A group of young warriors came down to the homestead one day, having watched from a distance until the men had sailed for Mangonui, to demand payment for the land. The alarm went up and the family ran for the house — all of them except Sophie, who stood alone on the front porch and waited."Vat do you vant?" she asked, in heavily accented English."For the land," they said."For da land!" yelled Old Sophie. "I'll give you for da land!" — and she jumped off the porch, wrenched the axe out of the chopping block and chased them around the yard in her long black dress, roaring at them in a mixture of broken German and English. They withdrew at speed, calling to one another: te wahine porangi — she's a crazy woman.From that day on the warriors held her in the highest regard. Having proved herself in battle, she was considered their equal.

Sophie's grave at the foot of Mount Camel, Houhora — "in memory of the best of mothers, from her sorrowing sons." ¹⁰

Her Sorrowing Sons

Houhora · 1875

She died at Houhora in 1875, aged 76. Even in her seventies she is remembered for being able to lift the anvil that stood in the family smithy.She was born in the year Nelson won the Battle of the Nile. She had outlived her husband, her daughter, and several of her grandchildren, and she died at a moment when her sons had achieved a prosperity that would have been unimaginable to the orphaned weaver's daughter in Uelzen.They buried her at the foot of Mount Camel. Seventy years later the writer A. H. Reed, wandering the old gumfields of the north, came across the little Subritzky cemetery by accident. He sat down beside her grave, leaning against the iron railing around it, and was so struck by two words on the headstone that he copied the entire inscription down.The two words were: her sorrowing sons.Today she has more than three thousand descendants, Pākehā and Māori. Many of the women among them carry her name. Her Māori descendants call her Te Paea. And to the whole of the extended family, across five generations and two countries, she has only ever been one thing.Old Sophie.

1. St Marien-Kirche, Uelzen — by Oxfordian Kissuth (own work), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

2. St Michaelis, Lüneburg — by DerHexer (own work), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

3. St John's, Lüneburg — by Unscheinbar (own work), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

4. Model of the St Pauli (1/48 scale) by Peta Raggett, Motueka District Museum — image from the Subritzky Family History, 1785–1915.

5. NZFCA premises, Hardy St, Nelson, c.1920 — Fletcher Trust Archives (P0102/27), via Wikimedia Commons; no known copyright restrictions.

6. Street scene of Klemzig, South Australia — watercolour by George French Angas, 1846, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain.

7. The original Subritzky homestead, Maldon, Victoria — from the Subritzky Family History, 1785–1915.

8. Geological Survey of Victoria, Bulletin No. 14, Plate I (1904).

9. The Subritzky Family Homestead, Houhora — painting owned by Mike Subritzky; from the Subritzky Family History, 1785–1915.

10. Sophie Subritzky's headstone, Mount Camel cemetery, Houhora — photograph from John Anderson's Maldon Story archive.

Old Sophie has more than three thousand descendants.If you are one of them — and if you carry a story, a photograph, a name, or a correction — feel free to share it here, as this this page is not finished, and it's not only ours, but yours as well.Feel free to reach out.

Share a story, a photo, or an update about Sophie

The Maldon Story is a family project. It is not a business, it is not for sale.This page was built from the work of others.

Stephen Subritzky, whose "Subritzky Family History from 1785 to 1915" is the backbone of everything here, and who gave fifteen years to it.Mike Subritzky — "The Subritzky Family Legend", "Golden Book of Subritzky Nobility", "Subritzky Ships".John Anderson, whose "The Wagener's of Maldon, Victoria, Australia" - told in collaboration with sister Marilyn Anderson - traces the Wagener and Subritzky lines back through months of archive research in Maldon and correspondence across two countries.Maria Beniston (née Subritzky) · Alan Wagener · Bev Sharp · Laurel Jonkers (née Quelch) · Jenny Briars and Jenny Leith, "The Road to Sarau" · the Kaitaia Museum and the Alice Evans collection · the Maldon Museum, Victoria.