Blumberg, Grunthal, Lobethal, Hahndorf — the First World War took the Hills' German names away. Some came back. Some never did.
Drive the eastern Hills with a passenger who reads the road signs aloud and a puzzle emerges. Hahndorf and Lobethal are unmistakably German. Birdwood and Verdun are unmistakably not. Yet all four towns were founded by the same wave of Prussian and Silesian Lutherans in the 1840s and 1850s, and for their first decades all four carried German names. The difference between them is a single year: 1917.
A colony of two tongues
For seventy years, German was simply part of South Australia's furniture. The refugees who founded Hahndorf in 1839 spread through the ranges within a generation — to Lobethal ("valley of praise"), to Grunthal ("green valley"), to Blumberg ("flower mountain"), buying land, building flour mills and breweries, and singing Lutheran hymns in stone churches whose bells still ring. By the 1900s the Hills were dotted with German names the way the Barossa still is.
The First World War ended that. Anti-German feeling, stoked by years of casualty lists, made the names themselves intolerable to many, and in 1917 South Australia passed a Nomenclature Act that swept dozens of German place names off the map. The Hills changes read like a war memorial: Blumberg became Birdwood, after General William Birdwood, commander of the Anzacs at Gallipoli. Grunthal became Verdun, for the French fortress town then synonymous with sacrifice. Hahndorf became Ambleside; Lobethal, Tweedvale.
What came back, and what didn't
The sequel is the interesting part. In 1935, with the war a generation behind and South Australia celebrating its centenary, Hahndorf and Lobethal got their names back — their German identity had become heritage rather than threat. But Birdwood and Verdun never reverted. The new names had taken root, and today they sit oddly and wonderfully on towns where the bakeries still make bienenstich and the cemeteries are full of Schuberts and Pflaums.
The old names survive in corners, for those who look. The grandest is the Blumberg Hotel in Birdwood — first licensed in 1856, renamed with the town in 1917, and defiantly re-badged with its original name in 1973. In Hahndorf, the Hahndorf Academy tells the story of the German settlement years, including the uncomfortable wartime chapter when the town's own name was contraband. And in the heritage streetscapes of Mount Torrens — a town whose English name needed no fixing — you can see the valley much as it looked when its neighbours were still Blumberg and Grunthal.
It is a story best absorbed slowly, town by town. Our guide to the villages of the Adelaide Hills maps them all; bring an ear for the names beneath the names.
