JUST RELEASED

Drawing on information sourced for the three highly successful Wittafest events held in 2015, 2016 and 2018, Witta archaeologist, museum expert and anthropologist, Steve Chaddock, and Curramore writer, Dale Jacobsen, teamed up to record the history in printed form (with lots of illustrations). It has been a long process, pulling together, then teasing apart, the personal stories behind the settlement of the area that was once called Teutoburg.

 European settlers arrived on the Blackall Range in the 1880s to carve out a place to live among thick vine scrub.

Selection offered them a chance to establish a place of their own, clearing the land using hand tools, felling trees and sawing them into timbers to establish homes, and fence smallholdings which grew into dairy farms. 

The families:

• Bergann
• Manitzky
• Nothling
• Sommer
• Tesch
• Vandreike
• Warne

The predominantly German pioneers named their new home Teutoburg, in memory of the forest they left behind. 

For 30 years they built a community centred around dairy farms and their Lutheran faith. All that changed in 1916 when, due to anti-German sentiment, Teutoburg was renamed Witta.