Join us for a BGLA Luncheon and Kaffee und Kuchen with guest speaker Bert Stock
Luncheon:
Würstchen mit Kartoffelsalat (sausage with potato salad). Cost: $25 per person, including Kaffee und Kuchen. Please contact Steffi to reserve a spot (0408 621384).
When: Monday 31st March 2025, 12pm start (Lunch reservations) / 1pm – 3pm
Where: Langmeil Lutheran Church hall, 5-7 Maria St, Tanunda
Guest Speaker Summary:
Join us for an insightful talk with Dr. Herbert (Bert) Stock, a former CSIRO Engineer and policy advisor who has dedicated his retirement to historical research, focusing on German settlement in South Australia and his own family history as the child of Holocaust survivors. His presentation will explore the multicultural history of Austrian Galicia and its lasting impact on European geopolitics.
More information
Dr Herbert Stock
After graduating with degrees in Mathematics and Physics Dr Herbert (Bert) Stock worked for the CSIRO as an Engineer before family responsibilities led to his return to South Australia to work for the South Australian Public Service, initially with Consumer Affairs and then in operational Departments as a Policy Officer and advisor to the senior Executives in a number of Agencies.
On retirement, and strongly encouraged by his wife (also a historian), Bert took up the study of history, concentrating on the history of the German settlement of the city of Adelaide and the Adelaide Hills.
Bert has also served as a member of the South Australian Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, as a member of the National Archives of Australian South Australian Consultative Committee and a member of the South Australian State Records Council.
The child of Holocaust survivors, and the grandchild of Holocaust victims, Bert has recently started to document his family history with the intention to produce a written record than he hopes that will, eventually, be of interest to his children. His interest in the history of Austrian Galicia derives from this latter work.
Galicia
With the retreat of the Ottoman Empire following the defeat of their army at the siege of Vienna in 1683, vast swathes of the Great Eastern European Plain (the watersheds of the Dniester, Dnieper, Don and Volga rivers) were annexed and divided between the Austrian (Holy Roman) Empire, the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania and the Russian Empire. Poland-Lithuania was unstable and collapsed in the mid 1750’s with the
southern areas based on the cities of Krakow, Przemysl, Lemberg (L’vov) and Tarnopol being absorbed into the Austro-Hungarian (Hapsburg) Empire as the Kingdom of Galicia.
However, Galicia was isolated from the rest of the Empire by the Carpathian Mountains and was ethnically diverse with large (but minority) populations of ethnic Poles, Germans, Ashkenazi (German speaking) Jews, Czechs and Ruthenians (now Ukrainian) populations. This led to a Galicia being a State within a State and (until 1919 and then 1946) being historically interesting as it developed as a multicultural state in a
highly nationalistic European system.
Decisions about Galicia and its populations made more than a hundred years ago affect geopolitics even now. Bert intends to explore this history, using his family history as an example.