The settlers were Lutherans, mostly from a small Prussian village then called Kay - now Kije, in Poland - who left home rather than abandon their old form of worship under a king bent on church reform. They crossed the world aboard the sailing ship Zebra, arriving at Port Adelaide and disembarking on 28 December 1838. The ship's captain, a Dane named Dirk Meinerts Hahn, did more than ferry them; he helped the families negotiate land and settle once ashore. In gratitude they named their new town for him - Hahndorf, "Hahn's village." It is a rare thing, a town that carries the name of the man who delivered its people to safety, and the story is still the first thing locals will tell you.

The hills the Lutherans cleared and planted were not empty. This is the traditional country of the Peramangk people, who lived in and moved through the Adelaide Hills long before any ship reached Port Adelaide. The German arrivals settled, as new immigrant communities often did, largely among themselves - socially closed villages where the old language and customs held on, where many did not take part in colonial government for years. That insularity is part of why Hahndorf preserved so much: a community that kept to itself also kept its bakeries, its building styles, and its tongue intact while the wider colony grew British around it.

Hahndorf's most famous resident was not a baker but a painter. Sir Hans Heysen, one of Australia's great landscape artists, made his home and studio here at a property called The Cedars, which he established close to the town in 1912 and where he painted until his death in 1968. Heysen found his subject in these hills: the towering gum trees, the dry golden light, the slow Adelaide Hills mornings. The Cedars remains in his family and opens its doors to visitors, so you can stand in the studio where so many of those luminous eucalypts were captured. It is a fitting home for an artist - a town where the immigrant eye and the Australian landscape met and made something new.

Today Hahndorf is mostly a day-tripper's town, close enough to Adelaide that few stay the night, and it wears its heritage warmly rather than solemnly. Visitors pick their own fruit at the Beerenberg Strawberry Farm, wander craft shops and galleries, and work their way through the cellar doors of the surrounding wine country. Families stop at the Hahndorf Farm Barn; everyone, eventually, eats. And the town asks one small thing for its dignity: it is not a suburb of Adelaide, and it would rather not be mistaken for one. Like many places living in the shadow of a bigger city, Hahndorf prefers to be known for what it is - a German village in the Australian hills, with a captain's name and almost two hundred years behind it.