QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

A rare passion preserves documented history This collection of Bauer’s letters was acquired by the State Library of Victoria. In 2006 the State Library of Queensland acquired from me the rarest 19th century Queensland ‘view book’,

the highly sought-after Short sea route to Australia. Descriptive illustrated handbook of the Singapore route to Australia , published in London in 1875. While the book is primarily a paper-backed handbook and timetable for the sea route, it is also illustrated with seven large folding panoramic views of towns along the Queensland coast and inland, including Somerset, Cardwell, Townsville, Gladstone, Maryborough, Brisbane, Ipswich and Warwick. These views were printed as lithographs and each measures 22 x 55 cm. Only a handful of copies of the complete book with all the views are known to exist. Over the last few years I have handled several hundred important items relating to Australia, many originating in Germany. I am driven by a love of ferreting out significant items, coupled with the enjoyment of in-depth research and of placing items in appropriate collections. harbeck.com.au

Book dealing takes in many related fields, such as original photographs and manuscripts. In 2009, I discovered an important album of photographs of WWI internment camps in Australia, with many from the short-lived camp on Rottnest Island in Western Australia. The photographs had been taken by Karl Lehmann, a seaman on the mail steamer Greifswald . The ship had called into Fremantle on 14 August 1914, a few days after the outbreak of war, and was seized and impounded. The crew was interned on Rottnest Island, where Lehmann took over 250 photographs. As only a handful of photographs from the Rottnest Island camp were known until then, this album added very significantly to the pictorial record of World War I activities in Australia, and Western Australia in particular. The album was acquired from me by the National Library of Australia, has been fully digitised, and can be viewed on the NLA website. Recently I found 69 original letters by Jacob Bauer written between 1850 and 1869. Bauer was a junior lawyer from Speyer who joined in the 1848 revolutionary upheavals in Europe. Escaping arrest he was a political refugee in London for a while, and arrived in Melbourne in 1853. His letters are a unique and rich source of the life of a mid-19th century German settler. They give a complete picture of his struggle to build a life for himself in Australia, tracing his life from his exile as a political refugee, learning of his death penalty conviction, and his failed attempts to establish himself in England. They give an insight into Bauer’s detailed plans to set himself up as a merchant in Australia, his high hopes to get rich quick, his moderate success as a farmer, his work at the Flagstaff Observatory under Georg Neumayer, his resolve to become a pioneer settler when he loses this position, and finally his bad fortune and tragic end at the doomed settlement of Palmerston (the first attempt to create today’s Darwin) in the Northern Territory. A rare find indeed: this German map of May 1802 is now in the collection of the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales.

Image of the original macadamia nut, leaf and flower, which was accompanied by Ferdinand von Müller’s description as published in Transactions of the Philosophical Institute, Vol. 2, part 1. 1857.

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