Cirrus@Austlit

Friedrich Gerstaecker arrived in Australia in 1851 where he stayed for about a year. He already had a reputation not only as a traveler and adventurer, but also as a novelist and writer of travel books. Some of his works have been published in English and in German, and the German versions have been frequently re-edited and reprinted over the years.

Gerstaecker had migrated to America in 1837, where he led an adventurous life. Returning to Germany in 1843, he wrote travel books and became well known. From 1849 to 1851 he travelled to South America, the Californian goldfields, the Pacific and Australia, where he was canoe-wrecked on the Murray River and walked 700 miles to Adelaide. He went to the Bathurst diggings and then to the East Indies, once again returning to Germany in 1852. He visited the Middle East and the Americas in the 1860s and worked as a war correspondent in 1870.

His writings on Australia include a handbook for intending German migrants (Nord- und Süd Australien: ein Handbuch für Auswanderer, 1849); a description of his activities in Australia in the travel book Narrative of a Journey round the World (1953); a romantic bushranger story which was serialised in the Examiner and Melbourne Weekly News (1859-60); and Im Busch (1864; in German), a story of the goldfields. In several of his other novels he used an Australian setting or background. He also translated into German Charles Rowcroft's Tales of the Colonies.