Hermann Wilhelm Püttmann was the son of Hermann Püttmann (q.v.), and, like his father, a printer and publisher. He is described in E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935 (1940) as 'a German-Australian litterateur well-known in Melbourne during the nineties of last century'. Püttmann began his career serving an apprenticeship with a printer in Elberfeld in his native Germany, before emigrating with his parents to Australia in 1855. In 1864 he married Annabella Thomson, and they went to live in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. In 1872 he was working for the printer Fergusson and Moore, and joined a printing and publishing partnership in Flinders Lane with fellow printers John F. McCarron, John H. Bird and Andrew Stewart as McCarron Bird (q.v.). Püttmann continued his association with that firm until at least 1900. When his father died in 1874, he took over the family printery and continued to publish his father's Australiasher Kalender. He also continued in the roles developed by his father of writer, journalist and public figure in German-Australian society. He founded the Association for German Schools (Deutscher Schulverein) of Victoria in 1899, chairing it until its dissolution at the outbreak of the first World War 1. He contributed poems to the German press in Victoria and the Deutsch-Australische Post in Sydney, as well as publishing three volumes of verse. He also published the translation, Byron's Last Lament, in 1895. He died in Hawthorn in 1914.
