ON FEBRUARY 9, 1865, the German-Australian botanist Ferdinand Mueller stood before a group of six hundred colonists at St. Georges Hall in Melbourne, and gave an illustrated two-hour address about his missing countryman, Ludwig Leichhardt. He published a transcript in the weekly, The Australasian, and also arranged for a translation by the German community's “resident fictionist and poet” Theodor Müller, for Germania. This was an important new intervention, and was recognized as such. Ignoring the consensus that Leichhardt was dead, the Victorian government botanist convinced a diverse group of his fellow Victorians, as well as a network of correspondents elsewhere in Australia and in Europe, that the putatively fifty-one-year-old might actually still be alive, in a remote location, probably among a group of Indigenous people, and awaiting his rescue. He mobilized a large group of backers, including a so-called Ladies Leichhardt Committee, who conducted an internationally successful fundraising drive, and sent an expedition into the field over the following two years. In the process, notions of female philanthropy were tested, and exploration, and its failure, were gendered. This activity indicated how malleable Leichhardt had already become, and how he could serve different masters and mistresses. Finding him became a project that could have cosmopolitan, diasporic German, and an occasionally proto-national Australian significance. But it also had quite troubling aspects.

There was a comparatively large number of expatriate German-speaking scientists in colonial Australia. They willingly left German lands, or were forced out, for all sorts of reasons, especially a Humboldtian ambition to enlighten; to investigate what was still a largely “unexplored” continent of very great scientific interest. Many also left as a direct result of the political upheavals in their country around 1848, and the disappointment that set in when their liberal-national ambitions were scotched; this generation is hence often called “1848ers.” Rod Home has advanced the idea that science was a “German export to nineteenth century Australia.” The German-speaking lands were not only exporting to Australian colonies, however. It was common from the late 1700s on for German naturalists to staff British expeditions in Africa and the Americas too, “because Germany for much of this period was a poor country with a good educational system and no colonies of its own.”