Readings with Joachim Specht must have been impressive: archival photos show him gesticulating wildly, holding his books in the air for all to see, pointing to a place on a map of Australia, passing around large photographs, and showing off a boomerang and his trapper hat. Whether he was addressing childcare workers, men in overalls, school groups or teenage apprentices, Specht never grew tired of talking about his experiences: ‘Readers wanted to know how I came to live in Australia and why I came back. And who taught me to write. And by the time I had told them, the hour was already up’.

Like his captive listeners, the author lived in the GDR. The big difference between them was that he had seen the world, and they had not. Thanks to his rich travel experiences on the Fifth Continent and the support he received from the GDR's cultural policy, Joachim Specht became one of the country's best-selling authors. Specht's career began in the early 1960s and collapsed only with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. His books were written in German and set, with few exceptions, in Australia. Much of his life centred on his role as an intermediary between these two worlds. Characterized by circumstantial realism and narrated from an assuredly socialist, ‘partisan’ viewpoint that clearly recognized social inequality and racial discrimination, his narratives pleased East German publishers and censors alike. While his titles promised to take readers away from the GDR to the exotic Great Barrier Reef and mangrove swamps, they assured censors that life under the Southern Cross was as distant as it was undesirable – indeed, Specht's publishers were quick to couch his own experiences there as reformatory. Yet, his audience in the socialist country, without freedom to travel, was mesmerized: ‘Because I am so drawn to this continent – Australia – I would like to learn even more about it’, wrote one young lady in a fan letter to the author, after she had listed the 14 books of his that she owned. How did Specht succeed in directing the East German reader's diffuse wanderlust to a specific yearned-for place, and why did Australia become more and more an abstract projection for Specht himself?