Half way through 1973, Dr Hans Petersen, who was head of the English department of Volk und Welt, the lead publisher for contemporary international writing in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), set to work on an anthology of Australian short stories in German translation. In the same year, former East German head of state Walter Ulbricht died a lonely old man, the Australian embassy opened in East Berlin and Patrick White became the first Australian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the three years following Volk und Welt's last foray into Australian literature, Xavier Herbert's Der vertauschte Traumstein (1970, orig. Seven Emus, 1959), the political climates in both countries had changed, shrinking distances in world literary space and transforming local scenes of reading – that is, the various concrete institutional, cultural, geopolitical and other frames through which a text is read at a particular moment in time. For the first time in 23 years, Australia had elected a Labor government. In East Berlin Erich Honecker's new leadership was ushering in a similarly brief yet significant period of liberalization.

Conceived as an act of public diplomacy at a key moment of political détente, an attempt to ‘do something for Australian literature’, as Petersen put it in a letter to Australian writer Dal Stivens, the anthology features 31 writers previously unpublished in the GDR, many of them translated into German for the first time. These include Frank Moorhouse, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Vicki Viidikas and black Australian author Mudrooroo, then still working under his birth name Colin Johnson. Writing in November 1975, Petersen concluded his afterword by boldly casting his fellow citizens as custodians and sponsors of a literature still undervalued by the world at large: ‘It is time to realize that Australia is no longer a literary backwater. Its literature has long had relevance, even though it does not yet enjoy the international recognition it deserves’.