An important part of the history of European colonial expansion is the role played by settler colonists who came from places other than the primary colonizing nation. The history of the role played by Germans in the colonization of the United States and Brazil, for example, has become an increasingly well-understood field of study for scholars interested in the global mechanics of settler colonialism. The experiences of Germans in the various British colonies of Australia, however, are not particularly well understood outside of specialist Australian studies circles. Even here, the German experience remains understudied when compared with the histories of English, Scottish, and Irish colonizers or the histories of non-British communities such as the Chinese.

This edited volume, which began life as a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies, is a wide-ranging, if slightly uneven, investigation into the complex interactions among German settlers, British settlers, and Australia's indigenous peoples. It is a joint German-Australian project and as such displays a deep understanding of the state of the field of colonial, postcolonial, and decolonization studies at both ends. Importantly, it includes chapters that focus on the period of frontier colonial encounters, as well as others that study the traces of those encounters in the culture and politics of the Australian and German present.

In its most successful sections, the volume reflects the multifaceted and highly complex nature of colonial encounters and their legacies, where instances of frontier cooperation and conflict were structured but not predetermined by the implacable logic of settler colonial dispossession and displacement. The volume thus contributes to a growing literature that complicates the totalizing picture of imperialism as flattening all manifestations of indigenous agency, but also rejects the nostalgic desire for a more sanguine history of colonialism that highlights intercultural, cross-frontier colonial entanglements without explaining whose interests these entanglements predominantly served.

Exemplifying the volume's attention to complexity, for example, is Felicity Jensz's study of German Moravian missionaries, which sets out their dual role as putative protectors of indigenous Australians from their “white Assailant” (115) and as vehicles for religious and secular colonizing endeavors. So too Anja Schwarz's discussion of the German naturalist Richard Schomburgk makes clear how seemingly neutral scientific investigations into Australia's flora and fauna often relied upon the extraction of Indigenous knowledge and its application to colonizing ends. Schwarz demonstrates that the same naturalist who sent botanical samples back to Berlin also made it his business to send Indigenous human remains. For his part, Dennis Mischke demonstrates the complicity of Germany's nineteenth-century cosmopolitan liberals in the imperial projects of other nations. Mischke persuasively shows that the commitment of German settlers who had left Germany for Australia after 1848 to the cause of “Weltbürgertum” meant that “German settler colonialists contributed to the spreading of imperial rule under the banner of cosmopolitanism” (104).

Elsewhere, the volume carefully studies contemporary legacies of German settler colonialism in Australia. Nowhere is this more successful than in Andrew W. Hurley's excellent analysis of a recent performance of a trilingual (Western Arrarnta, German, and English) symphonic cantata. Hurley's chapter makes clear the wrongheadedness of simplistic expectations that “Aboriginalising” (133) European cultural forms might engender a harmonious cultural reconciliation between Indigenous and settler colonial Australia. Unpicking the intended “polysemic reconciliation message” of the performance (137), Hurley shows that it is actually in the tonal clash between Arrarnta and the two European languages of the performance that a jarring and agonistic dissonance is enabled, one that is a perhaps a more fitting evocation of the current moment than an expectation of a seamless process of reconciliation.

In the same vein, Monica C. van der Haagen-Wulff's poignant discussion of the traces of an almost-erased Indigenous past located amid Australia's suburban sprawl problematizes the current hopes of an easy reconciliation process that does not address the central fact of territorial dispossession. Laying bare the Indigenous past of the land upon which her German migrant family home sits, she shows how the uncovered remnants of an Indigenous precolonial past have the power to overturn the myth of an empty continent (terra nullius) and to unsettle the European Australian sense of place, reminding current and future generations that the new Heimat rests on unceded Indigenous land. So too Lars Eckstein's brief but penetrating discussion of the lingering afterlives of colonial-era physical anthropology in current repatriation processes for human remains confronts historians with the paradox that “any Indigenous community levelling a restitution claim is perversely forced to accept the legitimacy of its own colonisation in principle” (27).

Exploration and its lionization in Australian settler discourse are also examined by several contributions to the volume. As Lindsay Barrett points out, Ludwig Leichhardt remains the “Ur-figure” (60) for writers seeking a shorthand for depicting German colonial endeavors in Australia. Leichhardt's literary doppelgänger, Johann Ulrich Voss, brought into the world by the novelist Patrick White in the mid-twentieth century, remains a touchstone for the desert gothic genre of Australian writing as well. Quite properly, the myth of Leichhardt is read critically here by Eckstein and Hurley, with the novel Voss too interrogated to reveal its problematic service to colonial tropes of Indigenous “savagery.” Metropolitan German representations of James Cook's voyage to Australia are shown by Fredericka van der Lubbe to have contributed to the normalization of British-style maritime imperialism in Germany.

The representations of German entanglements with Australia brought together in this volume are multifaceted and provide an impetus for further fine-grained work. Although some of the chapters are perhaps overly self-reflexive and others are more suggestive rather than completely developed, by refusing to resolve the tensions of colonialism in Australia both at its foundational moment and in the present, Eckstein and Hurley's volume contributes to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of German settler colonialism in its global context.