Must Read for Germans Down Under

I love my Kindle and my new black denim cover. It took me a while to get used to it since I really enjoy flicking pages in a real book, especially to flick back to a page I really liked or just to browse a bit. But now I like the Kindle especially the fact that I can read a German book at any time, I just need to download it. I did some book reviews before but this is my first e-book review, so here we go:
Friedrich Gerstäcker: Australien

While browsing the Kindle-shop the other day I came across this book. Its title and price (0 Euro) convinced me to download it straight away. I got hooked after reading just a few pages and I did some research on the author who's name I had never heard before. Friedrich Gerstäcker was born in Hamburg in 1816 and was able to travel the world and live of the sales of his travel books. He is most famous for his books about Northern America. In 1849 he sailed to Sydney. His plan was to built a kayak and travel from Albury to Adelaide on the Murray river. This book is absolutely fascinating for me, especially his detailed descriptions of Sydney, the Australian landscape, aboriginal people and the daily life of immigrants, gold diggers and farmers. All that he does with great humour and sarcasm and often I was laughing about his descriptions. Even in dangerous situations like attacks from aborigines, travels on a stagecoach at breakneck speed or loss of his kayak the author sticks to his humorous attitude. He visited a lot of places that I got to know too, only 150 years later. Some things have changed a lot (state of the roads) some have not (number of drunk ladies on the above).

Jeannie Pitjara

I can't say how excited I am about this painting. Not only is it the first original piece of art I ever purchased, but it is also incredibly beautiful. I bought it on Ebay, directly from the artists community in Alice Springs and could therefore get a much better deal than I would have in one of the overpriced Sydney galleries. So when the rolled up canvas (150cm x 90cm) got delivered a few days later I was happy and could not wait to have it hanging on our wall. I got it framed (finally all the framing shops everywhere made total sense) and I managed to hang it without a nail in the wall (in Australia you are not allowed to put a nail into a rented apartment's wall, but this is another blog topic).

The painting is about “Bush Medicine Leaves” and I really like the colours and the gentle movement of strings of leaves.

Interestingly there are two museums in the world entirely dedicated to aboriginal art, one in Virginia (USA), the other in Utrecht (Netherlands).