Hermann & Fanny Rieck
The Travel Letters 1898–1908

A Life in Two Worlds

Hermann Rieck was born around 1837 in Delmenhorst, in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, Germany, into a family with interests in publishing. He served as a non-commissioned officer in the Prussian army during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and by the late 1870s had made his way to Australia, arriving in the Coffs Harbour district around 1880–81.¹ He was not the first settler at Korora, a coastal valley six kilometres north of Coffs Harbour, but he became a consequential one. Selecting eighty acres north of Pine Brush Creek, he initially sheltered in the recess between the spurs of a large fig tree before building a slab hut lined with many thicknesses of newspaper. He experimented with sugar cane, maize, tobacco, fruit and livestock, and pioneered a clearing method using pigs to break and manure the soil. Sometime around 1890 he introduced Fiji banana suckers to Korora,² and by 1894 had six acres under cultivation. Local people were sceptical — bananas, they said, would not grow so far south. By the 1940s the Coffs Harbour area had become a major centre of banana growing in Australia.³

Hermann was also a journalist. He wrote prolifically for newspapers across New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, and observed everything with the eye of a man accustomed to putting his impressions into words: land prices, crop yields, railway policy, tick disease, the price of butter in Kandy. His pen never really stopped.⁴

Fanny Elizabeth Cox was born on 28 March 1860 at Currency Creek, South Australia, the youngest daughter of John Cox and his wife, who had arrived in the colony on the S.S. Susannah in 1849.⁵ The Cox family were pioneers in the most literal sense — they moved from Yankalilla to the Lake Alexandrina hills, then in 1872 trekked with six children and a reaping machine 150 miles north to the new wheat country around Laura, when Laura, as Fanny later recalled, was not yet on the map.⁶ She attended school in a slab building at Currency Creek where the teacher was Miss Fidock, and remembered its stone successor being opened with a grand concert, the stage crowded with ladies in crinoline hoops singing Nelly Bly. She was seven years old when the Duke of Edinburgh visited South Australia in October 1867, and was among the party who drove to Strathalbyn to catch a glimpse of the Prince and eat a slice of the ox roasted on the green.⁶

Hermann and Fanny were married on 16 April 1892 at the Cathedral in Grafton, New South Wales.⁷ She was thirty-two; he was around fifty-five.

They settled at Korora on what Fanny would later call, with characteristic directness, their Fiji Banana Plantation, and for seven years they farmed together. Hermann wrote; Fanny kept house in a remote coastal valley where the nearest town was a rough road away. Then Hermann and Fanny decided to travel to Europe. They left Sydney on 28 December 1898 aboard the North German Lloyd steamer Bremen, bound first for Ceylon.⁸

What followed appeared to be some of the best years of their lives together.