French Perceptions of the Colony of Victoria – Facts, Fiction and Euphoria
Author: COLIN THORNTON-SMITH Explorations No 2 (Dec 1985): 14-25 https://doi.org/10.62586/NTVH2916 The author has identified over thirty French books on Australia, mostly published in the second half of the nineteenth century. He discusses the difficulty of establishing the genre to which each book belongs, as the borderlines between personal reminiscences or memoirs, fictionalised autobiography and pure […]
The idea of France in Victoria
Author: JIM DAVIDSON Explorations No 2 (Dec 1985): 3-9 https://doi.org/10.62586/CNWF2695 In this wide-ranging essay, the author surveys not only Melbourne society’s enthusiasm for things French but also the occasional emergence of anti-French feelings generated by the survival of traditional British hostility to France as well as the existence of tensions between the Australian colonies and […]
The French Disconnection
Author: MILES LEWIS Explorations No 3 (July 1986): 21-45 https://doi.org/10.62586/TODX3119 In this detailed study of French influences in pre-World War 1 Australian architecture, the author distinguishes between stylistic features of French origin and building techniques and materials originating in France. Examples of both are given. Keywords: pise de terre, Marseilles tiles, reinforced concrete, mansard roof, […]
Out of Oblivion
Author: JOHN WHITE Explorations No 6 (Sep 1988): 9-20 https://doi.org/10.62586/DJWW6982 A personal account of a family history project, presenting the actual history of the author’s French ancestors as well as the author’s process of investigation and his understanding of the people in the story. The main characters are his maternal grandfather, Gaston L’Huillier, and his […]
The Victorian Customs Department and Respectable Limits of Taste: Émile Zola and Colonial Censorship
Author: BRIAN HUBBER Explorations No 9 (Dec 1990): 3-16 https://doi.org/10.62586/HTOH8480 The author details the steps taken by Alfred Deakin when Chief Secretary of Victoria in the late 1880s to have some of Zola’s works prohibited and vendors guilty of selling them prosecuted. When legal opinion was obtained, it became obvious that the novel selected as […]
Two Adaptations of S.T. Gill by Gustave Doré
Author: C.B. THORNTON-SMITH Explorations No 10 (Jun 1991): 1-8 https://doi.org/10.62586/UFQY9652 This article examines the adaptation by Gustave Doré of two of S.T. Gill’s drawings, for publication in the French magazine Le Tour du monde. These drawings were meant to illustrate a pseudo-travelogue (“De Sydney à Adélaïde”) which the author argues was not, as claimed by the […]
Sydney, 1957 – Paris and Melbourne, 1976: the Literary Friendship of Two French Exiles, Antoine Denat and Louis Brauquier
Author: PHILIP ANDERSON Explorations No 14 (Jun 1993): 3-34 https://doi.org/10.62586/AGDJ3966 Poet and painter Louis Brauquier, Agent Général de la Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes and Antoine Denat, teacher, philosopher, poetician and author of occasional verse, met at the Green Jade restaurant in Sydney in 1957. They maintained a long literary friendship — literary in its largely […]
Paul Maistre, Vice-Consul and later Consul for France in Victoria, 1886-1898, 1901-1908
Author: C.B. THORNTON-SMITH Explorations No 17 (Dec 1994): 3-47 https://doi.org/10.62586/IPDO1259 This article is a detailed account of Paul Maistre’s struggle to reform the Melbourne Alliance Française at the beginning of the twentieth century. Maistre, like Georges Biard d’Aunet, the Sydney-based Consul General for Australia was committed to the Alliance Française as an educational institution. The […]
Ferdinand von Mueller and the French Consuls
Author: R.W. HOME & SARA MAROSKE Explorations No 18 (Jun 1995): 3-50 https://doi.org/10.62586/JZEO6350 Published here for the first time is a fascinating series of letters (May 1883 to November 1895) from the eminent botanist and explorer Ferdinand von Mueller, Victoria’s Government Botanist from 1853 until his death on 10 October 1896, to successive French Consuls-General […]
Looking Ahead: an 1898 French View of Australian Federation
Author: COLIN NETTELBECK Explorations No 19 (Dec 1995): 3-30 https://doi.org/10.62586/DMJO9523 In a short introduction the author recalls the accidental discovery in the late 1980s of some of the pre-war archives of the Melbourne French Consulate and describes a specific 1898 document, namely a report sent by Georges Biard d’Aunet, the then French Consul General in […]