Céleste de Chabrillan’s One-Act Comedy, En Australie; In Australia, a One-Act Comedy with Songs by Countess Lionel de Chabrillan

Author: PATRICIA CLANCY
Explorations No 46 (Jun 2009): 3-13
https://doi.org/10.62586/IALK9854

This article introduces the translation by Dennis Davison of Céleste de Chabrillan’s play about Melbourne in 1853, En Australie, originally performed and published in Paris in 1862. It recounts the life of Céleste, a former courtesan and wife of the first French Consul to Melbourne, who used her first-hand experience of the Victorian gold-rush of the 1850s to write a novel, Les Voleurs d’or, which later became a successful play on the Parisian stage. Although En Australie is a minor work – it was mainly created to serve as a vehicle for Chabrillan’s vaudeville acting – it represents an interesting contemporary French perspective on gold rush Australia.

Keywords: Céleste de Chabrillan, En Australie, Victorian gold-rush