Explorations – No 28 Jun 2000

PATRICIA CLANCY, JACQUES DE SAINT-FERJEUX, COLIN THORNTON-SMITH, Foreword

PATRICIA CLANCY, JACQUES DE SAINT-FERJEUX, COLIN THORNTON-SMITH, Addendum and Corrigenda

Keywords: Massena, Murat, organ, Robert and William Grey 1796.

DIANNE REILLY, A Huguenot Heritage: the French Ancestry of Charles Joseph La Trobe, Superintendent of Port Phillip, 1839-1850, and First Lieutenant Governor of Victoria 1851-1854

Dianne Reilly explores La Trobe’s French heritage in general and then focuses on his direct ancestor Jean La Trobe who, in the seventeenth century, fled to England with William of Orange and, after being invalided out of the army, established himself as a linen manufacturer in Waterford.

Keywords: Charles Joseph La Trobe, Superintendent of Port Phillip, Lieutenant Governor of Victoria.

IVAN BARKO, The Closing down of the Melbourne French Consulate General (1900 and 2000)

Twice within a hundred years the French Government, in 1900 and in 2000, closed down its Melbourne Consulate General, and transferred its functions to the Sydney Consulate General. In the years and months leading to the proclamation of the new Commonwealth of Australia in January 1901, the Consul General in Sydney, Georges Biard d’Aunet, recommended that French consular functions in the new Federation be centralised in Sydney, and that Melbourne be downgraded to vice-consulate status under his control. His recommendation was eventually approved by Paris. This article records Biard d’Aunet’s pyrrhic victory and his trials under the new arrangement when his work was undermined both in Melbourne and in Paris by his critics and enemies.

Keywords: Biard d’Aunet, Consul General Sydney, Consulate General Sydney, Consulate General Melbourne.

HELEN FRANK, Buvettes and Chiko Rolls: Australianness in Translated Children’s Fiction

Helen Frank suggests that the most common constructs of Australia in French translations reveal a preponderance of traditional Eurocentric signifiers that identify Australia with the outback, the antipodes, the exotic, the wild, the unknown, the void, the end of the world, the young and innocent nation and the Far West. She explores the selections of twentieth century Australian children’s books as well as translators’ concerns with the portrayal of the exotic, rather than with Australianness.

Keywords: translation, Australian children’s fiction, Australian children’s books in French, Australianness

BOOK REVIEWS

Mark A Clements, Susan Walker, and Paul Ziesing, New Caledonia Field Expeditions 1992, reviewed by Edward Duyker

Tim Fischer, Seven Days in East Timor: Ballot and Bullets, reviewed by Edward Duyker

Explorations – No 21 Dec 1996

(issued February 2000)

WALLACE KIRSOP, Forward

WALLACE KIRSOP, Mme Juliette Henry Writes to Félix Faure

The author examines Madame Henry’s fraught relationship with the then Consul-General of Australia, Biard d’Aunet, outlined in her letter of complaint to the President of the Republic, Felix Faure. These letters are printed here in full and with the rest of the dossier, now held at the Quai d’Orsay, ‘leave no doubt that what she was doing was very much like the programmes of the Alliance Française’ (not then established in Sydney), through her Cercle Littéraire Français.

Keywords: Juliette Henry, Biard d’Aunet, Felix Faure, Alliance Française, Cercle Littéraire Français in Sydney

JULIETTE HENRY, La Fête de notre directrice : comédie en deux actes composé pour le Ladies’ College, Hobart 1892, Sydney, Imprimerie de M. M. Murray.

The script in French of this ‘slight play written for performance by Hobart schoolgirls’, one of the many cultural enterprises of Madame Juliette Henry.

Keywords: French play, La Fête de notre directrice, Juliette Henry.

BOOK REVIEWS

Kenneth Dutton and Denis Rowe eds, A Swiss Settler in Australia: The Diary of Etienne Bordier 1849-1851, reviewed by Wallace Kirsop

Jim Davidson, Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of Oiseau-Lyre 1884-1962, reviewed by Wallace Kirsop

Explorations – No 17 Dec 1994

(issued October 1997)

WALLACE KIRSOP, Foreword

C.B. THORNTON-SMITH, Paul Maistre, Vice-Consul and later Consul for France in Victoria, 1886-1898, 1901-1908

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 struggle for reform continued for a number of years until a conflict exploded between Maistre, supported by many key constituents and the socialite Committee. A reformist Committee was established under Paul Maistre. This was however a pyrrhic victory as the Melbourne socialites used their influence with the British Embassy in Paris to lodge a complaint against Maistre resulting in him being recalled in 1909,

Keywords: Alliance Française of Melbourne, French consuls and consul-generals in Sydney and Melbourne, Melbourne establishment, the Crivellis, Maurice-Carton, Paul Maistre, Biard d’Aunet

Kelveriana
An editors’ note about the publication of the first in a series of publications to be known as Kelveriana, consisting of works written by Kelver Hartley or relevant to his interests