Explorations – No 11 Dec 1991

WALLACE KIRSOP, Foreword

WALLACE KIRSOP, Selling French Books in Melbourne during the First World War

The author introduces a catalogue of French books available for purchase through a Melbourne bookseller at the time of the First World War. He also situates this document within the context of other ephemeral material and uses it as a basis to make assumptions about the interest in French books at the time in Victoria. The 12-page catalogue is reproduced.

Keywords: booksellers, French books in Australia, Melville & Mullen Pty Ltd, Robertson and Mullens Limited.

C.B. THORNTON-SMITH, A Réunion Journalist in Nineteenth-Century Australia

This article discusses a book published by Réunion journalist Thomy Lahuppe in 1865, under the title Notes sur l’Australie. Lahuppe’s original intention was to promote commercial exchange between Australia and the French colony, especially in the area of sugar production. The book consists of ‘notes écrites au jour le jour’, but some of the chapters closely resemble material he had published in Le Moniteur de la Réunion, the newspaper which had sent him to Australia.

Keywords: Thomy Lahuppe, colonialism, sugar trade, Aborigines, La Réunion

HILARY HUTCHINSON, Meeting Kelver Hartley

A brief account of a meeting between the author, Grahame Jones and Professor Kelver Hartley, an eminent Oscar Wilde scholar.

Keywords: Kelver Hartley, Oscar Wilde

BOOK REVIEW
R. W. Home, with the assistance of Paula J. Needham, Physics in Australia to 1945: Bibliography and Biographical Register, reviewed by Wallace Kirsop

Explorations No 9 – Dec 1990

WALLACE KIRSOP, Foreword

BRIAN HUBBER, The Victorian Customs Department and Respectable Limits of Taste: Émile Zola and Colonial Censorship

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 a test case (Thérèse Raquin) “would not be held to be obscene within the meaning of the Act”. Deakin then sought the assistance not only of the Police but also the Customs Department to have copies of Zola’s books confiscated when attempts to import them were made. Using the Customs Act to censor books soon became common practice at both State and Federal levels.

Keywords: literary censorship, Customs Act, Emile Zola, Alfred Deakin, booksellers

C.W. NETTELBECK, A Contemporary French Artist in Australia

This is an interview with Monique Frydman, a French painter who spent several months in Melbourne in 1986-87 as part of an exchange programme of French and Australian artists.

Keywords: French-Australian Artists Exchange, Baudoin Lebon, Ian Howard, French Ministry of Culture, Victoria College, Prahran

BRONWYN OLIVER, A Contemporary Australian Artist in France

In this personal narrative an Australian sculptor tells the story of her two and a half months in Brest, on the Atlantic Coast, as part of an exchange programme of French and Australian artists.

Keywords: sculpture, artists exchange, Brest

BOOK REVIEWS

Jules S.C. Dumont D’Urville, Two Voyages in the South Seas (translated and edited by Helen Rosenman), reviewed by Edward Duyker

K.A. Lodewycks, The Belgians in Australia, reviewed by Edward Duyker

Edward Duyker, Of the Star and the Key: Mauritius, Mauritians and Australia, reviewed by James Cowan