The French Australian Review – No 70 Australian Winter 2021

ELAINE LEWIS, JANE GILMOUR, Foreword

 
ROBERT ALDRICH, Keynote Speech: ISFAR 2021 35th Anniversary Symposium, From the French East Indies Company to the French in the “Indo-Pacific”

Robert Aldrich gives a concise overview of four centuries of the French presence in the Indo-Pacific region. The political and commercial idea of an ‘Indo-Pacific’, it seems, came to attention with a statement by the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2007, then was taken up by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in 2010. In 2013, the idea appeared in the Australian Defence White Paper. In the words of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, at the virtual meeting of the Quadrilateral group of powers of the region—Australia, the United States, Japan and India, though not including France—held in March 2021: ‘It is the Indo-Pacific that will now shape the destiny of our world in the 21st Century’.

Keywords: Indo-Pacific, French presence in Indo-Pacific, 21st Century, Australia and France in a Regional and Global Context

 
ANDREW MONTANA, Virtue and Sentiment: Madame Mouchette’s Art and Teaching in Melbourne 1881–1892
WINNER OF THE 2021 IVAN BARKO AWARD

Australia in the early 1880s welcomed the professional artist and art teacher Berthe Mouchette from France, accompanied by her husband and her sister. Mouchette’s artistic and cultural influence was strong for well over a decade in Melbourne but she is absent from Australian art history, which has prioritised modernism and shunned flower painting, history painting and portraiture, subject genres in which Mouchette excelled.  This article provides a feminist perspective of Mouchette’s work and her contemporary impact. It reveals her French teaching methods and highlights her social networks to promote French culture and language. It shows how she fostered an appreciation of women’s art through her own example, and her student exhibitions, and how she expanded the public sphere in which women operated in an evolving society in Melbourne, prior to her departure for Adelaide due to the depression of the early 1890s.

Keywords: Berthe Mouchette, Australian art in the nineteenth century, Alliance Française de Melbourne

 
LYNN EVERETT AND RUSSELL CHEEK, The Influence of the Lecoq School on Australian Theatre

Lecoq School devotees in Australia have created popular and visually rich theatre that has widened the scope of audience appeal to include and embrace new spectators, taking theatre to people who would not ordinarily attend mainstream theatre performances. Through the acting, teaching, directing and devising work of its former students working in Australian theatre, the École Jacques Lecoq continues to influence theatre training and practice in this country.

Keywords: Lecoq School, L’École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq, influence of Lecoq school, Australian theatre

 
NATALIE EDWARDS AND CHRISTOPHER HOGARTH, The Teaching Research Nexus: French-Australian Migrant Literature in the First-Year French Classroom

This article details the ways in which the authors bring their research into their pedagogical practise. Their research project is entitled ‘Transnational Selves: French Narratives of Migration to Australia’ and aims to discover, analyse and disseminate texts written by migrants in the French language from the nineteenth century to the present day. In this article, they discuss how they incorporate this important French-Australian cultural element into a beginner level language course, reminding students of the history and persistence of French-Australian cultural connections.

Keywords: Pedagogy, first-year language learning, literature in language teaching, migrant writing, travel writing, transnational literature

 

DOCUMENTS, NOTES AND REVIEWS

JANET LILLEY, French-Australian Encounters Number 6

The story of Janet Lilley’s meeting with Pâquerette (Totte) Feisselthe French translator of Mrs Jeannie Gunn’s classic book, The Little Black Princess.

 
DOCUMENT, Australian Theatre in France: 1994 and 2021

A brief account of two occasions when Australian playwrights were invited to France for readings and translations.

 
ELIZABETH RECHNIEWSKI AND ALEXIS BERGANTZ, The ISFAR Research Committee Report: ISFAR Research Committee Report on the ISFAR @ 35 Symposium, ‘Australia and France in a Regional and Global Context, Past Engagements and Future Research

 
ELIZABETH RECHNIEWSKI AND ALEXIS BERGANTZ, Travel Scholarship in Honour of Professor Colin Nettelbeck

 
KERRY MULLAN, Winner of the 2020 Ivan Barko Prize: Irene Rogers

 
LAUREN SADOW AND KERRY MULLAN, Obituary: A Tribute to Bert Peeters (1960–2021)

 

BOOK REVIEWS

PHOEBE WESTON-EVANS, Book Review: Crossed Lines by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston

 
KIRSTY CARPENTER, Book Review: New Zealand Journal of French Studies

 
NICOLE STARBUCK, Book Review: Dumont d’Urville : L’homme et la mer by Edward Duyker

 
ELIZABETH RECHNIEWSKI, Book Review: Paris Savages by Katherine Johnson

 

BOOK NOTES

Paris Savages, Cast Among Strangers, a Paris auction and L’Exposition coloniale de 1931, Paris

 
ELAINE LEWIS, French-Australian Bibliographical Notes

 
A NOTE FROM LE HAVRE
From June 5 to November 7, 2021, the City of Le Havre celebrates Australian life and culture with the event ‘Le Havre, Australian stopover’

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