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Book Review
| Edward Duyker, Citizen Labillardiere: A Naturalist's Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834), Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2003. pp. xx + 383. $39.95 paper.
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| Imagine a super-serious French republican scientist walking the momentous final pace, hand out-held, to grasp the hand of a Palawa chief, who in turn, raised his left leg to balance his body. |
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The place: Recherche Bay near the southern tip of Tasmania. The date is 1793 and the exact spot is the white sandy beach on the southern corner of Southport Lagoon. The scientist is 37-year-old lieutenant Jacques-Julien Labillardiere. |
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With that handshake began an extraordinary communication between two peoples from opposite ends of the earth, totally different in race, culture, religion, language and heritage: the French members and crew of Admiral D'Entrecasteaux's expedition and the indigenous Palawa people of southern Tasmania. In the following three weeks there were athlete contests, musical interludes, feasts and, little by little, the exploration of each other's universe. |
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Around the world we celebrate battlefields such as Trafalgar, Culloden Moor and Gettysburg. Here in Australia Recherche Bay should now be celebrated as a peace field. In Labillardiere's hand clasp is the recognition that no matter how great our differences, we human beings should celebrate these differences rather than be divided over them. We do not have to kill 'others' because they are different — we should enjoy that otherness instead. |
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Now Sydney historian Edward Duyker has published a definitive biography, Citizen Labillardiere: a Naturalist's Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755–1834). Labillardiere, the French contemporary of Joseph Banks, produced the first book of Australian flora. In 2006 his thousands of specimens are stored in Paris and Florence. In Tasmania, his name had been given to the Bruny Island National Park's Labillardiere Peninsula. His honourable connection with the Tasmanian Aborigines is in astounding contrast to the British invasion which followed a decade later. |
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Labillardiere was one of 400 men (and one disguised woman) who joined D'Entrecasteaux's two ships for their expedition from France in 1791. Their major challenge was to find the lost hero, La Perouse. While La Perouse proved to be irretrievable (his ships had perished in a Pacific cyclone), the D'Entrecasteaux expedition harboured in Recherche Bay in 1792, visited and studied many people and places in the Pacific, circumnavigated Australia, and returned to Recherche Bay in 1793. Labillardiere published his diary in English in 1800. |
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Two hundred and thirteen years on, the very forest he walked through to shake that Palawa hand is being rescued. Labillardiere would be overjoyed to know that Australians, led by philanthropists Dick and Pip Smith, are donating to buy the land to keep it as the Palawa knew it and to save from logging and modern development. See my website www.bobbrown.org.au or www.tasland.org.au |
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But there is much more to Jacques-Julien Labillardiere than Recherche Bay. This biography is about a boy who made good, a revolutionary thinker, a global traveller and yet an enigma. In telling Labillardiere's story, Edward Duyker gives a rich new dimension to Australian history, which, with the opening of the new Museum of Indigenous Culture in Paris this June, will capture the imagination of people around the world. |
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| Australian Greens Leader, Senator for Tasmania |
BOB BROWN | |
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