Edward Duyker
Père Receveur: Franciscan, Scientist and Voyager with Lapèrouse
210 x 148mm Printed soft cover, 40pp, colour illustrations saddle stitched.
Book of the Month March 2011
Australian: $20 (Approx. US $21, Euro €16)
ISBN 9780987072702
Worldwide 7 - 10 days, Australia 3 - 7 business days
About the Book
This slight but interesting new publication is by Edward Duyker, who notes that "The Laperouse monument was one of the first historic sites I visited after moving to Sydney in 1983. While the name of the explorer Laperouse was already quite familiar to me, I had not heard of Pere Receveur before encountering his grave on Botany Bay. His tombstone only bears a death date and I had no idea that he was a young man, not yet thirty-one years of age, when he died on our shores." The solemnity of the Latin inscription, the impressive bronze cross and the associations with the seminal events of 1788, somehow suggested an older and more august person. At the time, there was no Laperouse Museum to get an answer to the question of whom he was. Even the few books on the Laperouse expedition in local libraries had little to offer. My curiosity was fired further when I learned that Receveur had vowed to follow the rule of Francis of Assisi-that gentle, simple saint who loved animals and even sought rapprochement with the Muslim world. I did not have a portrait, but already I had a mental image of a friar in dark monastic habit and cowl, a knotted cord around his waist and a tonsured head shaved to leave a band of hair a mere three fingers' width. Although Receveur's grave remains a tangible vestige of the visit of Laperouse's expedition, the enigmatic Franciscan interred within has in many respects been defined by it. For many Sydneysiders he is simply: The Frenchman buried at La Perouse in 1788. Yet from his letters home - which appear in English translation herein for the first time -Receveur emerges as a man of true scientific curiosity, energy, warmth and familial love. I invite my readers to share what I have glimpsed through these records, but also the circumstances of his death and the role of his tomb as a focus of community cultural and religious life.
About the Author
Edward Duyker OAM, FAHA, is the eldest of eight children born in Melbourne to a Dutch father and a Mauritian mother in 1955. He graduated from La Trobe University in 1977 with a BA (Hons.) and received his Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne in 1981. He worked as an intelligence officer (South Asia/Middle East) with the Department of Defence in Canberra until 1983 and was briefly a Teaching Fellow at Griffith University in Brisbane. In 1984 he settled in Sydney as an independent historian. Between 1996 and 2002 he also served as the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Mauritius in New South Wales. He has published seventeen books, many dealing with early Australian coastal exploration and the natural sciences. These include An Officer of the Blue (1994), a biography of Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne (the first explorer after Tasman to reach Van Diemen's Land); Nature's Argonaut (1998), a biography of Daniel Solander the Swedish naturalist on the Endeavour, which was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's General History Prize in 1999; Citizen Labillardière (2003), a biography of the naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière, which won the New South Wales Premier's General History Prize in 2004; and François Péron (2006), a biography of the controversial zoologist of Nicolas Baudin's expedition to Australian waters, which won the Frank Broeze Maritime History Prize in 2007. In 2001, with his mother, Maryse Duyker, he also published the first English translation of the journal of the French explorer Bruny d'Entrecasteaux. In 2007 Edward Duyker was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences at the Australian Catholic University and an Honorary Senior Lecturer, in the Department of French Studies, School of Languages and Cultures, at the University of Sydney.