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Peter Pierce 1845, he emigrated in 1863, and worked as a jackeroo in northern SKILFUL SHAPING and central . In 1878 he led an expedition funded by the Queenslander newspaper to test the Ernest Favenc, Tales of the Austral proposed route of a railway from Tropics, ed. Cheryl Taylor, Colonial Brisbane to Port Darwin. Other Texts Series. : University of journeys of exploration followed, to Press, 1997. Queensland and Western . 211pp. ISBN 0-86840-381-4. Favenc knew the routines and rigours of survival in the bush in It looks like an exemplary 1890s ways that Paterson, let alone Bulletin career. Very soon after the Lawson, never did. He combined the start of the decade, on 15 February career of a genuine explorer with 1890, Ernest Favenc (writing as that of a writer who introduced and "Delcomyn") published a comic perhaps mythologised the wonders of yarn in the Bulletin concerning "the Austral Tropics" for a gener- cannibalism, entitled "Long Jim's ation of urban readers. Long before Appetite: A Back-Country Hair- Ion Idriess and Frank Clune, between Raiser." The dead-pan description the wars, Favenc was telling stories comes from Cheryl Taylor's of the Nicholson River and the introduction to her exemplary Rumford Plains, vividly imagining a edition of Favenc's Tales of the mysterious Australia in order to Austral Tropics, the latest in the titillate an audience susceptible to Colonial Texts Series of scholarly such material precisely because it editions of nineteenth-century thought it knew something, if not Australian literature. Favenc was a much, of what he wrote. bushman of the highest calibre and a boozer of destructive bent. The In a puffing Preface to the 1892 Bulletin published his verse, generic edition of Tales of the Austral Tropics, poems of lamentable outback "Rolf Boldrewood," the champion of commonplaces such as "Dead in the romance fiction in Australia, gave a Bush," as well as his prose "hair- backhanded compliment to Favenc's raiser" yarns of parched plains and achievement when he remarked on crocodile-infested swamps. "the strange romances which write themselves, often in letters of blood, Yet Favenc was, in significant res- amid the half-unknown, mysterious pects, an atypical figure. As Taylor regions of tropical Australia." The observes: "In the early 1890s, comment unkindly deprecates the Favenc was vastly experienced in author's role in shaping those bush life, and a generation older romances, while at the same time it than the rising young contributors recognises how material for such to the Bulletin." Born in in romance was a donnée, something to

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112 Volume 24, number 2, October 1997 be found in remote Australia, not "mangrove-flats of North Queensland." least because it needed to be. A revenge tale (ending in madness), and a yarn of horrifying apparitions Thus, Favenc was part of the prog- and a fabulous lost reef (ending rammatic literary effort begun by likewise), consort with a tale of horse Marcus Clarke and continued by theft, a murder mystery (featuring an "Boidrewood" and Rosa Praed which infelicitous portrait of a Chinese cook) aimed to make Australia fit for the and a story of a jinxed "big pearl," to liberties of romance, to provide this which the Quetta shipwreck provides country with the legends and the the conclusion. In "The Spell of Mas- history which—in European terms- Hantoo," Favenc ventures to Borneo it had not had time to generate. As reminding us how persistently and Taylor rightly points out, Rider fruitfully nineteenth-century writers Haggard was the sovereign spirit. looked east, to the Pacific, and to the His fervid imaginings of terrifying, lands to the north of Australia, both claustral spaces, caverns and in life and in art. Henry Kendall, tunnels and underground rivers, of Henry Lawson and Favenc's friend lost races in desert fastnesses, were Louis Becke were among the numbers adopted more enthusiastically by of wandering souls so distracted. authors in the colonies than in Britain, because the need for such The General Editorial Foreword to the models was stronger there. "A Haunt Colonial Texts series outlines a of the Jinkarras," the first of Favenc's laudable ambition to bring back into stories included here, depicts a print "a range of colonial artistic central Australian cavern whose achievement which has largely "awful darkness was at times dropped from view." And not merely peopled by forms that, for hideous into print: this is a scholarly horror, no nightmare could surpass." enterprise, wherein "all potentially The writing is slack and formulaic, authorial forms of the text ... have but that should be leniently under- been located and compared." Taylor's stood. It is a code for excitement, for editorial labour has been assiduous the frissons that explorers' journals and punctilious. The many notes on consistently refused to yield to the textual variants are boxed at the expectant reader. bottom of most pages, but the lay-out is clean and clear. Reading for Taylor has well represented the pleasure with indifference to scholarly range of short fiction modes in detail, is unimpeded. Ample and which Favenc worked. His most illuminating explanatory notes bring famous and most anthologised up the rear. Perhaps unexpectedly, it piece, "The Last of Six," relates an is the black-and-white illustrations- episode of cannibalism among title pages, scenes from the stories escapees from the French prison in that reproduce the rough-hewn forms New Caledonia who end up in the of their original publication in the

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Bulletin—that sometimes produce an The publication of the journal kept effect of disorientation. by Rose de Freycinet between 1817 and 1820 during the voyage around Is there a moral? The fare of the the world of the French scientific Bulletin in the 1890s has long ceased vessel Uranie brings us an important to be read as once it was, for early example of female autobiog- distraction, argument, delight or raphical writing. The 23-year-old companionship—as "the Bushman's wife of theship's captain Louis- Bible" of legenU. Now it is scholarly Claude de Saulces de Freycinet, Rose stuff, whose study enables us—in stowed away apparently with her Taylor's words—to discern "key husband's collaboration, despite the ideological trends of the decade." fact that women were prohibited by Perhaps that is the right emphasis royal ordinance from sailing on state too, in that it makes Favenc more vessels. Her journal, written as a conduit than creator, a skilled series of letters to a friend, records as shaper of tales, of received pre- it happens a young woman's judices and of settings which- experience of one of the last of the although he knew them intimately great scientific voyages of the and painfully—he transmuted into Enlightenment as it marks the the symbolic landscapes that changes those experiences bring, Australians have long preferred. and so offers a perspective that could never be found in the official scientific accounts.

Rose's journal provokes two main questions: why did she follow her husband, and what is the sig- nificance of her writing? A stopover in Mauritius sheds some light on the former: a series of couplets composed Maria de Ia cinta Ramblado for her there account for her presence Minero by celebrating her love for her husband, but she pointedly refuses to ROSE DE FREYCINET: comment on them: "I won't tell you A WOMAN OF COURAGE what I think of those verses" (31), she writes. She never says in so many words why she decided to stow M.S. Rivière, ed. and trans. A away—for love, for adventure, or for Woman of Courage: The Journal of both—but her descriptions of what Rose de Freycinet on her Voyage she sees show a young woman around the World 1817-1820. hungry for knowledge, albeit not of Canberra: National Library of the scientific kind. She wants to learn Australia, 1996. about the world, to experience its

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