This public lecture series is designed to celebrate the many cultural and historical ties that bind Australia and France, from the early days of exploration and discovery (La Pérouse, d’Entrecasteaux, Baudin…) to the battlefields of the two World Wars and beyond.
All lectures are open to the general public and will be held from 5.30 pm to 6.30 pm on the dates indicated, in various locations on North Terrace.
Programme
Saturday, 8 July
5.30-6.30 pm
Napier Lecture Theatre 102
University of Adelaide (Napier Building – North Terrace)
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Multiculturalism and Nation Building:
the French and Australian Contexts
Discussants
The Honourable Michael Atkinson
Attorney General, Minister for Justice and
Minister for Multicultural Affairs in the South Australian Government
Mr Laurent Delahousse
Consul General of France
Sydney
Immigrant populations in both France and Australia have made a significant contribution to the economy, the culture and the social fabric of their country of adoption. The Australian model of multiculturalism is perhaps best summed up by the popular phrase: “we are one, but we are many”. In France, which similarly prides itself on being a country that welcomes immigrants and refugees (a “pays d’accueil”), the spirit may be the same but the model is somewhat different. In the Republican tradition that grew out of the French Revolution, the nation is considered to be “one and indivisible”. In both cases, however, there are inescapable tensions that arise from what would appear to be conflicting aspirations: the desire to respect cultural difference on the one hand, and the need to develop a sense of nationhood, that is to say a unified national purpose and identity, on the other. At various points in the histories of both countries, these tensions have risen to the surface. This forum will examine the similarities and differences, both in terms of the nature of the challenge and the ways in which it is addressed, in the French and Australian contexts.
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Michael Atkinson holds a key position as Attorney-General in the Rann Labor Government in South Australia, with responsibility for the Justice and Multiculturalism portfolios. He has a long-standing interest in multiculturalism and multiculturalism policy in Australia. Laurent Delahousse is currently Consul General for France at the French Consulate in Sydney. He is a graduate of the Paris Institute of Political Studies (“Sciences-Po”), and was trained in 1987-1989 as a civil servant at the National School for Administration (“Ecole nationale d’administration – ENA”). He has a distinguished record of service in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with extensive experience as an advisor on European Union matters.
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Monday, 10 July
5.30-6.30 pm
Napier Lecture Theatre 102
University of Adelaide (Napier Building – North Terrace)
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Writing and Rewriting the Baudin Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere (1800-1804)
Inaugural Frank Horner Memorial Lecture on the History of French Exploration in the Pacific
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Presenter
Margaret Sankey
University of Sydney
Margaret Sankey is McCaughey Professor of French Studies at the University of Sydney. She has worked extensively on the history of ideas and mentalities in France, with particular reference to the early modern period and the scientific revolution. She has a particular interest in French notions of Terra Australis, an interest she has pursued through her research on the writing of Abbé Paulmier (1663-1664) and various other French explorers, including Nicolas Baudin, whose expedition famously crossed paths in 1802 with that of Matthew Flinders in the waters of what is now known as Encounter Bay. She is the team leader of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council, and which also includes Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby from the University of Adelaide, and Michel Jangoux from the University of Brussels. The project aims to re-write the history of the Baudin expedition and one of its principal outcomes will be the production of a searchable on-line database of all the journals kept by the scientists and officers. This talk will focus on the journals from the Baudin expedition and what it means to write a travel narrative in an age where scientific expeditions had become a key element in the quest for knowledge and national prestige.
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This lecture will be the first Frank Horner Memorial Lecture, commemorating that recently departed historian's valuable contribution to the study of French exploration in the Pacific.
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Tuesday, 11 July
5.30-6.30 pm
Art Gallery of South Australia
Function Room 1 & 2
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French Utopian Socialism:
Adelaide's Fourierist Connections
Presenters
Jean Fornasiero
University of Adelaide
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Michael Bollen
Wakefield Press
The mid-nineteenth century was a time of great intellectual and political ferment in France. Utopian Socialism was particularly influential in the 1840s, both in France and more widely throughout Europe, despite what many saw as the marginal status of the thinkers associated with this ideological current. Charles Fourier was one such philosopher who imagined a grand project for economic, social and human reform. A critic of bourgeois industrial society, he proposed an alternative social model based on associative life in communities he named phalansteries. While his influence was at its height, a project was being formed to develop a model colony in South Australia. This ambitious project did not escape the attention of a Fourierist leader by the name of Arthur Young, who in 1847 decided to make the trip out to South Australia with the firm intention of contributing to the development of an ideal city. This lecture will present his story, along with some examples from Adelaide’s early press of the influence of French Utopian Socialism on the ideas that were circulating in the fledgling colony.
Jean Fornasiero is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Adelaide. She has published widely on French intellectual history, most particularly the utopian socialist movement and its influence. She will be presenting some of the findings of her research into the life and works of Arthur Young. Michael Bollen is the well-known publisher from Adelaide’s Wakefield Press. He has a keen interest in South Australia’s early history and has uncovered some evidence from early newspaper archives of the influence of some of the more radical European thinkers on a number of the early figures in the State’s development.
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Thursday, 13 July
5.30-6.30 pm
State Library of South Australia
North Terrace
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Demobilising the Mind:
France and the Legacy of the Great War, 1919-1939
Presenter
John Horne
Trinity College, Dublin
Twice in the twentieth century, France has been engulfed by a world war that overturned Clausewitz’s celebrated dictum. For rather than being the pursuit of politics by other means, this kind of war dwarfed politics and left the countries concerned struggling for decades to come to terms with the experience. The legacy of France’s defeat and occupation in the Second World War is still tangible. However, the earlier experience of the Great War, which France ostensibly won but at the cost of 1.4 million dead and the destruction of its north-eastern region, was no less traumatic. How that was so will be addressed by considering the ways in which the French sought to return to peace in the 1920s, as they dismantled the mind-sets and values of wartime. They engaged in a process of cultural demobilisation that meant, among other things, seeing war, not the Germans, as the true enemy, investing the soldiers’ war-time sacrifice in a peaceful future, restoring humanity to the enemy by myriad forms of contact, and reconstituting the international ‘communities of truth’ shattered by the war.
Yet the process was not matched in Germany, where defeat imposed a different set of imperatives, and, in the changed circumstances of the 1930s, this led to divisions in France over the risks and meanings of a future war. In this sense, twentieth-century French history can be read as a dialectic in which the trauma of defeat in 1940 and the Vichy regime are partly explained by the earlier responses to the Great War, leading to subsequent pathologies, such as the Algerian War, that have not yet been fully resolved.
John Horne is Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College, Dublin, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an executive member of the Centre de Recherche at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France. He has published widely on the history of both the Great War and twentieth-century France, including (ed.) Labour at War: France and Britain, 1914-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and (ed.) Démobilisations culturelles après la Grande Guerre (Paris: Noêsis, 2002—Cultural Demobilisations after the Great War). With Alan Kramer, he wrote German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), which has been translated into German and French. He is currently working on a history of the French experience in the First World War.
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Friday, 14 July
5.30-6.30 pm
Art Gallery of South Australia
Function Room 1 & 2
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Bastille Day Lecture
Daily Life in the French Revolution
Presenter
Peter McPhee
University of Melbourne
How do we capture the lived experience of the French Revolution for the millions of people who lived in France’s country towns and villages? Did the Revolution’s laws affect daily life, or did people make changes to their own lives? In the end, were the most important aspects of family and private life beyond the reach of the revolutionaries? This lecture suggests that they were not: life could never be the same again for anyone.
Peter McPhee is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely on the history of modern France, notably A Social History of France 1780-1880 (London, 1992) and Revolution and Environment in Southern France, 1780-1830 (Oxford, 1999). His most recent book is The French Revolution 1789-1799 (Oxford, 2002).
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Saturday, 15 July
5.30-6.30 pm
Napier Lecture Theatre 102
University of Adelaide (Napier Building - North Terrace)
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French-Australian Food and Wine Connections
Presenters
Cath Kerry
CK Foods, Art Gallery of South Australia
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Emmanuelle Requin
Chalk Hill Winery and Boar's Rock Group
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Fanchon Ferrandi
Tatachilla Winery
France is renowned as the birth-place of gastronomy. As the saying goes, the French don’t eat to live, they live to eat! South Australia also has a well-earned reputation for fine wine and dining. This panel will explore these two traditions and examine the similarities and differences between them with respect to food and wine.
Cath Kerry is well known to lovers of good food in South Australia. With her mixed English and French heritage, she is ideally placed to talk about food preparation and dining habits in Australia and France. She has operated a successful catering business for 18 years, preparing food for everything from small cocktail and dinner parties to large corporate gatherings at events such as the Adelaide Grand Prix and Opera in the Outback. In late 1999, she took over the running of the SA Art Gallery’s restaurant. She has a long-standing interest in the history of life at the dinner table (manners, etiquette, table paraphernalia) and is quoted as having a fairly low opinion of vegetarians, whom she accuses of being attention seekers. Accordingly, Cath identifies offal as among her favourite ingredients.
Emmanuelle Requin was born in France, is married to an Australian, and has lived in Australia for 10 years. She has a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Aix-Marseille, and an Oenology degree from the University of Montpellier. Her experience in the wine industry spans 22 vintages. She started working in the Languedoc-Roussillon region, then moved to Bandol, Bordeaux and Bourgogne. In the Languedoc-Roussillon, she worked for Hardy’s at their Domaine de la Baume winery, before moving to Australia to work at Tintara in McLaren Vale, then at Reynella. She is currently employed by Boar’s Rock Group, managing their Langhorne Creek winery, which has a processing facility of 15-20000 tonnes. She is also the wine maker for Chalk Hill winery in McLaren Vale. Emma proposes to talk about the place of wine within the French family, the attraction that the French have for Australia, and the place of women in the wine industry in France and Australia.
Fanchon Ferrandi has a degree in Biochemistry and vegetal biology from Marseille, an Oenology degree from the University of Toulouse, and a Masters degree in International Wine and Spirit Marketing from the Dijon Business School. She has worked as a wine maker in France, Spain, Chile, the US and Australia, and is currently employed as a winemaker by Tatachilla Winery in McLaren Vale. Prior to this, she worked at Domaine de Sainte Croix, in France, and at Blackstone Winery in California. Fanchon’s presentation will revolve around the different approaches to wine making in France and Australia, and on the impact her French background has had on her wine making philsophy. She will talk particularly about the French wine branding system (Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée – AOC) versus Wine Brand in Australia. Under the AOC system, grape variety corresponds to a specific appellation. The system is very strict and not permitted to evolve with wine industry modernity ; there is very big vintage variation and big quality difference from one winery to the other. She will compare this to big Australian brands being exported all over the world, with the result that now, they have an image that they cannot get rid of: “standardised, cheap, quantity driven”. She will talk about how the French are trying to make their branding system work for them and therefore get closer to the Australian model. She will also look at how Australia is coming back to a regional concept closer to terroir and appellation: “best vines for best regions, with wines expressing the terroir”.
