François Péron--An Impetuous Life
Naturalist and Voyager
In 1800 François Péron gained a place as an assistant zoologist on Nicolas Baudin's expedition to Australian waters. He rose rapidly through the expedition's ranks and wrote its official account. In doing so, Péron sought to destroy Baudin's posthumous reputation.
Awards
Winner of the 2007 Frank Broeze Maritime History Prize
Opinion
'Dr Edward Duyker . . . may not be a household name but he is, quietly and methodically, trying to redress the Anglocentrism of early Australian history . . . His books are always meticulously researched. Duyker commonly retraces the journeys his subjects undertook . . . This is an important contribution to our knowledge of the early explorations of the Australian coastline.', Graham Williams, Sydney Morning Herald, 22/07/06
'Dr Edward Duyker has told Péron's story vividly and with magnificent research . . . a splendid and absorbing biography of a gifted scientist with a fatal flaw.',
Robert Willson, Canberra Times, 19/08/07
About this Title
In 1800 François Péron, an ambitious young medical student not long released from the French revolutionary army, gained a place as an assistant zoologist on Nicolas Baudin's expedition to Australian waters. As his colleagues either deserted or died, he would rise rapidly within the expedition's ranks and even write its official account. In doing so, Péron would seek to destroy Baudin's posthumous reputation.
The expedition was famously marked by the vexed relationship between Péron and Baudin, but Péron's work, as a man of science, profoundly enhanced the achievements of the expedition: he seized valuable opportunities to pioneer zoological, oceanographic and ethnographic studies, and as an ecological observer was remarkably prescient.
Edward Duyker's meticulously researched biography of Péron takes readers on an engaging and wide-ranging journey--from the heart of pre-revolutionary rural France, to the bitter fighting on the Rhineland front in 1793-94, to the late eighteenth-century Paris medical school, to landfalls in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, to the little-known shores of Van Diemen's Land and New Holland, and back into the very heart of Napoleon's Empire. This is both a balanced assessment of the difficult relationship between Péron and Baudin, and an analysis of the conduct of science during some of the most turbulent years in French history.
About the Author
Dr Edward Duyker OAM is a former intelligence officer with the Department of Defence, and the author of fifteen books. These include Citizen Labillardière (2003), which won the New South Wales Premier's General History Prize in 2004, and Nature's Argonaut (1998), which was short-listed for the same award in 1999. Dr Duyker believes very strongly in visiting the places he writes about and his books are characterised by great attention to detail. The late Manning Clark once wrote that he has 'an eye for the things of the mind'. In 2000 Dr Duyker was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government. In 2004 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia. He is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney, and between 1996 and 2002 he also served as the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Mauritius in New South Wales.
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