French Connection: The culture and politics of Frenchness in Australia, 1890-1914

Abstract

This thesis is a cultural history of ideas about France and the French in Australia during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It explores the links between representations of France, and of the French, and the ways in which different groups of individuals, whether they were French migrants or Australian colonists, mobilised these representations in social life. Until recently, studies of the French presence in Australia have tended to encase French lives in an ethnic framework, linked primarily to a social history of migrants. Although this has rescued some of their stories for posterity, it has also tended to marginalise them from a broader national story. This project, in contrast, combines French and Australian private and public sources (memoirs, letters, newspapers and works of fiction, as well as official government archives) to examine the shifting relational significance of France, both for the Australian nation and for individuals who lived during a formative period in its history. Pitched in the liminal space between two countries’ records, the thesis demonstrates that the tensions that arose in the articulation of cultural difference between Australian colonists and French and francophone migrants are revealing of the complex and sometimes paradoxical expressions of Frenchness in the antipodes in the decades before the Great War. They show some of the processes at play in the on-going definition of Australian culture and character in the early Federation era and bring to light a range of political and personal meanings that France had in people’s lives. In underscoring the connections that the Australian colonies, and later the Australian nation, entertained with France, this work helps bring to light the global and transnational connections constitutive of Australian history and identity. Show more