The Baudin Legacy: A New History of the French Scientific Voyage to Australia (1800-1804)

Visit the Project Site http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/baudin/index.html

• Professor Margaret Sankey
• Associate Professor Jean Fornasiero
• Dr John West-Sooby
• Professor Michel Jangoux

The expedition of Captain Nicolas Baudin, commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte, made an exceptional contribution to the natural sciences, cartography and anthropology concerning the Southern Lands. The importance of the Baudin Expedition in the history of early European contact with Australia and its place in French/Australian history is yet to be fully acknowledged.

The primary aim of the project is to provide an online archive and reference guide. The project will present French transcriptions and English translations, with annotations and analysis, of the writings generated by the expedition: the journals of Baudin, his officers, scientists and crew, as well as other documents previously difficult to access. This material will form the basis for an analytical reappraisal of many aspects of the expedition by the researchers involved in the project, as well as a focus for continuing work on the expedition by other scholars.

Images of the artwork and botanical specimens of the expedition will also be displayed in the Virtual Gallery and Herbarium. Other tools such as a comprehensive bibliography of Baudin studies and a guide to the latest published research will also become progressively available.

The Australian and International members of the research team hope to organise seminars, conferences and publications focusing on the expedition, and invite other scholars to notify the project of their areas of interest so a register of Baudin Expedition researchers can be published on the site.

This Research Project is funded in Australia by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and by the National Funds for Scientific Research (Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, [FNRS]) in Belgium.

Professor Margaret Sankey
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Professor Margaret Sankey is the McCaughey Professor of French Studies at the University of Sydney. She has published extensively on different aspects of the Baudin Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere and in 2002, she organised the Australian Society of French Studies Conference on Baudin at the University of Sydney, to mark the bicentenary of Baudin's visit to that city. Her research on French exploration of the Southern Hemisphere originates in her interest in French notions of the Terres australes in the seventeenth century and the influence of the Abbé Paulmier's, Mémoires pour l'establissement d'une mission dans les Terres australes (1663-64) on early French voyages of exploration.

Associate Professor Jean Fornasiero
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Associate Professor Jean Fornasiero is currently Head of French Studies at the University of Adelaide. Her research is particularly focused on the intersection between intellectuals and politics in nineteenth-century France. Her work on the Fourierist network has uncovered links to French writers such as Nerval and Jules Verne, as well as to the utopian beginnings of the colony of South Australia and the political history of Mauritius.

Dr John West-Sooby
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Dr John West-Sooby is Head of the Centre for European Studies and General Linguistics at the University of Adelaide. The particular focus of his work is the nineteenth century novel, including the works of Maupassant, Barbey d'Aurevilly and, in particular, Stendhal. He is particularly interested in the iconography of the Baudin Expedition (maps, sketches), but also in the personalities of the captain and his fellow expeditioners. In his paper presented to the Baudin conference in 2002, Dr West-Sooby used stylistic analysis of Baudin's writing in order to bring to the fore Baudin's qualities as a humanist.

Professor Michel Jangoux
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Professor Michel Jangoux is an internationally recognised Belgian marine biologist, and historian of the natural sciences. Since 1989 he has been Head of the Interuniversity Centre for Marine Biology (CIBIM) based in Brussels. The focus of Professor Jangoux's historical research is the Baudin Expeditions to the West Indies (1796-1798) and to the South Lands (1800-1804). He has worked extensively on the transcription and analysis of the journals, correspondence and other documents of these expeditions, found in France (Paris, Vincennes, Le Havre and in Caen) and in Mauritius (Port Louis). He has worked closely with the Museum of Paris to document and bring to light the collection of botanical specimens brought back to France by the Baudin Expedition to the Southern Lands.