French anthropology in Australia, a prelude: the encounters between Aboriginal Tasmanians and the expedition of Bruny d’Entrecasteaux, 1793
Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: Encounters between Indigenous Australians and French explorers in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth are a well-documented but not particularly well-known facet of Indigenous and Australian history.The accounts of these encoun ters open, however one-sidedly and scantily, a window onto Indigenous cultures at the time of European contact.In terms of French intellectual history, they are also signifi cant for the construction of anthropological knowledge, both biological and ethno graphic, in France during the nineteenth century.There are a number of important French voyages between 1791 and 1840 that deserve to be examined from this perspec tive.1 My concern in this two-part article is to examine the first two of these expeditions: that of Bruny d'Entrecasteaux (1791-1793) in the first part and in the second part Nico las Baudin's (1800-1804).From both expeditions a reasonable amount of anthropologi cal material was amassed which, for Tasmanian society, has been most usefully collated by NJB Plomley.2The d'Entrecasteaux expedition's sojourn in Van Diemen's Land was a model of engagement in a brief encounter across cultures.Baudin's expedition was less successful in terms of cross-cultural interaction but more complex in its anthropological dimension. Enlightenment and explorationThere are two interrelated domains in which to situate the early voyages that I shall refer to: that of the Enlightenment and that of two outstanding Enlightenment voyag ers, Bougainville and Cook.Without ascribing a homogeneous intellectual framework to what is termed the Enlightenment, I think that the voyages of d'Entrecasteaux and Baudin can be placed in what is paradigmatic ally thought of as the spirit of the Enlight-1 French voyage accounts that describe encounters with Indigenous Australians come out of the expeditions of Bruny d'Entrecasteaux in Tasmania in 1793, Baudin at Shark Bay in 1801 and in Tasmania in 1802, Louis de Freycinet in Western Australia and Port Jackson in 1818 and 1819, Louis-Isidore Duperrey's officers Dumont d'Urville and RP Lesson in 1824 in the Blue Moun tains, Hyacinthe de Bougainville at Port Jackson in 1825, and Dumont d'Urville on the first Pacific voyage under his command at King George Sound, Jervis Bay and Port Jackson in 1826.2-Plomley and Piard-Bemier 1993 and Plomley 1983.
Source: Aboriginal History Journal
Author: Stephanie Anderson
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2296878476