French Connection: Australia's cosmopolitan ambitions [Paperback]

The French have been integral to the Australian story since European colonisation. Escaped convicts from New Caledonia, wool buyers from Lille, Roubaix, and Tourcoing, gold-diggers, artisans, teachers and café owners, they were not always the crème de la crème.French Connectionprovides a fascinating insight into how the culture of Frenchness influenced a new nation anxious to prove itself to the world. What did Australian colonists see when they looked to France? How much did the French presence in the Pacific loom over such ideas? And what did the French in Australia themselves make of it all? Alexis Bergantz uncovers the little known and often surprising history of the French in nineteenth-century Australia and their role in creating a more connected and cosmopolitan nation.'In the late 1800s, for Australians, France was the land of haute cuisine, haute couture and high culture, but also a country of dangerous revolutionaries and menacing colonialists. Alexis Bergantz’s well-researched and very engagingly written history of the French in Australia offers revealing portraits of individual lives, deftly assesses the way the two societies saw each other, and explains how the French helped create modern Australia." —Robert Aldrich, University of Sydney

 ‘French Connectionsprovides a lively and well-researched study of the French in late nineteenth-century Australia – from escaped convicts to wealthy wool-buyers – and assesses how France perceived France and its South Pacific territories.’ —Professor Robert Aldrich, University of Sydney

 'InFrench Connection, Alexis Bergantz transcends ‘contribution’ or ‘ethnic’ history in explaining how Frenchness in Australia was among the ingredients of an antipodean culture that has been more cosmopolitan for much longer than most imagine. This superb cultural history is as stylishl³,