Edward Duyker

Personal and early life

Edward Duyker was born to a father from the Netherlands and a mother from Mauritius. His mother has ancestors from Cornwall who emigrated to Adelaide, South Australia, in 1849, and he is related to the Australian landscape painter Lloyd Rees. He is also related to the French painter Félix Lionnet and the writers Guy Lionnet and Francoise Lionnet. He attended St Joseph's School, Malvern, Victoria in the same class as the virtuoso pianist Geoffrey Tozer. He completed his secondary studies at De La Salle College, Malvern. There, under Tim O'Hearn (later Professor and Dean of Students Australian Catholic University), he was one of the first students in Victoria to study Asian history at a secondary level. In 1970 he competed in the Seven Network's It's Academic quiz program and the following year reached the semi-final as an individual contestant in the Australian version of the quiz show Jeopardy!. As an undergraduate at La Trobe University his formative influences were the eminent Australian historian Professor Alan Frost and the Modern Indian historian Don Ferrell. As a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne (where he also studied Bengali language), he was supervised by the Indian philosopher Sibnarayan Ray. He received his PhD in 1981 for a thesis on the participation of the tribal Santals in the Maoist Naxalite insurgency in India.

Career

After working as a spot welder at General Motors Holden in Dandenong and an RSPCA ambulance driver, Duyker was recruited by the Australian Department of Defence in Canberra in early 1981 and eventually worked in the Joint Intelligence Organization. He left in July 1983 to take up a position as a Teaching Fellow at Griffith University, Brisbane, but ultimately settled in Sydney as a full-time author in 1984. Although his early writings were focussed on South Asian subjects and in many cases were published in the Australian Defence Force Journal, Duyker soon refused to be confined as a scholar and author.

Using the Dutch and French linguistic resources of his family, he edited The Discovery of Tasmania (1992) which brought together all known journal extracts from the first two European expeditions to Van Diemen's Land. An Officer of the Blue (1994), Duyker's critically acclaimed biography of Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne (the first explorer after Abel Tasman to reach Van Diemen's Land), was launched by former Prime Minister of Australia Gough Whitlam. It was also the subject of an essay, 'The Tortoise Wins Again!', by Professor Greg Dening, published in his collection Readings/Writings (Melbourne University Press, 1998, pp. 201–4).

Nature's Argonaut (1998), Edward Duyker's biography of Daniel Solander the naturalist on HM Bark Endeavour and the first Swede to circle the globe, was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's History Awards in 1999. Duyker is also the co-editor, with Per Tingbrand, of Daniel Solander: Collected Correspondence 1753–1782 (1995), With his mother Maryse Duyker he published the first English translation of the journal of the explorer Bruny d'Entrecasteaux in 2001. It has become an important Western Australian and Tasmanian historical source and, with its annotations and introduction, informed public debate regarding the heritage-listing of Recherche Bay in Tasmania. Citizen Labillardière (2003), Duyker's biography of the naturalist Jacques Labillardière, was similarly influential and won the General History Prize among the New South Wales Premier's History Awards.

With former Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown, archaeologist Professor John Mulvaney and broadcaster Peter Cundall, Duyker was an outspoken campaigner for the protection of Recherche Bay from logging.

François Péron: An Impetuous Life (2006), Duyker's biography of the zoologist of the expedition of Nicolas-Thomas Baudin to Australian waters (1800—1803), won the Frank Broeze Maritime History Prize in 2007. A recurrent theme in Edward Duyker's writing on early natural history is an attempt to recapture the sense of wonder at the unique flora and fauna encountered by early European explorers in Australia. He has also rendered homage to prescient early naturalists who offered 'a new focus on the natural equilibrium, the finiteness of resources in restricted locations and the precious quality of unique and vulnerable species that could easily be driven to extinction by human greed or the introduction of feral animals'.

In 2007 Edward Duyker published A Dictionary of Sea Quotations with a deeply personal introduction on his family's links with the sea. He references to the austerity and difficulties of his Catholic childhood (he is the eldest of eight children and his Dutch father laboured on the Melbourne waterfront for 37 years), or the experiences of his forebears in Europe and the islands of the Indian Ocean.

Duyker's biographies of naturalists are largely conventional linear narratives, but they are characterised by meticulous research and great attention to detail – 'written with verve, but fortified with awesome scholarship' as Dymphna Clark put it in her review of Nature's Argonaut. He makes a point of visiting the places he writes about and orienting explorers' maps and journals to a modern landscape or coast. This has sometimes been under difficult circumstances, such as when he researched the naturalist Labillardière's travels in the Middle East. In August 2005, Duyker delivered the inaugural Theo Barker Memorial Lecture at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst and took as his theme a remark attributed to R. H. Tawney that an historian needs 'a stout pair of boots'. During his lecture, he recounted how in the course of field-research in West Bengal for his book Tribal Guerrillas, he had lost 20 kilograms in weight through dysentery and malnutrition. This was an ordeal he also recounted in a partly autobiographical article 'The Word in the Field'.

In September 1983, Edward Duyker published an article entitled ‘Land Use and Ecological Change in Central New South Wales’. It signalled his strong interest in the use of history and ethnography to understand anthropogenic environmental change. The following year he published an article entitled ‘History and Anthropology’ which explored a number of philosophical and methodological issues relating to these overlapping disciplines and which he demonstrated in his book Tribal Guerrillas. The late Professor Thomas Nossiter of the London School of Economics praised Duyker's Tribal Guerrillas because 'it exemplifies the value of synthesising anthropology and history; and, more generally, it is a scholarly contribution to a literature on tribal rebellion and insurgency far wider than India, which embraces Greece, Vietnam and Algeria as well as sub-Saharan Africa where tribal responses to imperialism and modernisation have been significant' (Third World Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 2, April 1989, pp. 226–7). This meeting ground between history and anthropology can also be seen in An Officer of the Blue, Duyker's biography of Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne, in which he skilfully used missionary and other accounts of Māori oral history and French journals to explain the circumstances of the explorer's death in New Zealand's Bay of Islands in 1772. Prof. Barrie Macdonald of Massey University described it as "a fine piece of detective work – a biography written with an empathy with its subject yet a critical eye that helps set in context a death that still has its significance in New Zealand history."

Despite his theoretical reflections, Duyker is essentially a narrative historian. He frequently produces equally engaging 'tales of research', such as his account of the detective quest involved in identifying the artist of the expedition of Bruny d'Entrecasteaux to Australia and the Pacific and his account of his search for the grave of Nicolas-Thomas Baudin in Mauritius. When he delivered the 2007 Vaughan Evans Memorial Lecture at the Australian National Maritime Museum, he chose to speak on uncovering the life of Daniel Solander.

Since 1985, Duyker has written more than 80 entries for the bilingual Dictionnaire de Biographie Mauricienne/Dictionary of Mauritian Biography published on his mother's native island. Aside from his books on the history of the Mauritians in Australia, Mauritian Heritage and Of the Star and the Key, Duyker has also written a number of pioneering monographs on the Dutch in Australia, and co-authored Molly and the Rajah (1991) *[1] the life of Esme Mary Fink, an Australian woman who married the Rajah of Pudukottai, India, in 1915. He also edited A Woman on the Goldfields (1995),*[2] dealing with the life of Emily Skinner on the nineteenth-century Victorian gold fields.

Academic career

Duyker is an Honorary Associate and Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney and an Honorary Professor of the Faculty of Education and Arts of the Australian Catholic University. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities

Other positions

Between 1996 and 2002 he served as the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Mauritius in New South Wales.

Critical Responses

Duyker's writings span a diverse range of subjects and disciplines. As the late Australian historian Manning Clark put it in his foreword to Of the Star and the Key (1988): 'Edward Duyker . . . has an eye for the things of the mind'. In many respects he has built his readership on his eclectic interests and made a strength of them. The late Professor Greg Dening once described him as 'an historian's historian' (Australian Book Review, June/July 2003, p. 10).

Marius Damas, in his book (Approaching Naxalbari, Radical Impression, Calcutta, 1991, p. 68) commented that "Duyker brings both historical and anthropological tools into play . . . Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary sources, including personal interviews . . . [and] provides us with a richly detailed account." Yet, his account of the Naxalite insurgency has been criticised. Mallarika Sinha Roy in her book Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari, commented: 'What Duyker misses in retracing the historical path of the Santal rebellion is the function of patriarchy with Santal Society, and this omission culminates in his silence about women's participation in Santal Naxalism', Roy was perhaps unaware that one of Duyker's principal Santal-Naxalite informants, Kuni Tudu, was a woman. Duyker's work on the Naxalites was also an important source for the Scandinavian scholar B.G. Karlsson.

In the Journal of Australian Studies (November 2001), Leo Scheps asserted that Duyker's and his mother's translation of the eighteenth-century explorer Bruny d'Entrecasteaux's account (the first in English) 'might find a market with collectors of early Australiana and maritime arcana', but that 'its text and extensive notes' were 'of little value to scholars of Australian and Pacific history, geography or anthropology'. Despite this, the translation was later a major source for archaeologist John Mulvaney in his book 'The axe had never sounded': Place, People and Heritage of Recherche Bay, Tasmania (2007) and for several specialists including Hugh Tydale-Tyndale a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, historian Professor Alan Frost of La Trobe University and historical archaeologist Dr Michael Pearson of the University of Canberra who delivered papers at a symposium held by the National Academies Forum in Hobart, 26–28 February 2007. It was also a seminal influence for the late Dianne Johnson's book Bruny d'Entrecasteaux and his encounter with the Tasmanian Aborigines (2012)

Reviewing An Officer of the Blue Professor Michael Roe (historian) wrote: "In building his story, Duyker has to confront matters of war, politics, geography, navigation, anthropology – the list could continue. He does so with constant skill and authority."

In 1995 Paul Brunton described Duyker's (and Per Tingbrand's) Daniel Solander: Collected Correspondence (1995) as 'a major contribution to textual scholarship' and added 'It is rare for such a work to be produced in Australia' Reviewing Nature's Argonaut, Greg Dening wrote: ‘One of the delights of reading this brilliant wander through the mind of a naturalist genius is the way Edward Duyker in a simple, direct phrase can lay open the most complex issue. No, perhaps the real joy in the reading is the continued sense of revelation and discovery Duyker conveys as he follows Solander . . . ‘, In 2006, Prof. Arthur Lucas, former principal of King's College London, wrote that Citizen Labillardière was an 'exceptionally readable, richly textured work . . . The life Duyker recreates is as rich as that of the hero of any adventure novel, and the context is insightful history, not just the history of an important natural historian'.

Honours

Quotes

"There was no point in searching for Marion Dufresne's grave...he opened the first French restaurant in New Zealand – the Maori ate him".

"Some would say that I could talk under wet cement. I know at least one property developer who would like to give me the opportunity."