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Item 01: Journal particulier de Rose pour Caroline, September 1817-October 1820 Item 02: Lettres de Mme. Louis de Freycinet écrites pendant le voyage autour du Monde de la Corvette l’Uranie, 1817-1819, transcribed and edited by Louis-Claude de Saulces de Freycinet, after 1820 and before 1842 Rose’s journal has been known since the 1920s, but what has been published has been poorly transcribed and heavily edited. In 1927 a combined version of the journals and letters was published in France by Charles Duplomb. The first English translation was published by Marnie Bassett in 1962 as Realms and Islands. Another English translation – again abridged – was published in 1996 by Marc Serge Rivière as A Woman of Courage: the Journal of Rose de Freycinet Rose’s journal and letters provide a significant counterpoint to the carefully crafted and finely resolved published expedition accounts. Louis’s official account, Voyage autour du monde : entrepris par ordre du roi … exécuté sur les corvettes de S.M. l’Uranie et la Physicienne, pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820 comprised eleven volumes of dense facts, words and illustrations, and was published progressively between 1824 and 1844 The other major account of the voyage of the Uranie was provided by Jacques Arago, an expedition artist, in his Promenade autour du monde of 1822. Arago’s romantic, excitable account falls in between Louis’s and Rose’s. A particular interest of his was Indigenous people, and he provided an extensive account of Aboriginal people he encountered in NSW. Rose’s letterbook and journal record much more the social aspects of expedition life: the importance of rank and class, the issue of appropriate dress, the protocols of official visits, as well as astute observations of the cultures the expedition encountered. Indeed the importance of these records is much more than their Australian content. This is a record of a major international Pacific scientific and exploring expedition – the voyage of the Uranie does not seem to have had geopolitical overtones – in which a major European power was attempting to define the Pacific region through science, documentation and art. Rose, for instance, also records important details about Timor (now a key ally of Australia but then still a Portuguese colony), Guam and the complex and fluid political situation in Hawaii. She also describes in some detail the baptism of Kalanimoku, a leading Hawaiian chief, into the Catholic faith. Kalanimoku was the first chief to be accepted into the Catholic church. It is a period in which Australia’s place in the Pacific was being written into a broader understanding of the region as a whole, and in this regard rich records such as this are not only internationally important, but also locally vital to a collection such as ours, as we document how our nation begins to be defined in European consciousness. Charles Duplomb’s edition of Rose’s journal, which is the basis of all recent editions of her work, omits significant proportions of the letter book, with many of the letters remaining completely unpublished. Duplomb based his work largely on the journal, incorporating material from the letter book only where there were gaps in the journal. While the two accounts are obviously similar, they present different emphasis and sometimes detail. Her letters about the expedition’s time in both Shark Bay and Sydney, for instance, are not published at all, and there is detail in them which is not in her Journal.

The journal and some of the letters have been translated into English in: Freycinet, Rose Marie de & Rivière, Marc, 1947- & National Library of Australia 2003, A woman of courage : the journal of Rose de Freycinet on her voyage around the world 1817-1820, National Library of Australia, Canberra