Edward Duyker

Edward Duyker (born 21 March 1955 ) is an Australian historian, biographer and author born in Melbourne.

Edward Duyker's books include several ethno-histories – Tribal Guerrillas (1987), The Dutch in Australia (1987) and Of the Star and the Key: Mauritius, Mauritians and Australia (1988) – and numerous books dealing with early Australian exploration and natural science, among them biographies of Daniel Solander, Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne, Jacques Labillardière, François Péron and Jules Dumont d'Urville.

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. He attended St Joseph's School, Malvern, Victoria, and completed his secondary studies at De La Salle College, Malvern. After undergraduate studies at La Trobe University, he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne (where he also studied Bengali language), and 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 Naxalite–Maoist insurgency in India. In the course of field-research in West Bengal, he lost 20 kilograms in weight through dysentery and malnutrition – an ordeal he recounted in article "The Word in the Field".

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.

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 biography of the explorer Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne was the subject of an essay, "The Tortoise Wins Again!", by Greg Dening, published in his collection Readings/Writings.

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, won the General History Prize among the New South Wales Premier's History Awards.

With former Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown, archaeologist 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.

In 2007 Edward Duyker published A Dictionary of Sea Quotations with a deeply personal introduction on his family's links with the sea.

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.

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". 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."

Since 1985, Duyker has written more than 90 entries for the bilingual Dictionnaire de Biographie Mauricienne/Dictionary of Mauritian Biography published on his mother's native island. In November 2017, he was made an honorary member of the Société d'Histoire de l'Ile Maurice, in recognition of these contributions and for 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) * 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), dealing with the life of Emily Skinner on the nineteenth-century Victorian gold fields.

Academic career
Between 2001 and 2022, Duyker was an honorary senior lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. Between 2009 and 2018, he was an adjunct and then an honorary professor of the Australian Catholic University. In 2007, Duyker 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. Duyker is a member of the International Council of Museums and a life member of the Sutherland Shire Historical Society.

Critical responses
Duyker's writings span a diverse range of subjects and disciplines. In many respects he has built his readership on his eclectic interests and made a strength of them. Greg Dening once described him as "an historian's historian".

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."

Reviewing An Officer of the Blue, 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".

In 2006, 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".

Duyker's biography of French explorer Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville was shortlisted and a runner-up for the 2015 Frank Broeze Maritime History Prize. One of the judges wrote that it was "a thoroughly and meticulously prepared history of one of the giants of French voyaging". Another judge described it as a "monumental work". In 2022, the French edition received one of five medals awarded by the Académie de Marine, France's naval academy.

Honours

 * 2000 Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, France. Palmes academiques Chevalier ribbon.svg
 * 2003 Centenary Medal, Australia. AUS Centenary Medal ribbon.svg
 * 2004 Medal of the Order of Australia AUS Order of Australia (civil) BAR.svg
 * 2022 Médaille de l'Académie de Marine, France.

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".
 * At the Melbourne Writers Festival, 24 August 2003.

"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."
 * At the launch of Nature's Argonaut, Sutherland Entertainment Centre, 28 April 1998.