Antoine Fauchery

Antoine Fauchery's account of his time in Australia is overshadowed by his remarkable photographs, but his written account is a lively tale of minor successes and failures in the new colony.

Fauchery sailed from London in 1852, when the rush to Victoria had begun. His observations of life at sea are among his most amusing: he describes ships from Germany where the passengers were packed like 'anchovies in a keg'. Here, he paints a vivid picture of life on board for the 160 passengers during their four-month voyage to Melbourne:

It is in this cellar, or rather in this oven, that two thirds of the passengers stay during most of the day; through a dense vapour their silhouettes move incessantly and with fantastic jerks [...] the children cry out, the crockery rattles, while sick folk moan and others get drunk; from all this hurly-burly comes a nauseating smell complicated by the heavy perfumes of the musk-flavoured liqueurs with which, alas, the over-voluptuous Englishwomen inundate themselves [...] Phew! Let us go [above deck] as quickly as we can.

- Antoine Fauchery

Fauchery, A 1965, Letters from a miner in Australia; translated from the French by A.R. Chisholm; with drawings by Ron Edwards, Georgian House, Melbourne, Vic.

The trip to Australia from England took around 100 days in the 1850s. Ships would usually transport passengers to Australia and return with wool and gold. The Madagascar was one ship that never made it home. It disappeared after sailing from Melbourne in 1853, carrying almost 2 tons of Victorian gold. If found today, the gold would be worth around $A60 million.

Despite once finding a nugget of nearly 4 ounces (60 grams), simply poking up between the roots of the grass, Fauchery was not very successful during his stint as a miner. But he saw many who were. One party of miners, who worked a shaft practically next to the one Fauchery was in, excavated a nugget weighing 132 pounds (60 kilograms) on just their second day at the diggings.

After a couple of years spent mostly on the goldfields around Ballarat, Fauchery packed up and returned to Melbourne. He had £60; about as much money as he had started with.

With his £60 he was able to open a café on Bourke Street. Trade was brisk and he quickly turned his shop into a miniature French parlour with marble tables, billiards and plenty of brandy and wine. Unfortunately for Fauchery, the financial depression of 1854 saw his trade plummet. Forced to go back to the fields, this time as a shopkeeper, he realised he was tired of the struggle and solitude of mining life, sick of being 'an unmarried wolf'. He returned to France with a backhanded compliment to Melbourne's sudden growth:

I shall not regret Melbourne, though I found it a small city and am leaving it a large one, with shops [...] gas lighting [...] and with five new theatres [including] a lyric theatre where the company made up of people from all countries, sings the same opera in French, English, German and Italian, each man singing in his own language! I pity the conductor if he is a musician - which is not highly probable.

- Antoine Fauchery

Fauchery, A 1965, Letters from a miner in Australia; translated from the French by A.R. Chisholm; with drawings by Ron Edwards, Georgian House, Melbourne, Vic.

Fauchery returned to Melbourne in 1857 and, with Richard Daintree, took some of the only photographs of the Victorian goldfields and Indigenous Australians during this period.

Title page of Antoine Fauchery's account of the Victorian goldfields.
Photograph by Antoine Fauchery.
Photograph by Antoine Fauchery.
Photograph by Antoine Fauchery.