L'Île du Géographe Revisited: Unofficial Diplomacy in Post-Federation French-Australian Relations

Résumé En

The role of learned societies in international relations has long been acknowledged by historians of diplomacy, while the agency of non-state actors in general, and of scientific institutions in particular, has attracted closer attention since the "cultural turn" of the 1990s and the emphasis placed by critical geographers in recent years on the material and personal conditions of diplomatic activity. The Fleurieu missions undertaken in the wake of Federation and the Entente Cordiale "on matters of geographical interest to Australia" were inspired by the International Geographical Congress, backed by the Société de Géographie and hosted by the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia. Part of a wider Asia-Pacific initiative that encompassed New Zealand and Japan, they combined personal, scientific and public diplomacy in a concerted effort to persuade state and Commonwealth authorities to amend the charts of Australia and bestow the names given by the French navigators to otherwise "unnamed" features of coastal toponymy, albeit with mixed results. The present paper draws on archival research for a forthcoming book about the unofficial diplomacy of Alphonse de Fleurieu and his contemporaries to argue that it set a template for diplomatic exchangeof media, objects and practices-that would influence later missions and is, to a degree, still extant in French-Australian relations.