PELLETIER
The Forgotten Castaway of Cape York

By Stephanie Anderson

French cabin boy Narcisse Pelletier was fourteen years old when the Saint-Paul was shipwrecked near Rossel Island off New Guinea in 1858. Leaving behind more than 300 Chinese labourers recruited for the Australian goldfields — believed to have been subsequently massacred by the Rossel Islanders — the ship’s captain and crew, including Pelletier, escaped in a longboat. After a gruelling voyage across the Coral Sea to Cape York, Pelletier was abandoned by the crew. He was rescued by an Aboriginal family and remained with them as a member of their clan until 1875 when he was sighted by the crew of a pearling lugger. ‘Rescued’ against his will, Pelletier was conveyed to Sydney and then repatriated to France.

Even though Pelletier’s Cape York experience is all but forgotten in Australia, and in France it is known only in its broad outlines, his story rivals that of the famous William Buckley, both as a tale of human survival and as an enthralling and accessible ethnographic record.

The author, Stephanie Anderson, came across Pelletier’s story by chance in an old French anthropological journal. As she started researching it, her fascination with the story grew. She found that Pelletier had left an account of his experiences, first published in 1876, that had never been translated into English.

Now, for the first time, this remarkable true story is presented in English, complemented by an in-depth introductory essay and ethnographic commentary. This book is required reading for anyone with an interest in Australian history, anthropology, or the intriguing pre-colonial world of a coastal Aboriginal people.

‘Stephanie Anderson, with perceptive assistance from ethnographer Athol Chase, has unearthed a forgotten treasure, brought it vividly to life and imparted it with a deep lustre. The moving and melancholy story is every bit as illuminating as the better-known castaway tales of Buckley, Morrill and Barbara Thomson. Prodigious scholarship and keen insight has gone into making this fascinating multilayered book that is part biography, part primary source, part ethnography and part investigative social history.’

Professor Iain McCalman,
author of Darwin’s Armada

Launch of Pelletier: the Forgotten Castaway of Cape York, tr. and ed. Stephanie Anderson

Bronwen Douglas

Co-op Bookshop, ANU
30 July 2009

On behalf of us all, I offer respect and acknowledgement to the Ngunnawal people, the traditional custodians of this place, and to the Aboriginal people of Australia in general. Stephanie Anderson's Pelletier: the Forgotten Castaway of Cape York is a terrific book. It is a pleasure and a privilege to launch it and I thank Stephanie very much for inviting me to do so.

Before talking about the book, I'm going to mention a few things about Stephanie that many of you might not know, since she is expert at self-effacement and hiding her light under a bushel. Her whole academic career has been at the ANU, starting with a BA in Anthropology in the mid-70s and an MA in French literature in 1992. Her MA thesis, a critique of Marguerite Duras, won the Crawford Prize and was published as a monograph in French in 1995. Her 1998 doctoral thesis – an outstanding study of masculinity in the autobiographical writings of the author, poet, critic, and ethnographer Michel Leiris – was much acclaimed by her examiners but remains unpublished, an early victim perhaps of the dumbing-down of international publishing.

Stephanie has since continued to make highly significant contributions to scholarship by transforming herself into an historian of early French encounters with Aboriginal Australians and their appropriation by metropolitan anthropologists in an emerging discourse of race. She published two excellent articles in Aboriginal History on encounters in Van Diemen's Land and the anthropology of the voyages of Entrecasteaux and Baudin. Her contribution to the recent collection Foreign Bodies, that I edited with Chris Ballard, is a tour de force. It probes an meeting in Paris between three touring Aborigines and several French anthropologists and illustrates beautifully the ubiquitous tension between racial discourse and lived experience. Stephanie is also an acclaimed translator and editor, having contributed signally to widely varied works on Korea, Thailand, Daoism, and Polynesia (that I know of – there are probably others). In the acknowledgements to her 2004 book, Kim Hyung-A says (p. xv): 'Every single pencil stroke she made on the manuscript gave me a fresh perspective and helped me to polish extensively the text for the completion of the final version'. This heartfelt praise points to a key feature of Stephanie's translation and editing work: that her intimate critical engagement always adds considerable value to the original text.

 All these elements – linguistic skill and sensitivity; critical acumen; historical expertise in French anthropology, Aboriginal encounters, and Australian ethnography; and added value – come together in the present book. Pelletier is equally compelling on many levels but they are systematically integrated into a very satisfying whole. Part One is a virtual monograph in its own right, combining Stephanie's long biographical, historical, and critical introduction, 'The Two Lives of Narcisse Pelletier', with Athol Chase's ethnographic, ecological, and historical commentary on 'Pama Malngkana: the "Sandbeach People" of Cape York'. Part Two comprises Stephanie's densely annotated translation of Dix-sept ans chez les sauvages, Constant Merland's little-known Notice recounting Pelletier's experiences at sea and as a castaway who lived for nearly two decades amongst a coastal people of northeast Cape York Peninsula. Then follow six appendices which leaven Merland's abstract ethnographic mode with more personal testimonies: including three deeply moving letters written by Pelletier to his French family in the months following his forcible removal from his adopted Aboriginal family at Cape York; and two blunt English eyewitness accounts (one of them very retrospective) of the early stages of his painful reintegration into a European world. In this context, I put to you Athol's rhetorical question relating Pelletier's experience to the fraught issue of the 'indigenous "stolen generation"': 'Might the Frenchman Narcisse Pelletier be considered a forerunner of these Aboriginal people taken from their families and homelands?' (p. 127). The volume concludes with a marvellous series of photographs of Cape York people, places, and objects, mostly taken by Athol in the 1970s.

Part One is brilliant and its two segments are perfectly complementary. By casting a wide, thorough, and imaginative net of historical and biographical inquiry, Stephanie has transformed Narcisse Pelletier from the shadowy object of obsessive contemporary European racialism into a thinking, feeling, acting subject whose life before, during, and after his Australian residence takes meaningful shape. By placing the Pama Malngkana and Pelletier's residence among them in cultural, social, religious, ecological, historical, and geographical perspectives, Athol provides the basis for an informed reading of Merland's ethnographic distillation of Pelletier's testimony. In Part Two, Stephanie systematically builds on and extends this foundation in precise annotations interspersed within her translation of Merland's text. These annotations and her footnotes systematically tap her wide critical reading and the generous collaboration of practising ethnographers and linguists of Cape York Peninsula – Athol himself, Bruce Rigsby, Peter Sutton, and David Thompson.

The outcome of this exemplary cooperative scholarly enterprise is a window on two remote, eventually intersecting, but now largely alien worlds: the precolonial existence of the Sandbeach people of Cape York; and the febrile racial imaginings of nineteenth-century Europeans, particularly French physical anthropologists and British colonizers in Australia. If our window is inevitably opaque, given the contingencies of time, fragmentary information, and change, the resulting story is wholly convincing and profoundly moving. Nor is it of purely academic significance. The alliance of local memory and ethnographic reconstruction provides vital tools for the achievement of modern Aboriginal aspirations for recognition, justice, and equality. And although the science of race and its colonial applications have long been publicly discredited as obscene or bizarre, they nonetheless cast very long shadows and demonstrate a chameleon capacity for reinvention which must be acknowledged and combated.

David Tenenbaum and Melbourne Books have done full justice to Pelletier, the Sandbeach People, Stephanie, Athol, and their colleagues by producing a handsome volume, beautifully illustrated and presented, and very well priced. I strongly urge you to buy a copy as this book is not destined for oblivion. I warmly congratulate everyone involved, but particularly Stephanie who has lived with Pelletier for so long and done most of the hard yards in bringing the project to fruition. On that note, I formally launch Pelletier: the [no longer] Forgotten Castaway of Cape York.