Edward Duyker

Biography

Dr Duyker received his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 1981. He worked as an intelligence officer (South Asia/Middle East) with the Australian Department of Defence until 1983 and was briefly a Teaching Fellow at Griffith University. In 1984 he settled in Sydney as an independent historian. In 1996-2002 he served as the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Mauritius in New South Wales. Dr Duyker is the author or co-author of 19 published books.

In 2000 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Acadà miques by the French Government, was awarded the Centenary Medal by the Australian Government in 2003 and the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2004. Dr Duyker is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of French Studies, School of Languages and Cultures, at the University of Sydney and member of the editorial advisory board of the French Australian Review (formerly Explorations), published by the Institute for the Study of French Australian Relations.

His books include several ethnology histories – Tribal Guerrillas (1987), The Dutch in Australia (1987) and Of the Star and the Key (1988) and numerous books dealing with early Australian coastal exploration. An Officer of the Blue (1994) his biography of Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne (the first explorer after Tasman to reach Van Diemen’s Land) was published in French in 2010. Nature’s Argonaut, his biography of Daniel Solander the Swedish naturalist on the Endeavour, was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s General History Prize in 1999.

Dr Duyker is also co-editor of Daniel Solander: Collected Correspondence (1995). With his mother, Maryse Duyker, he published the first English translation of Bruny d’Entrecasteaux’s journal in 2001. Citizen Labillardiere (2003), his biography of the naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardiere, won the NSW Premier’s General History Prize in 2004. Francois Peron: An Impetuous Life, Naturalist and Voyager (2006) his biography of one of the zoologists of Nicolas Baudin’s expedition (180004) won the Frank Broeze Maritime History Prize in 2007. His biography of the French explorer Dumont d’Urville (2014) was published by Otago University Press, in New Zealand, and by University of Hawai’i Press in the United States. It was shortlisted for the Frank Broeze Maritime History Prize in 2015.