The extraordinary voyage of Rose de Freycinet

Late Night Live with Phillip Adams is often frustrating, occasionally infuriatingly hokey, always informative and never boring…. I seem to coincidentally stumble across it more than I reasonably should, and this week was no exception. In the week that celebrated International Woman’s Day you could do a lot worse than donate 24 minutes of your time to listening to Suzanne Falkiner talk about her fascinating book.

French explorer and cartographer Louis de Freycinet is famous for producing the first complete map of Australia's coastline, completed following his expedition with Nicolas Baudin.

Louis de Freycinet

But history tried to hide the fact that his wife Rose stowed away on his ship and circumnavigated the world on his on his second expedition on the URANIE.

In 1814, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, nineteen-year-old Rose Pinon married handsome naval officer Louis de Freycinet, fifteen years her senior. Three years later, unable to bear parting from her husband, she dressed in men's clothing and slipped secretly aboard his ship the day before it sailed on a voyage of scientific discovery to the South Seas.

Living for three years as the sole female among 120 men, Rose de Freycinet defied not only bourgeois society's expectations of a woman in 1817, but also a strict prohibition against women sailing on French naval ships.

Rose de Freycinet seen in front of a tent an the original image STATE LIBRARY OF NSW

Her image was removed from the official record STATE LIBRARY OF NSW

From dancing at Governors' balls in distant colonies, to evading pirates and meeting armed Indigenous warriors on remote Australian shores, to surviving shipwreck in the wintry Falkland Islands, Rose used her quick pen to record her daily experiences, becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the world and leave a record of her journey.

Suzanne Falkiner tells this story of courage, enduring love, curiosity and spirit of adventure, using contemporaneous accounts as well Rose's own journal and letters. in her book “Rose: The extraordinary story of Rose de Freycinet” and earlier this week she talked to Tracey Holmes on the ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN to the 24 minute segment.

Broadcast: Tue 8 Mar 2022, 10:40pm