Ernest Favenc

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Ernest Favenc (21 October 1845[1] – 14 November 1908) was an explorer of Australia, a journalist and historian.

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[edit] Early life

Favenc was born in Walworth, Surrey, England, son of Abraham George Favenc, merchant, and his wife Emma, née Jones. He was educated at the Werderscher Gymnasium, Berlin and at Temple College, Cowley, Oxfordshire.[1]

[edit] Career

Favenc arrived in New South Wales in 1864[1], and, after being in the colony for about a year, in a commercial position, he afterwards worked in the pastoral industry in the frontier squatting districts of Queensland.

Favenc wrote under the pseudonym of "Dramingo", often for the Queenslander, and was an accomplished pencil sketcher. In 1878 he was selected to explore the country along the western border of Queensland to Darwin to see if a railway could be constructed and in the early 1880s also undertook expeditions in the country to the south of the Gulf of Carpentaria and north-west of Western Australia.

He is chiefly remembered for his exploration, part of the European Exploration of Australia, but he also published romances, children's stories and verse as well as several books on exploration, the most extensive being The History of Australian Exploration.

On the original launch of this book in 1888 the The Daily Telegraph (Australia) reported...

“ The History of Australian Exploration is an important one and however diverse may have been the aims, ideas and successes of those by whom the work was done,...Ernest Favenc's rather formidable volume...gathers together all those scattered memorials merging it into a unity of a great labour. Favenc was himself an explorer and treats his subject not in a perfunctory way, but as one who feels the wild charm and the magical attraction of the unknown... ”

Favenc's first publication was The Great Austral Plain in 1887, The Last of Six: Tales of the Austral Tropics appeared in 1893, followed by The Secret of the Australian Desert (a short novel) in 1895, Marooned on Australia and The Moccasins of Silence, both in 1896.

Favenc died in Sydney in 1908.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c H. J. Gibbney (1972). Favenc, Ernest (1845 - 1908). Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 4 160. MUP. Retrieved on 2007-08-10.

Additional resourcecs listed by the Australian Dictionary of Biography:

  • Evening News (Sydney), 16 Nov 1908
  • Town and Country Journal, 18 Nov 1908
  • CSO 3554/87 (State Library of Western Australia)
  • Northern Territory files, 1884, 1886 (State Records of South Australia)
  • manuscript catalogue under Ernest Favenc (State Library of New South Wales).

[edit] Works

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