Exhibition: 15 July 2010-16 January 2011
Open 10am–4pm Thursday to Sunday
Laperouse Museum - End of Anzac Parade, La Perouse, Sydney  For further information

(painting of L’Astrolabe and La Boussole by Robert Carter)

    At the Exhibition opening on July 13: L-R Delivering Speech- Alistair Henchman, Director Sydney, National Parks & Wildlife Service; Tom Peters, William Peters,  Joshua Jones with Bob Carr and Vic Simms.

Twenty-two students and their teacher from the Lycée Condorcet  (French School)  in Maroubra celebrated the end of the school term with a visit to La Perouse. The Laperouse story, in the Museum,  has been compressed into less than a quarter of the space that it occupied when the collection was gifted to Australia by the French Government in 1988.  Major items like the Receveur Tree Stump are no longer in the Museum but have been returned to France.  John Winch’s tapestry (seen in background during visit of school from Villers-Bretonneux )  which marked the entry to the Museum has been moved upstairs to a room now available for hire for ‘conferences’.  Stencilling, sympathetic to the architectural period of the Museum and to the Laperouse story (such as in this photograph ) has now been painted over.

The students today were very interested in the remaining items and replicas from the wreck of l’Astrolabe.  The Wrecks Room, seen in this photograph , has been dismantled and some of the items from the room are now located in the two rooms which contain remnants of the original exhibition. The students lay on the floor of the former Wrecks Room so they could look at the specially commissioned mural (link to artist)  and imagine the last glimpses experienced by officers, scientists and crew of l’Astrolabe.

Students at the Laperouse Monument.  The monument was commissioned by Hyacinthe de Bougainville on his visit to Sydney in 1825 (the new storyboard in the Museum records this as 1824, the year of Louis Duperry’s visit)

Link to further information of the Wrecks Room

Time to say goodbye to some not so cuddly friends

Tim Elliott
January 23, 2010, Sydney Morning Herald - LINK TO Cann family website

All in the family … John Cann with a python in his backyard.
Photo: Kate Geraghty

  FOR A 72-year-old professional snake charmer, John Cann has done pretty well. “I only got bitten seven times,” he says. “But I certainly remember them all.”

There was the Clarence River snake that bit him on the right index finger and “made me bring up blood clots”.

Then there was the red-bellied black snake that struck the webbing of his thumb and put him in hospital for eight days. And of course, there were the tiger snakes, one of which sent him temporarily blind. (more…)

To celebrate the 800th Anniversary of the founding of the Franciscan order members of the Franciscan parish of Deeragun, Townsville, are conducting a pilgrimage to important Catholic sites in Sydney. The leaders of the group are Franciscan Friar Giles Setter and Mary-Ellen Pattinson. Mary-Ellen is an Education Consultant for the Townsville Catholic Education Office and is interested in including the Receveur story in the curriculum. When the group arrived today they immediately headed for the La Perouse headland to pay their respects at Receveur’s Grave. The group will be leaving on Sunday. The Receveur Grave is a very important site for Catholics and particularly Franciscans, because it is on the La Perouse headland that the first Christian services, Roman Catholic Masses, were celebrated in colonial Australia. The first burial mass in Australia was for Receveur. It was performed by fellow chaplain and noted physicist and geologist on the Laperouse expedition, Abbé Jean-Andre Mongez. Each year St Andrew’s Catholic Church at Malabar hosts the Pere Receveur Mass. See details for 2009.

The Headland is now regarded as a site of major significance for catholic pilgrims from around the world as evidenced by the high visitations to the site. In 2008 it attracted pilgrims visiting Sydney for World Youth Day.

The group pictured at the Laperouse Monument and graveside with Fr Paul Ghanem, from Waverley OFM. More details on Receveur.