Bonjour Australie! This week, Clare and Yves put on their berets and grab a baguette to talk Australian history through a French lens with Dr Alexis Bergantz, historian at RMIT University and author of the award-winning French Connection: Australia’s Cosmopolitan Ambition (NewSouth, 2021). How does being an outsider give one fresh eyes on a nation’s past? Why should we disrupt the monolingualism of Australia’s settler history? What do non-English archives bring to the table? And can foreign-language sources help us challenge nationalist mythologies?
