Danielle Clode is an award-winning author, biologist, and research fellow at Flinders University. As she tells us in this lively biography, Clode grew up on a boat, and her own experiences of sea voyages are an integral part of her quest to find out more about Jeanne Barret, the first woman to circumnavigate the world.

I'd never heard of Jeanne Barret until the Australian National Curriculum specified that Year 4 students were to study exploration, i.e. the great voyages during the Age of Exploration, including the exploration of Australia. This topic hadn't been in the curriculum at primary level for years and years, and there was next to nothing in the way of kid-friendly resources. So I made a wiki for my students to use, which meant I needed to resurrect my own rusty knowledge of the topic, which dated from the days when we used coloured pencils to mark explorers' sea routes onto a map of the world, using tracing paper to copy it from an atlas. (My students had to show what they had learned with an iPad App called Explain Everything, using their fingers to trace the voyages across a map of the world and explaining where and why the ships stopped en route. LOL Teachers are getting more cunning with ways to stop parents from doing their children's projects.)

Anyway, I started my wiki with my own small library of books on the subject, which included:

• 1788, the Brutal Truth of the First Fleet by David Hill


• The Great Race: The Race Between the English and the French to Complete the Map of Australia by David Hill


• Encountering Terra Australis: The Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders by Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath, John West-Sooby

For the rest i.e. Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Bartolomeu Dias et al, I relied on Wikipedia... and that was how I found Jeanne Barret. At that time she was a mere footnote, a curiosity, partly because not much was known about her, and partly because she was not a navigator or a ship's captain, she wasn't even a member of the crew. Dressed as man among men who were apparently oblivious to her gender, she was valet and assistant to Philibert Commerson, the naturalist who sailed with Bougainville's 1766 expedition to circumnavigate the world. Indeed, it was easy to get the impression that she was notable only because of her gender. After all, there are hundreds of nameless crew and servants who accompanied these celebrated voyages, and the only one most of us might know about is Syms Covington, made famous by Roger McDonald's Mr Darwin's Shooter (1999).

Turraea rutilans, originally named Baretia bonafidia by Commerson (Source: The Conversation)[/caption]

Danielle Clode, however, sets the story straight, and it's a remarkable achievement because of the paucity of records about Jeanne Barret.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/10/20/the-woman-who-sailed-the-world-by-danielle-c... ( )