Ernest Favenc

 

 

Ernest Favenc (1845 – 1908) was an explorer of Australia. He was born in London and educated at Berlin and Oxford.

He arrived in New South Wales in 1863 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" 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 died in Sydney in 1908.

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