There’s a drawing in the State Library of Queensland that always makes me think of Rosa Frankenstein. It’s 1885 and a ship is disembarking newly arrived migrants to Australia. Two men guide an elegant young woman onto the gangplank that will lead her into the teeming dockside and her new life.
I imagine this young woman is Rosa, nervous, excited. She has come to Sydney to be married to Jules Francois, an ambitious, intelligent young journalist whom she met in London while he was on assignment for his Australian newspaper, The Bulletin.
Nothing in her life has prepared her for this new world. Everything she knows – her loving family, her London home and Jewish community – might as well be a million miles away.
There will be no happy-ever-after for Rosa. For Jules Francois was not the man he had made himself out to be.
His real name was John Feltham Archibald, founding editor of the radically republican newspaper The Bulletin and the man who bequeathed the annual Archibald Prize for best portrait painting.
He was an excellent journalist, an eagled-eyed copy editor, astute “talent spotter”, and a patriot whose nationalist “Australian, for Australians” newspaper supported and promoted the White Australia policy.
As a young man in the late 1870s, Archibald lived and worked in Melbourne in various clerical and journalism roles. It was here he adopted the Jules Francois identity, declaring he had been born in France, and that his mother was a French Jew.
Read the article by David Myton in WAToday.