Edward Duyker

Edward Duyker
Edward Duyker (2014)
Born	(1955-03-21) 21 March 1955 (age 62) Melbourne, (Victoria)
Occupation	Historian
Nationality	Australian

Edward Duyker (born 21 March 1955) is an Australian historian, biographer and author born in Melbourne.

Edward Duyker's books include several ethno-histories – Tribal Guerrillas (1987),The Dutch in Australia (1987) and Of the Star and the Key: Mauritius, Mauritians and Australia (1988) – and numerous books dealing with early Australian exploration, among them critically acclaimed biographies of Daniel Solander, Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne, Jacques Labillardière, François Péron and Jules Dumont d'Urville. Much of his work seeks to redress the Anglo-centrism of Australian history and he has made a major contribution to knowledge and understanding of the French voyages to the Indian Ocean and Pacific in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.

Edward Duyker was born to a father from the Netherlands and a mother from Mauritius. His mother has ancestors from Cornwall who emigrated to Adelaide, South Australia, in 1849, and he is related to the Australian landscape painter Lloyd Rees. He is also related to the French painter Félix Lionnet and the writers Guy Lionnet and Francoise Lionnet. He attended St Joseph's School, Malvern, Victoria in the same class as the virtuoso pianist Geoffrey Tozer. He completed his secondary studies at De La Salle College, Malvern. There, under Tim O'Hearn (later Professor and Dean of Students Australian Catholic University), he was one of the first students in Victoria to study Asian history at a secondary level. In 1970 he competed in the Seven Network's It's Academic quiz program and the following year reached the semi-final as an individual contestant in the Australian version of the quiz show Jeopardy!. As an undergraduate at La Trobe University his formative influences were the eminent Australian historian Professor Alan Frost and the Modern Indian historian Don Ferrell. As a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne (where he also studied Bengali language), he was supervised by the Indian philosopher Sibnarayan Ray. He received his PhD in 1981 for a thesis on the participation of the tribal Santals in the Maoist Naxalite insurgency in India.