Who was Antoine Fauchery?
Born in Paris, Antoine Fauchery (1823-61) was an artist, writer and dilettante. His most notable literary work Lettres d’un Mineur en Australie (1857) brought him contemporary acclaim. One of a number of writers in Paris who mixed in bohemian circles, he was immortalised in Henry Murger’s Scenes de la Vie de Boheme on which the opera La Boheme was based.
Fauchery first visited Australia from 1852 to 1856 when he tried his luck unsuccessfully, on the Ballarat goldfields. It was during this time that he wrote his Lettres d’un Mineur en Australie. After a short visit to France, he returned to Melbourne in 1857 and established himself in a studio in Collins Street, Melbourne. It was shortly after this that the professional collaboration between Fauchery and Richard Daintree began. In 1857, he left Melbourne for the Philippines where he joined the French expeditionary forces in China as war correspondent and official photographer. His reports were filed as letters in the Parisian newspaper Le Moniteur Universel during 1860 and 1861. Fauchery sailed for Japan in January 1861 and died on 27 April at 37 years of age.
Fauchery and Daintree's parallel lives
Little is known of the circumstances surrounding the association of Fauchery and Daintree, but there are a number of parallels in their lives. Like many others, they both went to the Victorian goldfields in the early 1850s. In 1854, they returned to Melbourne to follow different occupations - Fauchery as a restaurateur and Daintree as an assistant mineralogical surveyor. Both men left Australia in 1856 and, as chance would have it, independently became involved in the new science of photography.
In 1857, Daintree and Fauchery returned to Melbourne where they joined forces in the photographic business. However, it is not known if Fauchery and Daintree had met before 1858 when their collaboration as photographers was first noted in the Melbourne press. | 
