Maryse Duyker

Marie-Thérèse Maryse Duyker, (née Commins), was born in Curepipe, Mauritius, on 22 February 1932. She spent her early childhood at Deep River, where her father was a sugar chemist. After her father’s death, in 1935, her widowed mother moved her family of seven children back to Curepipe. She spent the rest of her childhood and youth in a house her great-grandfather, Théophile Lionnet, built after returning from the Australian gold rush. Her great-grandmother, Jane Bone, was Cornish and the great-aunt of the Australian landscape painter Lloyd Rees. Maryse attended Loretto Convent, Curepipe, and emigrated to Australia, at the age of eighteen, in 1950. Initially she worked in a Melbourne shirt-factory, but then gained employment with the National Bank of Australia as a French translator. In 1954, she married Herman Duyker (1927–2014), an immigrant from the Netherlands. Together they had eight children. Maryse Duyker has written about her childhood and experience of emigration in the anthology Mauritian Heritage (1986), edited by her eldest son, historian Edward Duyker. In 1987, she published Beyond the Dunes, also co-authored with Edward Duyker. In 1992, Maryse Duyker contributed several translations to the anthology The Discovery of Tasmania (1992) which brought together all known journal extracts from the first two European expeditions to Van Diemen's Land. With Edward Duyker, she also published Voyage to Australia and the Pacific (MUP, 2001), the first English translation of the journal of the French explorer Bruny d'Entrecasteaux. In 2010, she published a French translation of An Officer of the Blue (MUP, 1994), her son Edward Duyker’s biography of the French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne (the first explorer after Abel Tasman to reach Van Diemen's Land). Yet another of her sons is the sculptor Frank Duyker.