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.
A drawing of a young woman’s arrival in Australia.State Library of Queensland
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 newspaperThe 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.
In fact,Archibald was born in Kildare near Geelong,Victoria,in 1856. His actual mother,Charlotte Jane (nee Madden) was neither French nor a Jew. A Roman Catholic,she died four years after his birth,leaving Archibald to be cared for by his aunt and grandmother. His Irish-born father Joseph was a policeman.
Archibald was educated at local National and Roman Catholic schools,leaving at age 14 to be an apprentice compositor at theWarrnambool Examiner. Later he moved to Melbourne where he became besotted with France and the French.
Archibald moved to Sydney and in 1880 establishedThe Bulletin. Circulation reached 80,000 in the late 1880s,not bad at a time when the NSW population was just about a million.
He headed to London in 1883 after losing a lot of money in a libel case and regularly filed stories forThe Bulletin until his return to Sydney in 1885.
It was in London he met Rosa.
Who was Rosa Frankenstein? The family name is German-Jewish Ashkenazi,and in the 19th century was common in areas such as Silesia and the Palatinate.
Rosa’s parents may have been born in or near Breslau (today Wroclaw) in Silesia,and at some point migrated to London where her father worked in sales,possibly dealing in coffee.
There are indications the family lived in Hackney,at the time an area home to some 5000 Jews.
Rosa was reasonably well-educated – one account has it that she spoke “five or six European languages” and enjoyed reading.
We don’t know how they met,although there is a story that Rosa nursed Archibald through an illness after which Archibald proposed,Rosa accepted,and they became engaged.
Why did Rosa accept Archibald’s marriage proposal?
The Occam’s Razor answer might be – they were two young people in love who hatched a romantic plan to be married in Australia where they would live a life full of joy and happiness. Rosa’s father may have encouraged her to take this opportunity for economic security and prosperity.
The Florence Rodway portrait of JF Archibald.Art Gallery of NSW
But there is another possibility.
It seems Archibald had convinced himself that the Jules Francois French-Jewish heritage persona was real.
That he called himself this is attested by a November 1952 retrospective on Archibald in the SydneySunday Herald (which merged with theSunday Sun to becomeThe Sun-Herald in 1953). The retrospective included a poem written by an ex-Bulletin sub-editor:
Have you read the pink
Paper of Jules Frankwa
The cocksure exponent of
Bushwhacking lore
With its politics crude and
Its logic so raw
It mirrors the mind of
Jules Frankwa
Hebrew and Frenchman
And Scottie so braw …
It is likely Rosa and her family simply accepted his back story – including the “fact” his mother was Jewish.
And that could only mean one thing:that Archibald was a Jew. UnderHalakhah (Jewish law) Judaism is matrilineal,therefore Jules Francois must be Jewish too.
Rosa and her family would think she was being wooed by a fellow Jew.
It would be a very surprised Rosa,then,who found herself getting married to a non-Jew in Sydney Presbyterian church in November 1885 – the marriage certificate (registration number 1895/1885) gave his birthplace as France.
There was nothing she could do. She couldn’t go home,she couldn’t run away. She had no family or close friends who could help her out. For better or worse,she was stuck with Jules Francois.
For a woman,divorce was expensive and difficult to obtain. She was stuck,thousands of miles from home with no money of her own.
Archibald’s biographer,Sylvia Lawson,says Rosa had “sweetness and charm,but few inner resources”,and over the years slipped into complete alcoholism. She died in 1911.
In his memoirs written in 1907 Archibald makes no mention of a French-Jewish heritage. His wrote that his Irish-Catholic mother had been “fragile,svelte and intensely nervous” and died when he was five years old.
It is perhaps telling that the November 1942Sunday Herald retrospective ended by asserting that Archibald had “lived a bachelor” and that Sydney “was his one love”. Rosa had been edited out of history.
Archibald died in 1919 and is buried in the Catholic section of Waverley Cemetery,Sydney.
David Myton is a Sydney-based freelance journalist and amateur historian.
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