Antoine Fauchery (1823–1861) was a Parisian artist and writer, an occasional collaborator with Henri Murger, author of Scènes de la vie de bohème which was a chief source of the opera La bohème. In Australia from 1852 to 1856, Fauchery worked the goldfields at Ballarat for two years and opened the Café Estaminet Français in Little Bourke Street in 1854; he was a storekeeper at Daylesford before returning to Paris, where his Lettres d’un mineur en Australie were published in fifteen instalments in Le Moniteur Universel in January-February 1857. Later, the Lettres were published in book form; they were his major work. By the end of 1857, having secured a French government grant enabling him to take photographs of life in Australia, India and China, he was back in Melbourne, where he established a studio at 132 Collins Street East. His sometime collaborator was English-born Richard Daintree (1832-1878), whom he had met on the Victorian goldfields in the early 1850s.
