Céleste de Chabrillan spent two and a half years in Victoria during the 1850s gold rush. Although little enamoured of Australia, she used the country as the backdrop for her memoirs and the setting for novels and plays. previously a dancer, actress, bare-back horse-rider and well-known Parisian courtesan, Céleste had forsaken her career to accompany her new husband, Count Lionel de Chabrillan, when he took up a diplomatic position in Melbourne. finding herself ostracised by polite society, Céleste questioning how reliable they are as first-hand accounts of Australian colonial life.