Vasse Felix Vineyard in WA and the Extraordinary French Plan to Invade Australia
Dr Tom Cullity, an idiosyncratic and visionary surgeon, named his first vineyard after the unfortunate Timothée Thomas Joseph Ambroise Vasse who’d disappeared 166 years earlier during a storm at Geographe Bay, some thirty miles north-west of where Tom had found the ideal terroir for his new vines. Vasse was a young sailor who went missing when members of a landing party from a French naval expedition led by Nicholas Baudin - which had spent over a week exploring the area where Bussleton now stands, was attempting, in heavy surf, to rejoin their ships which had been riding out a storm some miles off-shore. Nicholas Baudin To the young midshipman’s surname, Cullity appended, ‘Felix’, from the Latin for ‘happy’, ‘blessed’ or ‘fortunate’. It was an appellation that’d had come into vogue in what was to become Australia when, in 1836 Thomas Mitchell, who’d had his spirit nearly broken in the red heart of the continent, named the fertile lush lands s