Gabriel de Foigny – The Known Southern Land

In 1676, a century before the British colonized Australia, a defrocked French monk named Gabriel de Foigny published a novel imagining what the land was like. The work is told through the eyes of doomed, shipwrecked traveler Nicolas Sadeur, whose life is a series of watery disasters. Sadeur’s Australia (the Southern Land) is the polar opposite of Europe and, at first glance at least, a surreal utopia and respite for the hapless Sadeur. The land’s inhabitants are collectivist, but each Australian individually decides when they will die; until then, they subsist on fruits that cure diseases and work on scientific inventions that seem more like miracles. They are intersex, hyper-rational, successful in defeating European invaders (if not always in defeating the giant murderous birds who occasionally attack their communities), and intolerant of any among them who don’t have those qualities. But can the European Sadeur mimic them enough to survive? Written as a parable of Foigny’s religious persecution in Calvinist Geneva—which its publication by no means mitigated—The Known Southern Land is an unintentional narrative of a successful anti-colonial resistance.