Someone elses’s settler convicts (are not your settlers): Briony Neilson, ‘Framing New Caledonia: Policing Escapees from the Bagne in Colonial Australia’, in Sophie Fuggle, Charles Forsdick, Katharina Massing (eds), Framing the Penal Colony: Representing, Interpreting and Imagining Convict Transportation, Palgrave 2023, pp. 31-55 | settler colonial studies blog

Someone elses’s settler convicts (are not your settlers): Briony Neilson, ‘Framing New Caledonia: Policing Escapees from the Bagne in Colonial Australia’, in Sophie Fuggle, Charles Forsdick, Katharina Massing (eds), Framing the Penal Colony: Representing, Interpreting and Imagining Convict Transportation, Palgrave 2023, pp. 31-55

23Feb23

Abstract: This chapter examines responses in the Australian colonies to France’s penal colony (bagne) in New Caledonia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Situating the concern in Australia about the presence and proximity of French convicts in New Caledonia within both the history of the Australian colonies’ own origins as settlements of transported British convicts and the history of immigration restriction, I demonstrate how the bagne was entangled within long-standing and pervasive practices in colonial Australia of controlling mobility and excluding “suspect” populations. In locating perceptions about the bagne and responses to French convicts within the longer history of border policing in colonial Australia, I argue that the pursuit of escaped bagnards offered authorities in the Australian colonies a useful mechanism for asserting their relative superiority and helped pave the way for a sense of nationhood in the decades before the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901.

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