The Known Southern Land

by Gabriel De Foigny

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.

168 pages, Paperback

Published November 21, 2024

Reviews

[Dana Jerman · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5. If you can stay with the exercise, and appreciate the writing, you might pull something out of this.
But since its construction is laden with sham and it was produced in large part to vindicate its author from their prior (perceived) wrongdoings, the whole thing is colored with a kind of graceful idiocy. It is a document of folly.