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.

Gabriel de Foigny was a French writer best known for The Known Southern Land. He was born around 1630 in Picardy, France, and began his adult life as a monk in a strict Franciscan order, from which he was expelled for loose morals. He arrived defrocked in Geneva, where he renounced Catholicism and became a Protestant. But Geneva’s two main religious bodies also accused him of being a libertine. Regardless, he published several linguistic and theological texts and started a family. In 1676, he authored The Known Southern Land, which he claimed was a factual account written by Nicolas Sadeur that he had come across at a bookseller’s in Clermont, France, and translated from Latin. This claim led to his imprisonment on charges of perjury and impiety, with the city’s Calvinist authorities trying and failing to ban the work. After further legal troubles and Foigny’s reconversion to Catholicism, he fled to a monastery in Savoy, where he died in 1692.

Dana J. Lupo is a writer and French translator. Lupo’s translation of Arthur’s Whims by Hervé Guibert was published by Spurl Editions in 2021.