This novel about Australia was written in 1676 but has a curiously modern resonance

The Known Southern Land
Gabriel de Foigny
translated and with an afterword by Dana J. Lupo
Spurl Editions, $29.80

For the past 10 years, Spurl Editions have given us fascinating esoterica – anarchist weirdness, flophouse anti-memoir, joyful pessimism, you name it. The Known Southern Land is a worthy addition to their growing catalogue.

Published in 1676, Gabriel de Foigny claimed that The Known Southern Land, his account of waif Nicholas Sadeur’s arrival in Australia, was a work of fact, not fiction. He was half-right: Terra Australis Incognita – literally, the Unknown Southern Land, a place hypothesised since antiquity and added to Europe’s maps during the Renaissance – had long been empire’s mirror, everything the Old World was not. Foigny’s primary source for his account was Pedro Fernandes de Queiros, a Portuguese navigator who hoped to colonise the continent for Spain in 1605, but only made it as far as Vanuatu (Australia’s northern end, Queiros hypothesised).

Expelled from a strict Franciscan order in 17th-century France, de Foigny later tried living as a Protestant in Geneva, but was accused – as translator Dana J. Lupo’s informative afterword puts it – “of being a libertine who debauched female servants and accepted money from Catholic clergymen”. Known for his grammar guides and satirical almanacs, the final edition of The Known Southern Land appeared, coincidentally, in 1788 – the same year British settlers invaded the real Australia.

In de Foigny’s Australia, people are “firm, fit, and active”. They have flat stomachs that “barely protrude during pregnancy” – proto-wellness influencers, really. In Australia, there are no insects, spiders or flies. Summer is perpetual, rain is non-existent, and the Australians know no conflict, save for having to defend themselves against European invaders and marauding neighbours (born, unfortunately, of bestial relations with tigers).

The Australians oppose hierarchies and servitude. They bemoan Europe’s “unquenchable thirst for possession”. They share everything freely and love one another equally. At around age 35, Australians may become “lieutenants” – presumably in a non-hierarchical sense – and form “a family unit with other brothers”.

Their children suffer no measles, smallpox or other European maladies. They eat sparingly – so much so that they barely defecate – and consume no animal flesh. Nudity is the norm; indeed, “the Australians hide nothing, for fear of being viewed as dirty and repugnant for having something to hide”. Their language is composed entirely of monosyllables.

Spirituality is not organised but everywhere, for “it is necessarily the case that people speak of the incomprehensible in many different ways”. The narrator, Sadeur – a Portuguese subject of the Spanish Crown born to French parents who die saving him from drowning, also known as a Freudian field day – is born a “hermaphrodite”. In Australia Sadeur discovers that gender is fluid and Australians all have both sexes. Although the book uses gendered terms, they mostly seem to be markers of convenience. He/they/whatever. Australians laugh at the patriarchy, convincing Sadeur that “this great empire that men had assumed over women was more a form of tyranny than righteous conduct”.

The absence of difference sometimes manifests as rationalist dystopia rather than progressive paradise. In Australia, everything is so perfect that not only is variation inconceivable, occasionally it is intolerable: “Should a child be born with only one [sex], they suffocate it as they would a monster.” If this isn’t a commentary on the horrors of bigotry – a nod, if you like, to gendered violence, if not what we might today call trans exclusion – it certainly permits being read as such.

Like Thomas More’s Utopia or the fantasias of Alexis Wright and Peter Carey, de Foigny’s work can be read as a critique of empire and imperialist destruction. Before arriving in Australia, Sadeur spends time in Africa and is disturbed to find people so blessed with abundance that they fail to cultivate the land. Heaven forbid! Sadeur’s eventual arrival in Australia – having been mauled by bear-like creatures and carried off by a bird whom they escape only by tearing out its eyes with their teeth – is preceded by the old colonial game of at-a-stretch comparisons.

Thus, the native animals of the Congo inevitably resemble European ones, even when they don’t. Yet why, Sadeur wonders, do the Africans not trade the brilliantly coloured wool of their sheep-like creatures? We soon learn the reason: the colouring is “extinguished as soon as their life was”.

The line recalls how Sadeur’s mentor critiques their idea that death and the hereafter should be treated as more sacred than earthly existence. Sadeur’s Christian devotion fetishises death, treating it with undue reverence – an obliteration kink. The only force strong enough to contend with capitalist-imperialist greed, apparently, is the fact of extinction itself.

Then again, considering the state of the world today, we may wonder if even that will be enough.

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