Remembering Australasie: European Settlers and Trans-imperial Thinking in the Cosmopolitan Le Courrier Australien (1892–1896)

Le Courrier Australien was initially published as a “cosmopolitan” newspaper written in French. It was launched in 1892 by a Polish nobleman and one of its first managers was a Mauritian; its brief was local, international and pluralistic. This chapter examines the deployment of the ideal of cosmopolitanism in the first years of the newspaper as a form of universal liberalism aimed at collapsing imperial rivalries between the French and British empires in the region. Le Courrier Australien imagined a space—an Australasie—stretching across the Coral Sea from the Australian colonies to New Caledonia and the New Hebrides which served to justify the presence of non-British European migrants in British settler colonies. This strategy of belonging was underpinned by a pan-European settler colonial logic of expansion and sovereignty often obscured by national and imperial histories.