The Many Lives of the Count de Nérac: French Convicts and Impurity in Australian Invasion Stories

This article examines a short-lived and small iteration of sensationalist fiction published in late nineteenth century Australia that centred on New Caledonia and portrayed French characters and French convicts as villains. While rooted in the British genre of war literature and the Australian invasion "ripping yarn", the corpus under study is unique in that it creates a new type of arch villain in the figure of the escaped convict-cum-French gentleman, who welds together long-held British stereotypes about the French as promiscuous and overtly polite, and colonial Australian ideas and fears of racialized criminality. By analyzing the imagery of contamination and impurity associated with these new villains, the article explores the complex relationship that the Australian colonies, on the cusp of Federation, entertained with the French bagne and New Caledonia and its convicts.