Staking Claims

In seeking to preserve and highlight the history and heritage of the New Caledonian bagne, advocates have frequently sought inspiration and guidance from approaches undertaken at convict sites in neighbouring Australia. This article examines some of the ways convict history and heritage have been engaged with in New Caledonia since the 1960s and reflects on how these approaches compare to the engagement with similar questions in Australia over a similar period. It begins by examining the emergence of a willingness to speak about the convict past in both places and the local and global factors that generally encouraged a concern about the preservation of heritage in the decades following the end of the Second World War. The discussion then turns to local campaigns in New Caledonia to preserve sites of the bagne, thereby demonstrating how these were bound up in particular circumstances of France’s post-war (re)colonization of the archipelago and growing tensions between Kanak and Caldoche communities. From there, the article offers an analysis of how the history of the penal colony has been shaped by the political notion of “un destin commun”, a concept that emerged out of the 1988 and 1998 reconciliatory agreements. The final section briefly explores the centrality of Australia for New Caledonia’s current campaign to secure UNESCO World Heritage status for bagne sites

Archaeology · Archipelago · Colonialism · Convict · Environmental ethics · Ethnology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · History · Law · New Caledonia Indigenous Studies · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

• Incarceration

  Sophie Fuggle, Briony Neilson•French Historical Studies•2026

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