(AB)ORIGINAL ANDROGYNES

Gabriel de Foigny was a defrocked Franciscan monk and a man in constant revolt against the sexual and moral restrictions of church and state. In 1676, he wrote A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, a work which purported to be the story of the shipwrecked explorer James Sadeur, cast up on the shores of the Great South Land, there to remain for twenty-five years.

Australia was certainly Terra Incognita. A French map of Australia published in Melchissedec Thevenot's Relations de divers voyages curieux in 1663 outlined the northern, western, and part of the southern coasts, but little more. Europeans who landed were unimpressed. In 1605, Captain William Jansz had found only wilderness and wild, cruel black savages. In 1644, Abel Tasman found only black and ‘naked beach-roving wretches, destitute even of rice … miserably poor, and in many places of a very bad disposition’. In 1688, the English buccaneer William Dampier imagined the inhabitants, whom he saw as little better than brutes:

The inhabitants of this country are the miserablest people in the World.