Exposing the colonial routes of Island connectedness beneath the apparent French roots of Hunters Hill (Sydney, Australia)

Abstract

The #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement, which has seen the felling of statues of white invaders, colonisers and slave traders, has highlighted the racist legacy of slavery and the inequities, racism and ongoing impact of colonialism throughout the world. The toppling of statues sits within an ongoing historical push to remove visible tributes to colonial violence from the land. The colonial project, however, in its consumption and transformation of the colonised space, has seen the settler narrative firmly imprinted on the landscape. While knocking down statues is a powerful demonstration of resistance, the layers of embedded colonial presence in and on the landscape and in the national narrative remain. In this article, in the spirit of the BLM movement and through both decolonial/activist historiography and a creative/poetic interpretative approach to history writing, I challenge and topple the colonial narrative surrounding Didier-Numa Joubert, 19th Century Franco-Australian trans-imperial entrepreneur and slave trader with interests in and across islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. A man of routes but also of roots, Joubert’s legacy is embodied not in a statue but in the topography and European architecture of Hunters Hill, the Sydney suburb he ‘founded’. I reveal how the ostensible Frenchness of Hunters Hill, ‘islanded’ between two rivers, conceals a complex history of island connection to far-flung sites of colonial exploitation and forced labour in the French and British empires.