AFP, published Sunday 18 September 2022 at 09:27
Statuettes made more than a century ago by a deportee from the Commune have returned to New Caledonia: the gift of a private individual that should make it possible to support the dossier for the classification of the Caledonian penal colony as a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The grandson of a convict doctor, Philippe Collin, a retired professor with a passion for history, gave New Caledonia 27 dried clay figurines that his grandfather bought from a prisoner between 1910 and 1914. .
The statuettes, about four inches high and in perfect condition, represent scenes from traditional Kanak life, such as the pilou (ritual dance) or everyday moments.
“This is what we called scrap, those small objects that the convicts sold to guards, doctors and other personalities to improve the ordinary,” explains the president of the association Testimony of a Past, manager of the historic site of the island of Nou dedicated to the prison that held 21,000 prisoners in the prisons of Nouméa and Bourail, on Grande Terre and the Isle of Pines between 1864 and the early 1920s.
The convicts lived in very precarious conditions, in which violence, arbitrariness and the smell of death predominated. The insurgents from the 1871 Commune were deported there in their thousands. Among them the teacher and activist Louise Michel, who spent seven years (1873-1880) in New Caledonia.
The restored statuettes gathered dust on family shelves as Philippe Collin made the connection to the penal colony and his grandfather by rereading letters from a certain ‘Gérard’, imprisoned in Caledonia, asking for painting materials.
For the history buff, finding out the exact identity of the artist is a point of honor. “It took a year, but that’s how I found out that his name was Alexandre Gérard, that he was a Communard who was deported at 18 and that he had ended his days in Caledonia,” says Philippe Collin. For me, rediscovering his identity and making sure his work is exhibited is supposed to give him his humanity back.”
– “To highlight this shared history” –
This donation of statuettes supports the act that the government intends to submit for the listing of the Caledonian penal colony as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “It’s a plus because we have the buildings, but we lack these objects that tell this moment in history, but that’s also what Unesco asks for,” says Christophe Sand, archaeologist assigned by the government to the preparation of the registration application.
Caledonia is gradually reclaiming this part of its history in a land where Kanaks and white Caledonians, many of them descendants of convicts, often resist.
“Today it is our responsibility to bring about this common history,” believes Mickaël Forest, a member of the pro-independence government. Since prison is also the story of the Kanaks and other communities, these worlds were not as impermeable as we would like to believe.” .
“The convicts mainly represented the Kanak world, points out the historian Louis Lagarde. However, many only saw them in pictures or through what was told to them by comrades who were able to go out. But what strikes us is that they never grotesque or caricature representations of it did. It was always a representation of beauty,”
The inclusion of the Caledonian penal colony on the World Heritage List would not be a first. The Australian site has been classified since 2010 and includes around ten sites. But New Caledonia is only at the very beginning of the process. If all goes well, the file could be presented within four or five years.