AustLit

'Late one afternoon in May 1920 a French steamship, the Pacifique, pulled in at Circular Quay and discharged its passengers after a four-day passage across the Coral Sea from Nouméa. Among the usual contingents of businessmen and carefully-dressed women returning from holiday in the Pacific, one passenger stood out: an old Frenchman by the name of Marius Adolphe Jullien (also known as Julien de Sanary). Though nobody on the ship or at the port would have had reason to know it, the 60-year-old had arrived in Sydney after spending almost forty years of his life incarcerated in France’s penal colony (bagne) in New Caledonia.' (Introduction)