AustLit

Citizen Gamas was the author of four plays (staged in Paris in 1792 and 1793) and an earlier pamphlet (published in 1781), all of which were political in the sense that they dealt with events and issues current to the times. In 1797, Gamas was a limited shareholder and co-director of the Odéon theatre. Little else is known of his life, but his play Les Emigrés aux Terres Australes has been identified as 'the first play to use the theme of a penal colony and to use as a setting the recently discovered Terra Australis' (from Maurice Blackman, 'Upside-Down at the Bottom of the World: The First 'Australian' Play' in The French-Australian Cultural Connection, pp. 100, 101).