Histories of penal colonies and convict life often contain an almost perfunctory passage on escaped convicts, pointing to extraordinary cases that serve to compensate for the dearth of sources in colonial records. How extraordinary such cases were, particularly the successful ones, is a lingering question. Whether they escaped into the South American wilderness or took their chances in the Pacific Ocean, the story of those French convicts remains largely untold.

Although scholars of empire have, in recent years, shifted their attention beyond the New Imperial history’s concerns about the relationship between metropole and colony, a new transimperial scale of analysis has only just started attracting more sustained attention. Through an analysis of extradition files, government reports and press clippings, this paper seeks to explore that liminal in-between space by considering the creative agency of French escaped convicts from New Caledonia who were caught in the Australian legal system and in the judicial limbo between the French and British empires. Critically examining these experiences beyond mere sensationalism serves the dual purpose of underscoring the transimperial processes constitutive of empires while restoring the convicts as agents, who, through lies, deceit and forged identities, took control of their own lives.