'Annamese coolies’ at Australian ports: Charting colonial geographies of emotion, and settler memory, from French Vietnam to New Caledonia via interwar Australia

In 1927, a ship carrying indentured Vietnamese workers travelled down the eastern coast of Australia on its way to New Caledonia. The movement of the Ville d'Amiens steamer through Australian waters sparked protests against alleged French slavery' and, eventually, moved politicians to recall the injustice' of the pre-White Australia' era. This article uses the Ville d'Amiens episode as a portal through which to explore the nexus between geographies of colonialism and of emotion. It argues that colonial and national power operated in pervasively triangular' ways, via the interplay of an affective triangle - of guilt, shame and pride- and a geo-political triangle - of French Vietnam, Australia and New Caledonia. Further, the article calls for greater exploration of the historical, geo-spatial contingencies of memory, motion and emotion.