Cirrus@Austlit

19th-Century Australian Travel Writing

Hoaxer Louis de Rougemont was born Henri Louis Grin (1847-1921) in Switzerland. After working in England, he travelled to Australia in 1875 as the butler of Western Australia’s new governor, Sir William Robinson, however the employment only lasted months. After some travels and a number of jobs, he settled in Sydney and married before fleeing to New Zealand, and later London. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, de Rougemont secured a letter of introduction from Sir J. Henniker Heaton to the editor of Wide World Magazine, and from August 1898 to May 1899, it serialized 'The adventures of Louis de Rougemont'. This series was a fanciful and astounding recount of his alleged thirty odd years spent as a castaway among the Aboriginal peoples of North-West and Central Australia. These articles were republished as The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont, as Told by Himself. The legitimacy of this sensational, approaching mythical, account of de Rougemont's adventures was questioned at the time of publication, particularly by Louis Becke and D.W. Carnegie in the London Daily Chronicle. It was, however, published as fact, despite this controversy. The book provides an account of de Rougemont's various sea battles with octopus, sharks, and riding on the back of turtles to safety. In Australia, de Rougemont described his life among "cannibals," and his time living with Aboriginal communities. He also related his second marriage to the Indigenous woman Yamba, to whom he dedicated the text. The Australian Dictionary of Biography further states that “In 1899 he was a music-hall attraction in South Africa as 'The greatest liar on earth'; on a similar tour of Australia in 1901 he was booed from the stage.”