The Strange Case of Dr Giustiniani and Mr. Hirsch: The Incomplete History of an Imposture (1790s-1855)

This article sets out to reconstruct the curious case of Louis Giustiniani, Anglican missionary to the British colony of Swan River, Western Australia, in the mid-1830s. All existing scholarship on Giustiniani focuses on his Australian years, when he became a confrontational critic of settler violence against Indigenous people. However, the rest of his life prior to and following his time in Swan River remains completely unexplored, and the materials about him scattered across several different archives. Previously unknown archival materials are used to shed light on the hitherto untold part of Giustiniani’s globally mobile biography across Central and Southern Europe, the British Isles, Australia, and the United States. By unveiling Giustiniani’s deceitful account of his own past, this article investigates a specific case study as an entry point into broader themes, including the refashioning of individual identities through conversions and naturalization processes, and wider methodological questions, such as the challenges of unravelling the entanglement between true, false, and fictive.