The same author also mentions it in Le Docteur Pascal (1893), when Pascal Rougon had his niece Clotilde detail the Rougon-Macquart genealogy, concerning Étienne Lantier:Étienne Lantier, back in Paris after the Montsou strike, was later compromised in the insurrection of the Commune, whose ideas he had defended with passion, he had been condemned to death, then pardoned and deported, so that he was now in Nouméa ; it was even said that he was immediately married there and that he had a child, without knowing exactly the sexThe Directorate of the colonies needing women to colonize the island, the penitentiary authority toured the central metropolitan prisons to encourage volunteers to go to New Caledonia.

They are lodged in Bourail in a convent run by the Sisters of Saint-Joseph de Cluny until their marriage to a freed land holder or a convict, their meetings being organized under the watchful eye of the nuns.

The question of the historical legacies of the colonial period began to be raised in the 1970s by a geographer from the "Montpellier school", a pupil of François Doumenge, Alain Saussol, through his work L'Héritage in 1979 which tackles the themes land spoliations, cantonment and studies the effects in this regard of settlement colonization, including criminal.

Above all, from the same period, Louis-José Barbançon, a secondary school teacher and descendant of a convict, focused on historical research on the New Caledonian penal colony and penal colonization, fields hitherto neglected by historians, while multiplying the actions of popularization of this research and by carrying out in parallel political activities marked by the defense of a pluriethnic identity or even of a form of Caledonian nationalism.

He obtained his doctorate in history from the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, under the supervision of Jean-Yves Mollier, with a thesis on colonial representations of the prison entitled "Between chains and the earth.

[10] Mainly, in Le Pays du non-dit in 1991, he highlights the process of forgetting long installed in local collective memory, making penal colony one of the many "taboos" of New Caledonian history and regretting: " Young Caledonians know nothing about real colonization, burnt down huts, despoiled land, forced labor, displaced Kanaks; colonization has always been presented to them in its civilizing aspects: hygiene, health, education, technology ...

[13] From the 1990s, the Southern Province set up guided tour services by Alain Fort coupled with hikes, mainly in Nouville and the village of Prony in the Great South.

In 2013, the Southern Province launched a program to rescue, protect and enhance the remains of the Isle of Pines (invaded by vegetation), from the capture of Anse N'Du to Ducos (Nouméa) in link with the Institute of Archeology of New Caledonia and the Pacific (IANCP) and the In Memoriam associations of historian Stéphane Pannoux.

In 2020, an interpretation center dedicated to the penal colony in New Caledonia[15] will be open to the public in the restored former bakery of Nouville (which can already be visited, by reservation) by the association "Testimony of a past".